Product Leadership Next
The Evolution of the PM Role in the AI Era—and the Rise of the CPTO and CPMO
Product management is still a relatively young discipline that has been around for less than 25 years. It has always been a shape-shifter, adapting to the industry and company culture. I started my career in 2005 as a Business Analyst at BlackRock, where I was effectively a PM before the role had that name. My job was to build a digital risk reporting platform, replacing the paper-intensive, error-prone system that employed armies of analysts, and then position the Green Package and sell it to enterprise companies. I worked closely with analysts at night to understand their workflows and data flows through the system, recreating these flows digitally and developing a risk reporting platform. I would then wireframe in Balsamiq and sketch the user flows using UML. My boss did tell me that my research reports at 4:00 am were less clear than the ones at midnight (!) Then, I would train the analysts on how to use the new system and transition away from paper reports, as well as create emails and collateral for our SaaS clients.
The title didn’t matter. I was doing whatever it took to build a useful product and get it adopted, including design, research, enablement, and even marketing, but not coding, despite having a CS degree. That’s always been the core of product work: create something valuable and ensure it gets used.
Today, the role has two truths. The role has the support of many more functions, including researchers, designers, PJMs, and PMMs to support the build. However, we also have AI capable of generating prototypes before a Jira ticket is even created. But the essence is unchanged.
To me, great PMs still do three things:
Deeply understand users and their workflows
Anticipate where the future is going
Build at the intersection of user needs and market opportunity
What’s changing now isn’t the mission — it’s where PMs sit in the stack. And that shift has big implications. As AI improves at coding, we enter the era of building anything. With that market shift, I think PMs will move up the stack to influence the business and get the products they build discovered. After all, in the abundance of building anything, it is DISCOVERY that becomes crucial.
History of the PM role surge
PM jobs have grown, especially in the last decade. Companies across industries doubled down on digital products, agile came into force, and growth concepts such as PLG became growth levers; there was an increased need for more PMs. A LinkedIn analysis shows that product management roles in the US grew 32% from August 2017 to June 2019, outpacing general job growth. By 2020, Product Manager was ranked the #4 best job in America, alongside engineering jobs, according to Glassdoor. The role peaked in 2022, with over 426,000 openings worldwide posted on LinkedIn, according to
. With traditional tech and those wanting not to be left behind, hiring PMs across sectors. It is reminiscent of how AI is everything right now, and hiring hasn’t decreased; it has just shifted to “AI-role”.
Market correction
Between 2022 and 2024, product management hiring slowed sharply as tech companies shifted from hypergrowth to operational discipline. That said, if you look across tech sectors, no function was immune. The correction began with post-COVID overhiring—firms had ramped up hiring between 2020 and 2021 but faced a demand reset in 2022 as the market changed, which triggered widespread layoffs.
“Meta laid off 13% of its workforce in late 2022, Amazon paused hiring, and Stripe cut 14%, citing overhiring during the pandemic.” Laurel Wamsley NPR
For me, this was extremely real as the CPO of Braintrust, a recruiting marketplace. We observed a shift in the market from talent-first to company-first, resulting in a significant drop in demand for talent. However, we had the foresight that great talent would always be in demand and continued to be talent-first. At the same time, rising interest rates and inflation made capital more scarce, prompting both startups and public companies to prioritize efficiency. Investors began demanding profitability over growth, putting pressure on PMs who couldn’t directly tie work to revenue. The rise of AI in 2023 accelerated this shift further, with investors and founders asking if leaner teams could achieve the same as larger teams because they didn’t have the increased communication load (turns out there are mounting examples where this is true), and expense.
The Rise of the CPTO: A Fork in the Road
Over the last several years, the CPTO role has emerged. Since the 2020s, there has been a trend toward the consolidation of functions and an increase in the role of the Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO), especially in the tech sector. This enables companies to have one R&D leader on the executive team while the GTM function is separate and headed by either a CMO or CRO. It’s efficient and appealing to the CEO, justified by the simple logic of consolidating and streamlining communication between teams, thereby bridging the gap between vision and technical feasibility.
In certain types of companies, this consolidation makes sense. The CPTO model is well-suited for environments where the customer is a developer or a technical user, or the product itself is highly technical, such as hardware, AI, or the core company advantage lies in infrastructure, scale, or speed. Think: Cockroach Labs, Vercel, Retool, LaunchDarkly. In these companies, the engineers are effectively building for themselves or for closely dependent users. The strategy, intuition, ICP definition, and acquisition channels come from within the engineering organizations. This direction also makes sense in startups, where the founders are closely involved with the user and lead both the build and sale of the product.
However, in most other businesses, specifically consumer businesses and frequently SaaS, where the customer is not an engineer, growth hinges on the customer's discovery of products that are built and grounded in profit and loss (P&L) ownership. Success is a combination of what gets shipped and how it’s positioned, priced, brought to market, and supported.
Winning is not only shipping the most elegant architecture or even getting it shipped fastest, but increasingly about getting the product discovered. Companies win by knowing their ICP, the associated channels, and the business model that will succeed with the given product. Plus, marketing is just hard, annoying, and soul-crushing because no one seems to understand how wonderful your product is, and they still have no idea it even exists. Most technologists I know would rather spend their time on the product problem, rather than the people they need to adopt it and make the business grow.
