We definitely live in interesting times. This post was shared by a friend about someone getting interviewed by an AI. I have previously written about candidates who I have interviewed that had AI assist them and how bizarre that experience was for me. In the workplace we have people these days that have managed to bamboozle their leadership who are not nearly as fluent in the use of AI as a productivity tool. So we have people producing tons of content that is purportedly a work deliverable but as you start to read through and god forbid try to take any action, you find yourself in an impossible situation.
An engineering manager friend of mine who works for a large tech company shared his experience in this regard which is quite telling. P has been managing engineering teams for a good twenty years now and has a well-established track record of success. He is fully capable of rolling up his sleeves and diving into thorny issues his developers are struggling with and they all respect his authority. So if P has an opinion on the quality of product requirements coming to his team, I know he is right.
It turns out some very junior level product manager in the team who has ambitions that are not supported by her skill or level of experience, has made this team's life endlessly miserable. In pre GenAI times, such a person would need weeks and months to work through a product requirements until they reached the quality bar. But one such as her is now able to crank out requirements in minutes, lightly update them so they don't look completely machine generated. Within the day she has produced something she wants to the engineering team to start working on.
At first blush, it all looks reasonable so the engineers agree to do a review and the whole thing unravels in the first five minutes. Clarifications on one user story can take an hour with this individual demonstrating that she has not through the most fundamental things. In fact, by using Gen AI as a crutch from this early in her career, she has missed time to learn by doing the job, running a normal requirements discovery session and so on - the very basic nuts and bolts of her job. In all fairness she should be junior business analyst and go from there.
But that is not the state of the art. People like her have made product management a bit of a joke - everyone and their grandmother is a product manager these days. We are not even expecting her to do proper market and user research, competitive analysis and so on. The desire to suborn all that to Gen AI would be simply too high for her to attempt doing any of that unassisted. So anyway, this hapless engineering team has been spinning their wheels for a year without any feature delivered to the customer's satisfaction. In the meanwhile, the leadership in the organization is unable to size up why such "well-written" product requirements are considered completely unusable by the engineering team.
I had much sympathy for P but told him what I thought would likely happen next. The junior PM would get promoted based on the volume of output she was producing. His team would be blamed for their inability to deliver results. We joked about getting an AI to convert her spec to code and deploy it in production. While that sounded funny at the time, it may well be his only option if he wants to demonstrate his team can keep up with the product manager's productivity.
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