Cat Wu, Head of Product for Claude Code, argues the PM role is being rewritten in real time by AI-native engineering velocity. Six-month feature timelines have dropped to one week — sometimes one day. The traditional PM toolkit (multi-quarter roadmap alignment, partner-team coordination, detailed PRDs) is now the bottleneck, not the cure.
Her response is twofold: build concept corners — small product surfaces where one engineer can ship end-to-end weekly without coordination overhead — and hire engineers with strong product taste rather than additional PMs to do the speccing for them.
The argument cuts across role definitions. All the roles are merging, Wu says. PMs do engineering work; engineers do PM work; designers PM and ship code. On her team, the highest-leverage hire isn't another PM — it's an engineer with product taste, capable of going from user feedback on Twitter to a shipped product by Friday with almost no PM involvement.
That has implications for what a PM should actually do all day. Wu's framing: the PM's question is no longer how to align quarterly roadmaps. It's how to maximize what today's model already does well, before it gets superseded.