AI Made Developers Faster. Now Product Managers Have to Catch Up.

Andrew Ng is one of the most influential people in modern AI. At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos he said that in the last 1.5 years AI has already changed how software is built.

For years, product teams had more ideas than they could ship. One Product Manager worked with 4-8 developers. Developers were the bottleneck. With AI, that flipped. Developers work faster. They don't scroll Stack Overflow anymore. GitHub Copilot is a given in most teams. They build features and fix bugs in a fraction of the time.

And – we are not sure if we actually believe him, it sounds to good to be true – but he says that today, their developers come back and ask for more work. And more work. And more work. And their designers and product managers cannot keep up.

Their new ratio is: one Product Manager, one developer. The Product Manager defines specs. The developer builds.

That sounds efficient. And it is. But it exposes a problem.

Product management becomes more and more valuable. But it's also becoming the bottleneck. Developers are AI enabled already. Product Managers often are not. They cannot keep up with the speed. Writing specs, clarifying requirements, answering questions, aligning stakeholders, validating ideas.

Andrew Ng's conclusion is one answer to the problem: we need more product-focused developers. Developers who understand the problem space better and need less guidance. That is a valid approach. Teams should absolutely invest in that.

But it should not be the only approach. This shift is also a reminder for Product Managers.

If developers use AI to move faster, Product Managers need to do the same. Otherwise, they become the bottleneck in a system that finally removed many others.

This is the moment to rethink how you work.

AI does not remove the need for Product Managers. It exposes slow ones. If you want to stay relevant, now is the time to search for what you can do with AI as a Product Manager, pick the right tools, and redesign how you work.

Developers already did.