The Great Vanishing Act: How Product Craft is Slipping Away
Rediscovering Product Craft in the Age of AI – Part 1/5
Product management has never been more visible, or felt more misunderstood. Somewhere along the way, we lost the plot. That erosion may not be as obvious in places like Silicon Valley and other major startup hubs, where product craft runs deep and where I honed my career (the problems there are different these days). But it’s very real in most other regions where companies and teams are trying to emulate what they have never lived.
To be clear, this isn’t product-bashing. I have spent my career in product, and I believe deeply in the discipline and its impact. It has been my calling. But like any profession that grows quickly and industrialises, we have accumulated habits and structures that sometimes obscure more than they reveal. The intent here is not cynicism. It's an attempt to hold up a mirror to our own practice so we can carry forward what’s worth keeping and let go of what no longer serves us.
This blog, the first of a five-part series, is my attempt to make sense of that collision and rediscover the craft by re-grounding in the judgment, creativity, and discipline that actually move products forward. And yes, I will talk more about what all this might mean for an AI-driven world, vibe-coding, and agentic products, and why product-craft is becoming more critical than ever, as the series unfolds.
But first, we begin, fittingly, with the vanishing act itself: how product craft is quietly slipping away.
TL;DR: In trying to scale product management, many organisations turned principles into rituals and lost the essence of the craft. Agile became ceremony, product-led became rhetoric, and “progress” often masks a lack of conviction. This first part traces how product craft has been slipping away, before AI arrived to expose the cracks.
“Product craft has never been about tools, processes, or roles. It’s about how well a whole organization notices, decides, shapes, and learns.”
There's something broken in the way many companies, especially B2B ones, build products. And every few months, the tension spills out again in a cycle of hot takes on how PMs are redundant, specs are useless, and the product function is obsolete (again). Airbnb disbands the function entirely. Lovable runs with no PMs, no specs, just vibes. Meanwhile, Linear apparently writes meticulous PRDs for everything. While they are not typical traditional companies in any sense, their decisions ripple outward. Their moves shape what many companies then feel compelled to mimic and justify. The cycle repeats, and we copy, react, and overcorrect.
Each approach works in its context. But rarely for the reasons the hot takes suggest..
Product craft has never been about tools, processes, or roles. It’s about how well a whole organization notices, decides, shapes, and learns. When those fundamentals are made real, almost any method can succeed. When they're absent, or mere corporate buzzwords, no tool or cult of personality will save you.
The tension is escalated by the very real and deep confusion organizations are facing when growth is urgent, competition is fierce, AI is everywhere, and the old ways of building they have survived on are never going to catch up.
This isn't just philosophical hand-wringing. The reality is playing out in plain sight, and companies that have lost product craft are struggling to innovate and respond to the accelerating market shift. At that point, it doesn’t take a genius competitor, just someone who has learned the right way to build.
The Performative Product Organisation
From the outside, most technology organisations look well structured with multi-layered product teams, VP titles, glossy roadmaps. Rituals are dutifully followed, strategy decks are beautiful, fluent in the right language of visions, missions, OKRs, and customer-centricity. It all sounds very compelling.
Up close, though, the timelines, forecasts, and revenue projections are usually fiction crafted to “manage stakeholders” and survive the next quarterly planning or board meeting.
Everyone is busy, dashboards show enough green to reassure leadership, but conviction is low. Teams ship features without agreeing on what problem they’re solving. Engineers push code quickly, things break, and no one is sure why the feature mattered in the first place. Cynicism creeps in as people know they’re going through the motions, moving faster without a convincing direction, then carrying the blame for the mess. The inertia is stronger than the will to change. I have had to step into situations like this more than once to help reset mindsets and rebuild conviction. It’s hard, but necessary, work before any real progress can happen.
Part of the reason for this lies in how eagerly companies reach for borrowed playbooks rather than truly learning and shaping their own product operating model. So we set up guilds because Spotify did. We write future press releases because Amazon did. We adopt frameworks, canvases, and roles because that's what the book says and everyone else seems to. Rarely are these moves grounded in the actual business, technology, and people in front of us.
These practices made sense in the places they were born, shaped by first principles and specific challenges. When transplanted into organizations that haven’t done the hard learning and doing part, or understanding those principles, they become product and technology theatre and gestures without the substance.
That drift from purpose to performance didn’t happen overnight. It has been creeping in and compounding over the years, until good intentions have degenerated into theatre.
When Principles Became Rituals
If there’s a founding case study for this drift, it’s Agile.
The Agile Manifesto captured something enduring: that great products come from breaking silos, staying close to users, and adapting thoughtfully to change. It was a rebellion against the rigidity of waterfall planning and a call for flow, humility, and continuous learning to drive innovation.
But over time, the clarity of those principles gave way to packaged frameworks and rote implementation. What began as a mindset evolved into a methodology, then a certification, and ultimately a compliance function. Daily standups turned into status checks. Retrospectives became ritualised debriefs. The “product owner” became a glorified backlog clerk (and that’s when the role is not completely misrepresented as a synonym for Head of Product or GM). Collaboration narrowed into a flurry of cross-functional alignment meetings, with the functions desperately pedalling and politicking to defend their own lanes. And under the hood, most companies continue with their waterfall logic, sacrificing any chance of innovation at the altar of ‘predictability’.
“What began as a mindset evolved into a methodology, then a certification, and ultimately a compliance function. ”
This is not Agile’s fault. It’s what happens when we adopt the visible structure but forget the deeper, not-so-visible, intent. We have become too caught up in implementing the form and the comfort of rituals at the expense of thinking. Even Kent Beck, one of the manifesto’s authors, lamented that they wanted to free developers to build better software, not spawn a certification industrial complex. And the fact that we now have "SAFe Agile", a framework so elaborate it needs its own map, is the perfect symbol of bureaucracy and process insanity disguised as progress.
We have built an entire industry around product management. But in scaling the craft, especially in places trying to import it wholesale, we may have lost something more essential, i.e. the curiosity, conviction, and cross-disciplinary messiness that gave it life in the first place. And that was before AI entered the picture….
Next: In Part 2, we’ll turn to the promise of being “product-led” and why it so often collapses into empty rhetoric, and what that reveals about how organizations really make decisions.