Your Velocity Doubled. Did Anything Get Better?
Shipping faster is easy to prove. Shipping better is the part nobody has instrumented yet.
Katherine Man has spent six years at HubSpot and over a decade building the platforms that go-to-market teams run on. She sits down with Rina Alexin for a deliberately moderate take on AI: what it has genuinely changed about product work, what it has only made noisier, and why the role everybody predicted would disappear is still very much here.
Key Topics Discussed in This Episode
AI took the bottom 10% of your job
The simplest part of the role got democratized. Which leaves the other 90%, the part that makes someone actually good, more exposed than it has ever been. Katherine's view: the roles did not merge, the conversations got better.
Excuse culture is dead
No PM on the team? AI is your PM. No designer? You have prototyping tools. Katherine has watched a tech lead write product requirement docs for six months and designers run their own research and scoping. Fully resourced teams are now the exception, and she treats that as a planning assumption instead of a complaint.
Output metrics are the easy answer
Velocity is up. Quality systems have not caught up. Katherine points to customer-facing numbers instead: meetings booked through the prospecting agent, resolution rate through the customer agent. That's the scoreboard that counts.
The grunt work was the training
Writing bad PRDs by hand is how a generation of PMs learned to write good ones. Hiring for recent graduates is thinning while current employees stay put. Katherine is blunt that the industry has a five-year problem it hasn't priced in.
Why Listen to This Episode?
In this episode, you’ll get:
A realistic model for covering unfilled roles, including where AI stretches and where it stops (prioritization, trade-offs, decisions)
Plus the billboard on the way in from SFO that explains everything wrong with AI marketing right now.
Related Resources
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