My biggest takeaways from @nikhyl: 1. The best product leaders are in a state of “smiling exhaustio...

1. The best product leaders are in a state of “smiling exhaustion.” For years, PMs have just been feeling exhausted—endless alignment meetings, the monotony of organizational overhead, influence without authority. Now the work is genuinely fun" / X

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My biggest takeaways from

: 1. The best product leaders are in a state of “smiling exhaustion.” For years, PMs have just been feeling exhausted—endless alignment meetings, the monotony of organizational overhead, influence without authority. Now the work is genuinely fun again. People are building, compensation is up. But the pace is relentless, and the ground never stops shifting. 2. The next 12 to 24 months will be chaos, but then things will stabilize. Just like when internet companies reinvented product management in the 2000s—creating a discipline that looked nothing like the HP/Cisco hardware PM role—we’re in another period of complete transformation. Every three months brings new agents, new forms of judgment, blurred lines between roles. But in a of couple years, things will settle. Companies will optimize around new ways of working. You just need to cross the threshold now. 3. The best product managers are getting paid more than ever and have more opportunities than ever. Product management is going through a renaissance. Compensation is at an all-time high. The strongest builders have more offers than they’ve seen in their careers. They’re seeing paths to becoming founders, CEOs, or executives in other functions—roles that now want product manager backgrounds because they need someone who can bring judgment and a builder mentality to the company. 4. But half of product managers are in serious trouble. There are two types of PMs: those who got into product because they love building things, and those who gravitated toward it as a lucrative job. The second group—roughly half the industry—is facing an existential crisis. If you’re not energized by sitting down and building something, the industry is moving away from you. 5. Companies will shed tens of thousands and rehire a fraction—all AI-first. Nikhyl predicts that within the next 12 to 24 months, large companies will lay off far more people than they hire back. A company might let go of 30,000 and hire 8,000. The 8,000 will all be AI-native builders. The 30,000 will be a combination of positions that didn’t produce proportional value and roles whose work can now be automated. This isn’t a distant forecast; he says it’s already beginning. 6. Your fancy resume logos matter less than how "modern" you are. For the past decade, career advice centered on building your resume—work at Meta, Google, top-tier companies, prove you’ve “seen the movie before.” Now, if you spent six years at an established company working in outdated ways, you come out, and the world has moved on. Interviewers are asking, “Put yourself in a scenario. What tools do you use?” Not “Five years ago you shipped this thing—walk me through it.” 7. The shadow of your superpower is your biggest liability. You need to swallow your ego and think two moves ahead. Don’t say, “I was an X-level leader. I’ll only consider roles at that level.” Brands don’t matter. Everything’s changing. Be willing to take something smaller to make sure you’re on the boat leaving for the new world. 8. There’s a psychological threshold you must cross, and that's the hardest part. Your power years—your 30s—are when life plays a cruel trick: you finally know what you’re doing professionally, but you also have the least amount of time. You’re settling down, having kids, dealing with aging parents, managing your health. Now, AI is making us have to reinvent ourselves. It's hard. 9. Find your moment of joy, and everything else follows. Everyone who’s crossed the threshold has a story, usually something personal and silly. They built an app to manage their inbox, or control the lights in their house, or help their partner with a side business. They stayed up all night hacking. That moment of joy is when they caught the bug. Joy creates energy, and it doesn’t feel like work anymore. It makes you find time you didn’t think you had. If you’re a leader, find those moments of joy in your staff—it’s contagious. 10. Product managers will become agents of change across every industry. In the next year, product organizations will transform how they build. Marketing, sales, HR, private-equity-owned HVAC companies, schools—everyone will realize they need to change. Who will they bring in to lead that transformation? Product people. Nikhyl predicts PMs will spread like dandelion seeds across industries, while people from design, data science, and engineering flow into product roles.

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Lenny Rachitsky

@lennysan

Apr 19

"The ones who were the best at working in the past, the ones who mastered the old game, will find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage." Every PM needs to listen to today's episode with @nikhyl. This is the most honest, real-talk conversation I've had about