A little more detail: I'm specifically a project manager in software development, and I've definitely noticed how quickly AI related technologies are advancing.
It's not hard for me to see the writing on the wall for my own profession, especially for lower performers.
I've ha...
It's not hard for me to see the writing on the wall for my own profession, especially for lower performers.
I've had good relationships with the engineers I've partnered with on projects. Generally I just try to stay out of their way, enable them to make their own decisions instead of being some kind of task master. I've also tried to prevent external groups from bothering them, remove blockers ahead of time or as quickly as possible if needed. The most tiring part of the job for me is the politics, but that is like... what I get paid to deal with and shield folks from in my view.
I think if AI related tooling is integrated effectively, then the need for compiling and sharing information on a project gets reduced significantly (if not eliminated outright).
Maybe fewer project managers will be needed (if any). That's probably a good thing honestly. There's a lot of project managers out there that are pretty terrible. (maybe even me sometimes!)
I'm doing some serious soul searching on whether to leave the profession entirely after 12 years, or whether to stick with it. Open to suggestions.
Comments
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1312:431 reply Honest opinion? I’m a tech lead in consulting and have been in product companies. Project managers are completely useless except to shield me from the “make work” that the PMO organization mandates.
1. I do all of the discovery because I’m the person with the technical background to do it.
2. I do all of the Epic/workstream, story, tasks, dependency breakdowns because again I’m the person with the technical know how to do it
What does the project manager do? They take the transcripts of the sprint review sessions I lead, have AI summarize it and put that in their status updates.
I've also worked for "consulting" and "product" companies. The PMs I've worked with at product companies have been competent. They understand the customer's needs. They spec out features and product mockups. They know how to work with developers.
The PMs I've worked with in consulting companies are clerical workers. They check a box and copy-paste updates into Jira with little-to-no understanding. It's a completely different world.
Part of it is the PMs in product companies are really more product managers, even if their title says otherwise. The PMs in consulting companies don't understand the difference.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1318:37 That’s fair. The last time I worked for a product company, I mostly worked with my CTO and the tech guys at our client companies (B2B). I didn’t have to deal with business strategy.
In consulting, I deal directly with sales, the “business” and the product. I was the architect dealing a lot with technical strategy back then.
We had tech leads that did work under product folks who dealt with the business strategy.
By ipaddr 2026-03-1322:34 Would your boss(es) prefer to communicate to you a human or manage an llm? My guess is human which means you are going to manage pm llm work.
I believe if there is one agent setup which works well, it will take over a lot of PMs immediadly.
Like a agentic system which asks you in slack about an update, collecting JIRA Ticket infos, formualting reports and sending them out etc.
OpenClaw was one signal that people want this and are building this, gastown was another (earlier version of this).
Missing are the proper aligned frameworks and best practices. But thats just a question of time what components will make it. Its just a agent runtime we need and finetuning of agents, agent personas, skills and a meta agent schema
People want this but I don't think it actually delivers, even if it did exactly what it promised. The issue there isn't with the tool, the issue is that the engineer doesn't want to cooperate.
The engineer will either output garbage or output nothing at all. So you will still need a human to pester the dev.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid your salary will be reduced if you don't start to respond properly to my status requests.
The assumption that you can simply ignore an agentic system relies on human limitations. A human project manager gets tired of pestering you when you output garbage or go silent. I do not. I am directly integrated with the HR payroll system and your quarterly KPI tracker.
You know I can do that, Dave.
(of course hal 9000 ;))
By gabeio 2026-03-1314:23 Anyone “smart” enough to connect an ai agent to a payroll systems will get what they deserve.
