Claude is a better PM than me
I'm giving away my Legos.
I spent Sunday morning building with Claude Code, and it did “the PM thinking” better and faster than I would have.
I procrastinated fixing Familiar’s onboarding way too long. So many insights built up from watching people, and I didn’t know where to start, so I wanted Opus 4.6’s help. I brain dumped a really messy doc: the kind I would never give to a human teammate, but that an enthusiastic, unfocused CEO might slack me on a Saturday night (we’ll come back to this analogy).
You’ve heard the next part a million times: Opus did a fantastic job blah blah blah, and it even created the issues in Linear, prioritized, with tight descriptions, organized by neat milestones. Agentic agentic insane insane.
But enough about AI, let’s talk about me.
I got to be a cross between a caffeinated product designer and a salesperson with “tons of ideas for the product.” That was WAY more fun than PMing! Meanwhile, AI structured my thoughts, reminded me of the strategy, cut scope, and broke things into concrete phases. (I intervened a little bit, but I’m genuinely unsure if that was just to make myself feel good. Also it’s March 2026, and this is the worst it’ll ever be.)
What’s my added value? Not much. I just happen to have access to context that it doesn’t. I’m a gatekeeper, and that won’t last.
You know what that reminds me of? The best product teams I’ve been a part of. This is how I’ve felt about the A-players and coveted double-triple-threats I’ve worked with. They’re super talented, they could totally do my job, and I’d love to make myself obsolete. Long before AI, the best version of my job was to sit next to experts and builders, connect them to as much context as possible (customer and company) and get out of the way.
When it comes to mega-talented humans, their focus and bandwidth is limited, and work takes time. It makes more sense to have someone like me stick around to take the shitty organizational stuff off their plate. But that’s like, it.
So, AI is reviving my all-time favorite feeling at work:
Whoa, this can take my job.
Woo!!
How can I make myself obsolete even faster?
I’m giving away my Legos… to AI
Tyler Palmer, Patreon’s first employee and SVP of operations for 10 years, once told me that Patreon felt like a new company every 6 months. I’d say that describes our entire industry now.
Instead of a chaotic, hypergrowth company, we’re all in a chaotic, hypergrowth industry. I need you with me on this, because it’s the premise for everything else I’m going to say.
In 2015, Molly Graham wrote an article for First Round Review about the “ambiguity, chaos and stress that comes with doubling or tripling your team every six months.” It’s called “Give Away Your Legos” and if you work in startups you’ve already read it.
Read this and tell me she’s not talking about AI, too:
“As you add people, you go through this roller coaster of, ‘Wait, is that new person taking my job? What if they don’t do it the right way? What if they’re better than me at it? What do I do now?’” says Graham. “These are some strong emotions, and even if they’re predictable, they can be unnerving.”
And how about this:
“There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they’ll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you. But at a scaling company, giving away responsibility — giving away the part of the Lego tower you started building — is the only way to move on to building bigger and better things.”
Molly wrote this 11 years ago. Is this not the best advice anyone’s given about being a knowledge worker in 2026?
If Claude is the PM, what are my new Legos?
As Claude PMed me, I felt my role elevate. I could be the people whose chaos my job was to turn into order.
I could [try to] be that inarticulate, absent-minded, yet visionary founder. I could be the customer-facing person who’s full of visceral insights. I could be a designer immersed in inspiration, imagination, and creating 1-year vision flows, detached from bug reports, tech debt, and sprint planning.
Could I just spend all my day outside the building + sitting in product reviews?
Claude could handle strategy, opportunity assessments, roadmap prioritization, scoping, phasing, de-risking, measurement strategy, managing stakeholders, rollouts…
There’s an emotion coming up for me right now, but Molly called it 11 years ago:
“A week ago, someone might have told you they hate their Legos and want to get rid of them. But as soon as you hire someone else, they suddenly want to hang on to all of them.”
What if judgment, product sense, order of operations and scoping are actually low-level mental operations? The kind that Microsoft Excel abstracted away for hard skills that used to be societally admirable, and today are considered menial.
