I thought I invented this. Then I opened TikTok

The video was a product manager who claimed she worked at Netflix. (Her claim, not mine. I have no way of verifying it, and I can’t find the video now.) She was talking about how Netflix now requires every PM to vibe code a working prototype before presenting an idea to engineering. Show, don't spec. Build the thing first.

I sat there for about ten seconds being mildly annoyed. Because I had been doing exactly that for the past few months and was quietly proud of myself for figuring it out on my own.

I'm not in product, technically. I'm in product marketing at Upsun. But we work closely with the product team and the analysts. I'm in roadmap conversations every week. So a few months ago I started vibe coding prototypes (that's the term we'll use once, for SEO, after this I'm calling it AI-augmented development, which is the same thing but sounds fancier and is harder to dismiss in a board meeting). Mostly I built them so I could stop describing ideas in words and start showing engineers the thing.

It worked so well I built a working clone of the Upsun console. Now whenever I want to show a new feature I've been thinking about, I open the clone, reshape it into the version I want to argue for, and share it. The conversation that follows is twice as good as the one I used to have with a slide deck.

I'm even leading a team in our next internal hackathon with one of these prototypes. The prototype is the pitch.

So when the TikTok told me Netflix was making this required, my first reaction was annoyance. My second was: oh. The walls between these roles are coming down faster than I'd realized.

The data caught up before the org chart did

Stack Overflow's 2024 developer survey found 76% of respondents are using or planning to use AI in their workflow, and daily use jumped from 44% to 62% in a single year. McKinsey's State of AI report shows generative AI adoption nearly doubled in 2024. Gartner expects 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill on AI through 2027, and predicts that by 2030, "AI-native development platforms will result in 80% of organizations evolving large software engineering teams into smaller, more nimble teams."

Smaller teams. That phrase is doing a lot of work.

When a team gets smaller without the work getting smaller, you don't lose responsibilities. You smear them across the people who are left. The PM is doing more positioning. The PMM is doing more prototyping. The engineer is doing more product decisions. Everyone is doing more of everything, because AI-augmented development is eating the rote middle.

The people building products are saying the same thing

Marty Cagan, who basically wrote the modern PM playbook, published a piece in May 2025 called "The Era of the Product Creator." His framing: the old division between PM, design, and engineering is collapsing into "a single individual who creates products," and the piece is written explicitly for "anyone wanting to create a successful product, regardless of professional training or experience."

Lenny Rachitsky has been making a similar argument: "AI product sense" is becoming the core skill of product management, and PMs are now expected to be hands-on with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and v0. Shreyas Doshi puts it harder: "Product sense is the only PM skill that will matter going forward, because the rest can be approximated by a model with the right context." Aakash Gupta tracked 12,000+ people moving into AI-flavored PM roles between January 2024 and October 2025. He says prototype-first PM interviews are now a thing.

The CEOs aren't waiting

Airbnb killed the standalone PM title in 2023. Brian Chesky's bet was that one person should own research, roadmap, delivery, positioning, messaging, and retention. The role they kept is closer to a PMM than a PM, but the work is all of it. Tobi Lutke at Shopify followed last April with the now-famous memo: AI use is the baseline, and before any team can request new headcount, they have to demonstrate why AI can't get the work done. Sam Altman keeps saying we'll see a one-person, one-billion-dollar company. Aaron Levie at Box describes the new individual contributor as "an agent manager."

These are not careful predictions. These are operating decisions.

The honest counter-argument

Saeed Khan wrote a sharp response to the "AI will fix PM" crowd: producing artifacts is not the same as producing judgment, alignment, and vision. He's right about that. Stanford's recent piece on whether product management is dead lands in the same place. The PM role is evolving, not disappearing. Gartner's 2026 outlook warns that prompt-to-app approaches will increase software defects by 2500% by 2028.

So no, this isn't a clean replacement. The roles are not collapsing into nothing. They're collapsing into each other.

What I think is actually happening

The crafts aren't dying. The walls between them are. Product still needs judgment. Marketing still needs taste. Engineering still needs rigor. But the moment between "I have an idea" and "here's a working version you can poke at" used to be measured in sprints. Now it's measured in afternoons. And the person doing that afternoon's work doesn't really care what's on their LinkedIn profile.

Going back to the Netflix PM on TikTok. Maybe Netflix actually requires this. Maybe she was making it up for the algorithm. The detail doesn't matter much. What matters is that I felt seen, and then I felt late, and then I realized the only thing that would have been embarrassing was thinking my job description was going to hold the line on its own.

I'm in product marketing. I'm also, apparently, in product. And in engineering, for two hours at a time, when the prototype needs to exist.

That's the job now.