The software product manager (PM) role has navigated every major technology shift of the past two decades – mobile, cloud, and platform economies, by absorbing new tools and expanding its scope. The AI shift is different. It is eliminating a significant portion of the PM job and leaving something leaner, harder, and considerably more demanding in its place.
Most hiring managers are still hiring for the old job. The playbook has not caught up. Akila Kesavasamy, Head of Product at Gateway AI and a 15-year veteran of building and scaling products and teams at the intersection of AI, consumer, and enterprise, runs a six-person forward-deployed team built around three principles designed for the job as it actually exists today. “In the AI age, your team is your product strategy,” Kesavasamy states.
Hire for Raw Builder Energy
That restless, compulsive builder energy is the quality that makes a product person dangerous in the best possible way as AI collapses the distance between what can be imagined and what can be shipped.
Kesavasamy hired Josh who oozes raw builder energy. He turned down multiple post-MBA offers to build his own AI startup. In the AI-age, the person who builds and iterates rapidly will have 10x more impact than the one who waits for consensus and perfect information.
Hire for Intellectual Curiosity
AI has made strategic thinking one of the few things that differentiates great PMs today. The 80% of PM work that was research, documentation and execution tracking has been compressed. The 20% that was always the actual job- challenging assumptions, reframing the problem, making the hard call when data points in multiple directions simultaneously – is now the whole job.
When Kesavasamy hired Kaushik, he challenged the team’s target ideal customer profile (ICP) in week six of his role. By week 10, he had developed an entirely new product strategy. That is what intellectual curiosity looks like in practice: making sense of the plethora of information AI has put at our fingertips and driving clarity out of that noise.
Hire for Authenticity
In a world that keeps getting more efficient, automated, and transactional, the leader who forms real relationships is the rarest and most durable asset a team can have. When Kesavasamy hired Logan, he brought 400 customers through his personal network. They showed up for Logan first and for the product second.
Products can change, features can be deprecated, and strategies can pivot. The relationships that authentic leaders build outlast all of it, and in the early stages of a product, that kind of loyalty is often the difference between a company that survives long enough to find product-market fit and one that does not. Build a team of people who genuinely care about the humans around them, and you have built something no competitor can easily replicate.
Follow Akila Kesavasamy on LinkedIn for more insights on product leadership, AI-native team building, and the hiring principles that shape high-performing product organizations.
