Chalk illustration of a shifting landscape representing changing technical viability

I was recently interviewed on a podcast and had one of those moments every product person dreads. A complete brain shutdown. Mid-conversation, trying to make a point, with the recording running.

I was making a point about the core responsibilities of a Product Manager, and I could not for the life of me remember who coined the framework I was referencing. Value and Viability. Two of the pillars that define what a PM is actually accountable for. I knew the idea cold. I've internalized it. I've built teams around it. But the name? Gone. Just a blank wall where the attribution should have been.

Of course, within minutes of disconnecting from the call, my brain relaxed and there it was. Marty Cagan.

If you haven't read Marty Cagan's work, honestly, stop reading this and go find some of his stuff. He's going to help you a lot more than my random thoughts here. His thinking on the role of product management has shaped how an entire generation of PMs approaches the job. The Value and Viability framework (along with Usability and Feasibility) is foundational. If you're a PM and you haven't spent time with it, you're working harder than you need to.

The Interview Got Me Thinking

After I finished beating myself up for not properly giving credit where it was due, I started chewing on this idea a bit more in the context of what we'd been discussing. The interview was largely about the impact of AI on the PM role. Where does it help? Where does it fall short? What changes and what stays the same?

I mentioned on the call that I still believe Value and Viability are the keys to PM success in an AI-driven world. That hasn't changed. But there is one big thing that is shifting, and it's shifting fast.

It's not Value.

Value Is Still a Grind

Value is actually not changing much, in my opinion. Value is all about the "why." It's about picking the right problems. Understanding your customers deeply enough to know which problems they'll actually pay to have solved. Identifying where the real pain is, not where you assume it is. Getting out of the building, talking to people, watching how they work, and developing the judgment to separate signal from noise.

Can AI tools help with some of this? Sure. A bit. You can use them to synthesize customer feedback, analyze support tickets, identify patterns in usage data. That's useful. But it's incremental. The tools can help you process information faster, but they can't replace the hard work of developing genuine customer empathy and market intuition.

Getting great at the Value side of product management is still a grind. It takes a ton of hard work, intellectual honesty, and openness to being wrong. It takes years of reps. There's no shortcut, and AI hasn't created one. Not yet, at least.

Viability Is a Completely Different Story

What is changing, radically and fundamentally and at an accelerating rate, is Viability.

What's technically viable today is mind-blowingly different than it was even two or three years ago, let alone five. The landscape has shifted so dramatically that many of us are still operating with outdated mental models of what software can and can't do.

Think about problems that were conceptually impossible for software to solve a very short time ago. Understanding natural language with nuance and context. Generating original creative content. Analyzing unstructured data at scale. Automating complex multi-step workflows that require judgment. Building personalized experiences that actually feel personal. These were research problems. Now they're product features.

Many problems that would have required massive engineering teams and multi-year timelines are now solvable by small teams in weeks. Some are solvable by a single person with the right tools. The floor for what's "technically viable" has dropped through the basement.

It's not slowing down either. If anything, the rate of change is accelerating.

The PM's Viability Problem

Here's where this gets interesting for product people specifically. PMs have always been responsible for understanding what's technically viable. That's part of the job. You work closely with engineering to understand constraints, tradeoffs, and possibilities. You develop enough technical literacy to have informed conversations about what can be built, how long it will take, and what the risks are.

But most of us built our mental models of viability over years of experience. We learned what was hard, what was easy, what was possible, and what wasn't. Those mental models served us well for a long time because the pace of change in what was technically viable was relatively predictable.

That's no longer true. The viability landscape is shifting so fast that your intuition from even 18 months ago might be wrong. Problems you dismissed as too hard might be trivial now. Solutions you never even considered might be obvious to someone who's been paying closer attention to what the tools can do.

It's actually become harder and harder to think of things that aren't viable to solve with software. That's a wild sentence to write, but I believe it. The constraint is shifting from "can we build this?" to "should we build this?" and "will anyone care?"

Retrain Your Brain

This is the real takeaway for me. We all need to retrain our brains around what viable solutions actually look like.

If you're a PM and you're still evaluating feasibility with a 2022 mental model, you're leaving massive opportunities on the table. You're saying "that's too hard" or "that would take too long" about problems that might be solvable in a weekend with the right approach.

The PMs who are going to thrive in this environment are the ones who stay relentlessly curious about what's becoming possible. Not just reading about AI in the abstract, but getting their hands dirty. Building things. Breaking things. Developing a real, visceral sense for what the current tools can do and where the boundaries actually are today, not where they were the last time you checked.

Value is still your north star. Pick the right problems, understand your customers, do the hard work of figuring out what matters. That doesn't change.

But Viability? Viability is a moving target now, and it's moving faster than most of us have fully internalized. The PMs who recalibrate fastest will have an enormous advantage. The ones who don't will keep solving yesterday's problems with yesterday's constraints.

The "why" hasn't changed. The "what's possible" has changed completely.