How the Product Manager Role is Changing in 2025 | Jiaona Zhang (CPO Linktree)
The counterintuitive skills PMs that need in 2025: How AI is flipping the PM career ladder and why ICs and specialists might have the edge.
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Jiaona Zhang (JZ).
JZ is the Chief Product Officer of Linktree and an adjunct lecturer at Stanford. We had a great chat about AI’s impact on PM managers and super ICs, the shift towards PM specialists, and how becoming a creator can help advance your PM career.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
JZ and I talked about:
(00:00) Find what makes you happy in your PM career
(01:44) AI's impact on PM managers and super ICs
(04:03) How to balance strategy and execution
(08:24) Streamlining PM tasks with AI
(22:55) The shift from PM generalists to specialists
(23:58) Exploring JZ's Career Odyssey framework
(25:49) Why you shouldn't just optimize for comp and title
(44:19) Can being a creator help advance your product career?
Keep reading for the takeaways.
The rise of the super IC PM in an AI-first world
Welcome JZ! So, PMs have gone through layoffs and the rise of AI over the past few years. How do you think the PM role is evolving?
The most striking change I've seen is companies cutting middle managers.
Each PM can do more by delegating the lower leverage work to AI. As a result, there’s less of a need for middle managers. Middle management isn’t very satisfying anyway — being stuck in the middle translating things from above to their team below.
For a long time, becoming a manager was the only way to grow your PM career. But I’m starting to see companies offer IC PM tracks that go up to the director level and above. What makes someone qualified to be a super IC?
The best super IC PMs can operate at both 30,000-foot and 3-foot views. They can coach others to create leverage for themselves while still being able to get into the pixels when needed. They’re able to move between different altitudes.
I think operating at the 30,000-foot and 3-foot views is very hard to do in practice. Do you have any advice for finding the right balance?
My biggest piece of advice here is to:
Know what view you naturally gravitate towards and force yourself to try the other level.
For example, if you gravitate towards details, force yourself to step back to think about strategy. If you’re always at the high level, then ask yourself when you last dogfooded the product, filed a ticket, or spoke to a user.
I believe in artifacts because they let you say, "I've done the thing." A PM’s competencies are strategy, execution, and communication. You can create an artifact for all three:
For strategy - do you have a strategy document?
For execution - can you point to what you've shipped recently and quantify it?
For communication - when was your last weekly update?
Use these questions to understand where you're flying and when to switch attitudes.
One problem I see with internal artifacts is that people often obsess about them instead of about the customer. For example, some people write 10+ page strategy docs that become out of date a quarter later.
Yes, for company strategy, we try to keep it to a tight two-pager.
I think it’s also important to think about what artifacts your leadership team prefers. For example, at Linktree, the founders are incredibly visual. Writing long documents isn't effective because people rarely read and internalize them the same way. So we've gone heavy on visual artifacts like Figma - putting key problems and goals up top, then straight into low and high-fidelity flows. Figma becomes the source of truth.
Another artifacts we like is scorecards — a lightweight way to track what success looks like and details on progress, blockers and asks.
Pick the minimum viable artifact to get everyone on the same page and move forward.
Think about your career like your most important product
You've given talks about how PMs should treat their career like their most important product. Can you explain this concept?
The first big takeaway is simply taking the time to think about your career. So many people get caught up in daily tasks that they never step back to consider what actually makes them happy and energized.
When you're building a product, you have to deeply understand who you're building for. What do they want? What are their pain points? What gives them those dopamine hits? You need to think about yourself as a user for your career in the same way.
My core belief is understanding yourself like you would a product.
Too often, people just follow what others do or check boxes that seem "right." But we see so many PMs burn out after ten years and want a total change.
With recent platform shifts, we're seeing the rise of the super IC path. So if you enjoy deep, complex solo work, don't feel pressured to pursue management. If you're doing things that sap your energy, you'll never be your best self.
I used to think that I would’ve failed if I didn’t climb the ladder to CPO. But I've gotten more honest with myself that I enjoy being in a room with engineers and designers — kind of like what founders do.
Totally. Many founders don't enjoy their job anymore when it becomes more about scaling than building. So, even for them, finding the right fit to keep doing energizing work is key because, ultimately, that will make the company more successful.
With recent industry downsizing, should PMs be generalists or specialists?