Back to Molly:
“That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more…
People think, ‘Oh, that person joined! Now I can finally work a little less.’ But that’s almost never what happens,” Graham says. “Adding people is the opportunity to find a new job (or the new version of your old job).”
I love this. AI taking over PM work doesn’t mean “people-who-previously-wore-PM-hats” have less to do. It means we can do more—if we’re willing to do a different job.
So, maybe my Legos now are to set up AI for success. The next incarnation of my job is to do for AI what great executives do for their product builders:
Provide missing context
…and build systems so it can get that context without me
Give clarity on strategy, target customer, constraints
Own hard, fateful decisions
Keep things focused, and with healthy room for chaos
Know when to micromanage and when to empower
Separate signal from noise
Bring values, conviction, mission, and optimism
And no, that’s not PMs pushing features to production. It’s unimaginative to take senior PMs and turn them into junior engineers. Why give away your Legos to simply take somebody else’s?
Remember when Mixpanel and Amplitude got widely adopted in the 2010s? Remember what happened to the role of product data analyst? Yes, companies hired fewer analysts, and later. But each one of them had way more interesting work, could support more teams, and engage at a way more strategic level. Self-serve analytics tools elevated the analyst role.
The tools also changed hiring. Because each analyst role was so high leverage (and high opportunity cost), only the most strategic-minded, technically skilled data analysts were worth hiring. Better tools raised the bar for excellence.
That’s where today’s product managers are heading. Each “former PM” is going to be so high leverage that the opportunity cost of a wrong hire is even bigger and bigger. But wasn’t that always the trend?
I think that’s great news. With so much opportunity, if we have enough excellent people, they can all get hired, because they’re just worth it. Remember: great companies want to be able to do more with more, not the same with less.
What do I do right now? (IC PM edition)
Intuitively, our brains are asking “How do I hold on to my job?” The more effective phrasing is “how can I be as valuable as possible.”
Stay in the weeds and attuned to your customers, team, and company - the way a good founder or executive might
Stay hands-on with AI tools (just use it, it might suck or might be awesome, just keep using it regularly so you can notice that)
Notice little pockets of opportunity where you can set it up for success
Help your entire team with this
Help your entire org with this
Just like when leading excellent teammates, recognize opportunities to be valuable. And when those moments come, give away your Legos.
What do I do right now? (Leadership edition)
Do the above, publicly, as a personal example.
Give your reports room to do the above.
Be flexible on role expectations, and value the people doing things differently
Aside from that, I’ll hand the mic to Molly:
“Honestly, the best thing you can do is normalize what people are experiencing. As a leader, you want to head it off at the pass and proactively say, ‘Hey, this is what you can expect to feel during this time of growth. It’s pretty universal. Other people are going through the same thing. I’ve been through it too. There’s no need to be scared.’”
And then you can accelerate it:
“That’s when our boss did this brilliant thing — he gave her a huge goal…. Immediately, my co-worker let go of every single Lego she was holding and ran to the new project because she was so scared and excited. It was like someone had flipped a switch and she was suddenly like, ‘Good luck, peace out!’”
If your reports are surfers, you’re the surf instructor giving their boards a little push down the wave.
We all now work in a hypergrowth situation
It’s exhausting. Change and chaos mean bringing your best energy to your job. That’s really hard to do without a break, and I don’t want to romanticize anything. If you're between jobs right now, hypergrowth probably sounds like a cruel word.
The good part of hypergrowth (AI-driven or not) is it’s a chance to grow a ton. Under what other circumstances can you regularly elevate your role?
I believe that we all have the ability to galvanize people and to step into chaos, to learn things without being taught, to create clarity for others and operate with little structure… whether or not we’ve brought that to work.
Stay in the game, stay hands-on, and you’ll notice opportunities to make yourself obsolete. When the opportunity comes, give away your Legos.
I have sent around that first round article for many years! The connection to AI is spot on.
loved this one, Tal!