A new role. A blank slate. A challenge unlike any before.
The product manager steps into a company that has never had one. A small team, passionate but scattered, building an AI tool for creating documents. They’ve made it this far without structure—but now, the cracks are showing.
The company’s AI tool is designed to allow users to quickly target text, data, and imagery, and select from a a variety of LLMs to iterate on any element.
Version control you could practically walk on. A sandbox for the deepest minds.
Writing is no longer just about words on a page. It’s about the rhythm of iteration, and a series of deliberate re-generations that refine meaning.
The precision of targeting areas.
The intentional constraints placed on the machine to shape the output.
Interaction, iteration, and intelligence woven into one process. It's a space where creativity and technology blur together, demanding a mindset unafraid of predicting its future.
Allison is out to lunch with a friend, who introduces her to a new writing experience. Allison is shocked. She's quick to imagine the possibilities.
Undo, redo, restore. Seamlessly swap between content and formatting. Re-generate the layout or fine-tune the nuances of spacing, contrast, and alignment. It’s as if prompt engineering met the precision of editorial design—where structure and creativity exist in perfect balance.
Allison scours LinkedIn and company pages. She finally gets a response. A hiring manager suggests a chat. Within days, she is in the interview process, preparing to prove she can not only understand this new technology but help define its future.
Overnight, LLMs redefine work. Teams downsize, companies restructure, and job roles blur. Product management itself is shifting...
Industries scramble to adapt. It’s upheaval. AI has moved from tool to force, reshaping the process of creation in every single step.
Allison feels it—the pull of something inevitable. The ways AI can be used to create feels almost mechanical to her—like assembly. It takes her back to her component design class, back when she studied mechanical engineering.
She has an intuition for inputs and outputs of the system: the foundation, the timing belt, and the lubrication.
She sees writing not just as words but as a carefully orchestrated system where each component must align perfectly.
Allison is deep in understanding its construction, its architecture. A part of her bristles with something close to jealousy—watching the tool synthesize in seconds what once required hours of her deliberate craftsmanship and intuition.
Instead of fear, she feels a drive to refine it, to tweak the components, to ensure that the machine isn't just effective—but elegant. If this is the future, she is going to help design it from the inside out.
Allison doesn’t waste time.
She researches, diving into forums, reading every AI product release, testing models herself.
She rewires her thinking, reshaping the way she approaches product strategy. It’s a battle, but the deeper she dives, the clearer it becomes—she isn’t just chasing an opportunity; she’s stepping into a moment where everything converges. Only a few steps away from making an impact. From aligning the stars into something undeniable.
These are wide open spaces where the rules have yet to be written.
Imagine a toggle that doesn't just switch something on or off but instead unlocks the vast knowledge of the world in an instant. A simple flick, and the AI reaches beyond its training data, searching the live web, sourcing perspectives, synthesizing knowledge in real-time.
Toggles used to be about control—binary decisions, limits, boundaries. Now, they are about access, expansion, possibility.
These transformers? They aren’t just powerful—they are rewriting the fundamental relationship between human thought and machine intelligence.
The rhythmic patter of rain against the window pulls Allison from her sleep. Today is the interview.
She rolls out of bed, the nerves emerge from all directions.
A deep breath. She is prepared.
Coffee brews, notes skimmed, a crisp blouse chosen—professional yet comfortable.
She clicks the Zoom link.
Introductions—the head of product, the lead engineer, a product designer. They want clarity, structure, vision. She speaks of workflows, balancing strategy with execution. Then comes the real test: defining AI-assisted document creation. The conversation shifts from theory to problem-solving.
Then, a real discussion about the future.
The call ends, and the adrenaline still pulses through her veins. Has she said enough? Has she said too much? The waiting is a silent challenge of patience and self-assurance.
Two days later, her phone buzzes—an email from the CPO. Her breath catches in her throat as she opens it. "We were really impressed. We'd love to have you on board. Let's discuss next steps."
