AI has already changed how engineers work. Product managers and designers are starting to feel the same shift, and it runs deeper than a new tool in the stack.

The logic carries over directly. If it no longer makes sense for engineers to hand-write code that AI can generate from a spec, it doesn’t make sense for a PM to spend weeks writing user stories that AI can co-create through a sixty-minute dialogue, or for a designer to spend weeks on pixel-perfect Figma handoffs when the experience can be shaped directly in code with tools like Cursor.

The uncomfortable question for both roles: are you bringing knowledge, empathy, and common sense, or are you producing artifacts? Artifacts exist to survive handoffs between humans. When the handoffs disappear, an artifact-heavy role is optimizing for an audience that’s leaving the room.

What a good PM brings was never the PRD or the groomed backlog. It’s customer empathy and problem validation, prioritization based on pain rather than feature requests, knowledge of the business and its constraints, common sense about edge cases and how users actually behave, and presence in the room while specs are co-created and validated with real users. AI removes the artifact busywork; what’s left is the actual job, with more time to do it.

The same holds for designers. Figma is a tool — so are Cursor and v0. The job is understanding user needs and workflows, shaping software so it feels like it serves people, judgment about what will hold up in practice, and iterating on real usage instead of polishing toward theoretical perfection.

The workflow follows from there. Instead of designing alone toward a perfect handoff that engineers then build, the PM, the designer, and an engineer sit down with AI together. Specs emerge from the dialogue, engineers build the capability, and designers refine the experience directly in code.

The shift that matters most is in how you measure your own value. If the measure is artifacts produced, AI is genuinely threatening — it produces them faster than you can. If the measure is problems solved for users, AI is leverage, because it hands back the hours the artifacts used to consume. The contribution that stays human is exactly what AI doesn’t have: deep customer knowledge, business context, and judgment about people.

That gives you a practical test for your own calendar. The parts of your job that require knowledge, empathy, or common sense AI doesn’t have are the parts worth most of your time. The artifacts were never the point.