I spent last week at three product conferences, all making the same case: AI made building cheap, so judgment is the moat now. I think that's right. The tempting next step is to sweep away the friction and the meetings too, and for a team that's the wrong instinct. The fix isn't fewer conversations, it's better ones.
Years ago, our heaviest users were complaining that one of the screens they spent the most time in was getting slow. Months later we shipped a new version, and not one of us could have told you whether the thing we'd built actually fixed the original complaint. We'd stopped checking. That's not scope creep. It's something I've come to think of as the alignment tax, and AI is about to make every team pay it faster.
Keith Rabois says the PM role makes no sense. Boris Cherny says everyone is about to become one. Two predictions that sound opposite, pointing at the same shift. The version of each role that was measurable and process-shaped is being automated. The version that was always doing the real work is what's left.
AI has got very good at building things. What it hasn't figured out yet is what to build, and why. That's not an intelligence problem. It's a context problem.
We had everything in place. Channel partners lined up, systems ready, white glove service rehearsed. The day we went live, nobody called. Six months later we were still tweaking. Here's what I wish I'd known.