Nikhyl Singhal — longtime Meta and Google product exec, four-time founder, and operator of the Skip Community for CPOs — argues that the PM career is splitting. Two years ago, the day of a senior PM was largely moving information — running alignment meetings, summarizing decisions, brokering between functions, writing PRDs that translated leadership intent into engineering work. That role, he says flatly, 'is essentially going to become a dinosaur.'
The other half is having the time of their lives. PMs who love building — who can prototype, ship, test their instincts directly with customers — are seeing record compensation, more offers than ever, and a renaissance of agency. Singhal's prediction for the next 12-24 months: companies will shed tens of thousands of staff and rehire much smaller, AI-first teams. 'If you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.'
What to do about it: increase pace ('the next two years requires a lot of fire in the belly'), and be willing to reinvent yourself even when reinvention feels exhausting and unnecessary. His diagnostic exercise: color-code every meeting on your calendar green/yellow/red for a week. Most stuck PMs are mostly yellow and red. Builders are mostly green and yellow.
The deepest barrier, he says, isn't the new tools — it's psychology. PMs who reached senior levels under the old model have the most to lose by reinventing, and so they don't. The advice: have the courage to operate as if your current way of working is already obsolete, before the org tells you it is.