The Medium of PM
You hear a lot these days that product management is a craft. The “craft of PM.”
What I think when I hear this is less about the activities related to the performance of the art (certainly this is important), but I also think about the medium. Painters have paint. Sculptors have stone. Composers have time and pitch.
If PM is a craft, what to make of the “medium” of PM, and how is it changing in the era of AI?
A short digression to Sol LeWitt.
Concept as craft
LeWitt was a conceptual artist. He didn’t paint his wall drawings, persay - he wrote them. Line direction, density, color, geometry and so forth as instructions on a certificate. Installers (he called them “drafters”) executed the work on a wall, somewhere, even sometimes decades later. In this example, the wall isn’t the art, the certificate is the art. The wall is just an instance of the art.
It’s such an apt parallel for this time we find ourselves in as PMs.
The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.
LeWitt continued: “the execution is a perfunctory affair.” He didn’t mean execution was unimportant. He meant the creative work happened upstream - in the conception.
The installer’s craft
The installer side is worth lingering on. From an SFMOMA Q&A with Nancy Arms Simon, who installed LeWitts for the 2000 retrospective:
LeWitt’s directions allow for some interpretation, like how far a line should go and where it should end. Was that ambiguity stressful?
NAS: It was and it wasn’t. It wasn’t at first because I didn’t understand how much was at stake in being right. I was pretty green. I had a vision of what I thought lines not straight and not touching looked like, but when I saw other iterations of Lines, Not Straight, Not Touching [. . .] I realized, “Oh, that’s what they wanted that to look like. Whoops.” If you use the analogy that Sol LeWitt has written a piece of music and the orchestra is playing it, I was interpreting that music maybe a little bit too much in my own way.
I also didn’t understand that the weight of the hand with the graphite on the wall is supposed to be consistent. Mine was not.
The installer brings their own craft and judgment. The instructions leave room but the room is bounded - there’s a look the work is supposed to have, and a good installer learns to feel where the boundary is. Even the weight of the hand matters.
Substitute “developer” for “installer” and “spec” or “PRD” for “certificate” and we’re getting dangerously close to the relationship that PMs have with our devs.
Knowing your medium
Here’s the part that a lot of PMs miss, or misunderstand. LeWitt obviously wasn’t writing instructions in the abstract. He knew exactly what a graphite line on a primed wall looks like at 50% density vs. 75%. He knew which colors bleed when layered with washes. He knew taping. He knew geometry.
But also - he wasn’t an installer.
PMs for sure must know the medium - the contours of the code, the data model, the UX patterns, the deployment surface, the failure modes - in order to write specs that are feasible. They must know ENOUGH to convey the essence of value to a dev team that can implement the ideas in feasible ways.
But also, PMs are not devs.
Stranded on the old medium
Here’s the trap we find ourselves in c.2026 in the world of PM.
The PMs who pushed themselves deepest into the old medium - those who learned to be waiters, who localized for the dev team and not the customer, who optimized their craft for “writing more tickets” - are at risk of finding themselves stranded. They got good at the wrong layer.
The new medium does not need a human translator - a waiter. The handoff is collapsing and becoming a direct execution surface. The skills that mattered most (precision in a ticket, alignment in a sprint review, deference to an engineer’s read of the doc) are not the job anymore. Never SHOULD have been the job, but here we are.
This isn’t to say developers are going away. Far from it. But they face the same shift on their side of the wall. The “wall” for devs used to be conversion of ticket, via knowledge of syntax, into code. Now that’s an intermediate layer.
Everyone involved now has a medium that once was hand-cut metal, but is now 3D printed metal. A new abstraction has been wedged between intent and delivery.
For PMs the lesson is the same as it always was - knowing the medium matters, up to a point. But the medium isn’t what it was. The deeper you’ve embedded yourself in the old craft, the more deliberately you’ll have to retool for the new one.
The PMs who treat AI as “another team member to hand off to” will fall behind the PMs who treat it as a direct interface to the building material.
Same craft, new medium.
J.
Thanks to the amazing Melissa Boxer for the inspiration on LeWitt. Find her writing at melissaboxer.substack.com.