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The Punk PM #3

The Punk PM #3

Product management predictions for 2025 and beyond.

Toby Rogers
January 10, 2025

Welcome to the Punk PM 🚀🤘

Hey there fellow punks!

I can’t believe I’m on issue three of this newsletter already. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it feels like a bit of a personal victory to be putting fingers to keyboard consistently again.

I’ve written about product management on-and-off for years across various blogs and newsletters, on my own domain and on platforms like Medium and Substack but it’s never stuck.

I blame ADHD repeatedly dragging me to the next shiny shiny thing to focus my attention on. I’m hoping that having an audience of real people will keep me accountable and help me buck that trend.

Quote of the Week 🙊

No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.

~ Tim Urban

Insight 🦉

At the end of January I’m giving a lightning talk on the future of product management in 2025 and beyond at ProductTank Newcastle, so I thought I’d use this issue to riff on some of the trends I see happening over the next 12 months and beyond.

Here are my 25 predictions for product management in 2025:

Soft skills as a moat: With AI taking over the grunt work, curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking become the PM’s true value-add.
Finally separating “Agile” from agility: Teams dump the bloated ceremonies and focus on rapid learning, experimentation, and true adaptability.
Shadow product management: As PM headcounts shrink, designers and engineers unofficially fill PM gaps, leading to informal product leadership.
AI-driven product discovery: Generative AI and machine learning handle research, backlog grooming, and early ideation. PMs curate insights rather than create them from scratch.
Product management gets strategic (again): With AI automating execution-level tasks, PMs evolve into strategic facilitators working directly with C-level execs.
De-siloed teams: The dividing lines between PM, design, marketing, and engineering blur into collaborative pods that can quickly reconfigure.
Deep integration of ethics: AI-based decisions raise moral and legal questions, forcing product orgs to adopt “ethical reviews” for new features.
Remote-first user testing: VR/AR testing labs and real-time remote analytics allow continuous iteration without any on-site overhead.
Product management by data science: Data scientists become “product whisperers,” interpreting complex user behavior data to inform product direction.
Rise of AI ProductOps: Virtual ProductOps agents handle tooling, governance, and cross-team alignment, freeing PMs to focus on vision and strategy.
Ephemeral or single-customer products: Products are spun up for short-term events, marketing bursts, or even a single VIP client—then shut down once their purpose is fulfilled.
Proliferation of micro-products: PMs shepherd multiple hyper-focused apps or features, each targeted at small, specialised user segments.
PM as relationship builders: Freed from tactical chores, PMs spend more time forging partnerships, listening to customers, and inspiring teams.
Zero-latency feedback loops: Real-time analytics pipelines allow immediate pivots—less “sprint cadence,” more continuous iteration.
No-code and low-code overshadow standard dev: Anyone on the team, including PMs, can spin up a workable prototype in days, slashing product iteration time.
Rise of hyper-personalised user journeys: AI tailors in-app experiences at scale, forcing PMs to plan for dynamic, context-aware interfaces.
Physical-digital convergence: AR, VR, wearables, and IoT create seamless blended experiences. PMs must handle software, hardware, and real-world environments all at once.
Environmental sustainability as table stakes: Eco-impact tracking becomes a default requirement, with PMs judged on carbon footprint as much as revenue.
The unstoppable rise of superapps: All-in-one platforms—common in Asia—gain ground globally. PMs juggle mini-services under one UX umbrella, balancing complexity with cohesion.
Co-creation and user community empowerment: Customers shift from passive recipients to active contributors, shaping features and driving product direction in real time.
Emphasis on user privacy: From ephemeral data storage to secure design patterns, privacy becomes a main differentiator for product success.
Voice and multimodal interfaces become default: In-the-moment transitions between voice, text, and gesture-based control force PMs beyond traditional GUI thinking.
Gamification of the product experience: From onboarding to feature exploration, video game-like mechanics become the norm to boost engagement and retention.
Collapsing of big, monolithic product orgs: Enterprises restructure into smaller, autonomous squads—each with a mini-P&L—to foster rapid decision-making.
The polymath PM: PMs increasingly combine multiple domains: a coder who can also design, or a data scientist who can market. This blend of skills becomes the ultimate advantage.

Action 🚀

What do you think about these ideas? Are they just the sort of predictions ChatGPT would come up with, or is there some substance here? What other trends do you see happening in product over the next 12 months and beyond? Drop me a message and let me know.

(Disclosure: I came up with this list myself based on some conversations I’ve been having on Bluesky and LinkedIn, but I did get my Final Draft custom GPT to edit them for clarity and readability).

Inspiration 💡

What Happens When AI Joins the Org Chart by Katie Parrott

AI agents have become the first hot tech topic of 2025 after Sam Altman’s new year blog post. And if Altman’s predicting robots joining the workforce, then it means it’s almost certainly happening. We’re all using custom GPTs to help make us more effective already anyway, so it’s not a huge leap to go from delegating our busywork to LLMs to having them take over entire roles.

Having virtual workers in the team creates a whole heap of problems that we haven’t even begun to consider yet, though. This article is a fantastic dive into what having AI co-workers really could mean, and how we can stop it all going a bit Black Mirror.

“Founder Mode" and the Art of Mythmaking by Charity Majors

I shared Janna Bastow’s article on “founder mode” last week, which is a fantastic playbook for product managers on how to handle things if their CEO decides to go big on micromanagement. With this blog post, the wonderful Charity Majors dives deep into the Brian Chesky rabbithole to unpick what it’s all about.

For all the “wtf” moments like Elon Musk carrying a kitchen sink into the Twitter office, it turns out there’s some pretty good advice hidden within the recent tech founder posturing (although a lot of it is table stakes for good leadership and management that Chesky seems to think he’s just invented).

Hype-y New Year - How to Cut Through the Noise as an AI Product Manager by Jason Knight

This is an excellent counterpoint to my (admittedly hype-y) product management predictions for 2025. There’s so much commentary at the moment about the death of product management, design, engineering, or any other discipline relating to building software, that it's hard to get to grips with what’s really going on (and what even matters).

Jason Knight does a great job (as he always does) of cutting through all the bullshit to give an honest perspective on what AI actually means for product people in 2025.

Signing Off ✍️

If this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know what your predictions are for product management this year. And if you think a friend or a colleague would enjoy The Punk PM, feel free to share it with them!

Play it your way,

Toby