In an example from
‘s slack channel where he posed a question to the community,“What’s a product/ tool you vibe coded, that you actually use regularly in your work or life”
Over 40 individuals shared their experiences of using AI tools to create impressive products. The marketing is what is tripping them up from growing these excellent products into recurring revenue models or businesses and getting them found beyond their personal use. I venture to say the folks who are vibe-coding and constantly marketing by focusing on growing their owned channels, like
with ChatPRD, her through provoking talks, starting her own Podcast leveraging the distribution of Lenny’s community, are the examples of PMs and Founders of the future = R&D+GTM. For the majority, building an excellent product or something new is fun and has been accelerated and made much more approachable through vibe coding. However, marketing is not as much, or at least is a much bigger, continuous task that does not yet have the same “vibe” equivalent, and still requires the daily grind to nurture.
This is where I hypothesize that the GTM-savvy CPO and the GTM-competent growth leader and PM hybrid will become a key hire in the future. People who speak the language of growth, branding, pricing, customer segmentation, and strategic partnerships that sit in the R&D teams and can build the right products for the market today and those of the future, embracing profit and loss (P&L) ownership, and getting the products discovered.
So are we seeing these CPMO appointments in the market?
Emergence of the CPMO
Turns out the answer is yes. The Chief Product and Marketing Officer (CPMO) is a hybrid executive role that combines leadership of product development with marketing. This role was virtually nonexistent before 2020. The combined role has gained traction, particularly after 2024, as companies seek to unify their product vision and go-to-market strategy under a single leader. However, when I look at the appointments, I mostly see them as marketers getting closer to the build rather than the builder being curious about the marketing. The combined role brings tighter integration between building the product and marketing it. After all, business schools teach us the 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. That or the more modern take by
’s 4 Fits: Market<>Product<>Channel<Model<>. But think about it: what function owns all four? No one. Product sets the what, or the Product. Finance sets the how much, or the Model. Sales or partnership sets the distribution or the Channel. Marketing sets the promotion or the Market.A solid CPMO example is Julia Goldin, who has been Lego’s CPMO since 2015
“Goldin heads the team responsible for developing the product portfolio and experience, along with marketing and brand building.”
By combining the functions that build great products with those that lead their discovery, a company creates end-to-end accountability and breaks down silos. It increases the likelihood of product and, thus, company success. Marketing is already acutely focused on metrics that drive revenue, as is product. Additionally, numerous growth levers span both product and marketing, which have led to the addition of growth teams with a horizontal remit. Take PLG and PLS - depending on the company, there are layers of growth that need to be combined to grow the business and reach the company’s different types of supporters, some owned by product, others by marketing, and others by growth. Combining the two leads to campaigns that are customer-centric, product-congruent, and thus effective.
Can one function perform all these functions?
Yes, a CEO, in theory, could unify these functions and efforts, often serving as the arbitrator. In a small startup, the Founder or founders typically fill all these roles and can scale and run much farther with AI. However, in practice, they already have plenty of jobs to do, including managing the board, raising money, storytelling, setting the vision, and ensuring the company culture supports the progress they want to make, so at a certain team size, they will need help. Expecting them to also architect a thoughtful, research-based product and commercial strategy and delve into the details of all of it is both unrealistic and inefficient, especially with a team size of about 50+ people.
So no, the PM role isn’t dead — it’s evolving. Phew.
At their core, PMs excel at learning, problem-solving, and creating value through understanding the user. But do you now have to learn marketing and coding? That depends.
At a big company, you’re likely skimming blog posts about AI, feeling low-grade anxiety, but still spending most of your time in meetings, writing docs, and making decks.
grippingly illustrates your hamster wheel in “Typical Tech Company: A Case Study in Bottle Necks” section in her The Rise of the AI-native employee substack. It is really funny, until you realize it’s true. Your best move? Learn executive presence so you can get that promotion, and MAYBE get something of value shipped. Use AI to enhance yourself. Your efficiency and effectiveness when writing PRDs, status updates, Jira tickets, and managing up, across, and down to make your job of working in the business suck less, and side hussle into learning vibe-coding so you can fulfill your “AI quota” and can check the box on your performance review. The rest of the organization — design, engineering, and marketing — will mostly continue to function as you expect them to, and your time will be spent on their arbitration and getting some forward momentum.At a small company, you’ll need to do more, but you always have, so this is not new. Learn to vibe-code and ship, ship again, and then ship some more → maybe something will resonate. Talk to your customers. Early traction and investable products matter more than anything. Your job is to find product-market fit fast and then repeat it. Additionally, try to keep the team small by hiring the right people for today, using AI automation to the maximum extent possible, and building the right framework and API endpoints for growth. This will help stave off the size tax and enable you to run further.
At a growth-stage startup, Marketing will make or break you. A lack of apparent GTM motion is what traps most startups in a zombie state and gets 98% of them to fail. The channels that worked yesterday (SEO, anyone?) likely work less well today and won’t work at all tomorrow. Plus, your product is changing. That is compounded by never finding a market product fit, often falling in love with your product simply because you use it. So, getting curious about GTM, Finance, and how to build a company out of what you have is how you’ll be able to bring value.
PM role by company stage
💥 Hot Take: Anyone can ship. The winners get found. 💥
Thanks for reading. I am Elena Luneva. I work at the intersection of people, craft, and business. I bet that PMs need to learn Business Skills: GTM, Finance, and Executive presence to excel in the world of tomorrow, and I teach this in my course and through executive coaching. I advise companies on AI transformation and GTM. If you find what you read relevant, subscribe and consider joining me in an upcoming lightning talk, DM me, or simply give it a thumbs up and share with someone else!