A nervous thrill runs down her spine.
The doors to a new future have just swung open.
Allison has never worked on AI-driven writing tools before, and now she is expected to lead a team defining features in a space she has barely scratched the surface of. The initial rush of validation—of being chosen—is quickly replaced by a gnawing sense of impostor syndrome. What if she isn’t the right person for this? What if she can’t grasp the nuances of AI-generated content fast enough?
She spends hours researching, immersing herself in the latest discussions on retrieval-augmented generation. Yet the more she reads, the more overwhelming it becomes.
The industry is moving at a breakneck pace, and she can’t shake the feeling that she is already behind. Will she be able to contribute meaningfully?
Can she steer a team that has already been experimenting with these technologies long before she arrived?
Then, a realization cuts through the noise. She's spent countless hours writing, experimenting with AI tools, testing their limits, and creating illustrations that blend human intuition with machine precision.
She's more than an observer of the AI revolution; she's lived it. She isn’t just stepping into the unknown—she's already been here, shaping it from the other side.
Allison is the user.
Allison steps into the virtual office, no longer the newcomer but still feeling the weight of proving herself. The CPO acknowledges her with a nod, a silent recognition of the progress made.
Her first weeks had been a blur of documentation, process audits, and back-to-back meetings. Her role isn’t just about keeping up anymore; it’s about steering the team forward. But even after three months, the struggle to find focus remains.
The meeting begins like any other—updates, small discussions, scattered thoughts. But something feels different this time. There’s a tension in the air, an unspoken frustration lingering between the words. People talk around problems instead of through them. The roadmap feels like a collection of tasks rather than a vision. Allison senses an underlying hesitation that no one wants to identify.
A force—something almost primal—takes grip of Allison. She sees the inefficiencies stacking. Unstructured ambition presses against her, demanding order.
She feels it in her chest, a pull so strong she has no choice but to speak. Muscle memory, honed from years of navigating ambiguity and untangling complexity.
“Stop. Forget the roadmaps, the metrics, the polished pitches. Strip it all away. If this tool vanished tomorrow, what would remain? What would linger—not as a feature, but as a habit, an instinct, a part of someone’s creative process they can’t live without? What is the thing that would leave people scrambling, trying to recreate what they’ve lost?
Would they miss it? Would they move on? Have we built something fundamental?
If it's functional, is it sticky?
If we’re only designing for efficiency, we’ve already lost. But if we are obsessed with how people engage, how they experiment with our product, and how they engage with us when we experiment with our product... then that's the medium we want to swim in.
Are we creating something that democratizes knowledge, or something that restricts it to those who can afford access?"
The room shifts—conversation slows, voices drop. It feels like a secret gathering, an underground club where truth is spoken plainly.
The glow of laptop screens flickers like candlelight.
Energy dissipates, replaced with something quieter, heavier. The people lean in, forced to confront what they truly believe about their work. Typing goes dead.
It’s not a meeting anymore—it’s a collective moment.
Words hang heavy and inescapable.
It's a challenge to purpose. A confrontation with the reality of what they are building and who they are building it for.
The heads all turn to Allison. Startled at first, she takes a deep breath, steadying herself. The plan isn't something she consciously prepared; it feels as if it's been assembling itself in the background all along, waiting for the right moment to emerge.
Somehow, the words arrange themselves, on the way out from her mouth, almost magnetically.
"Here’s what needs to happen," she says, scanning the room. "Engineers, I need you to strip back every assumption—what is the simplest, purest form of this tool that still delivers undeniable value? Designers, I want you to rethink the interaction model. What would this look like if we prioritized intuition over instruction? Sales, talk to our earliest adopters. What are they actually using this for that we didn’t anticipate? And leadership—be ready to challenge the roadmap."
Allison is in her element. Her natural habitat.
She lets the weight of her words settle. "This isn't just about making a better product. It’s about ensuring what we build belongs to the world. And that means all of you are not just executors; you’re architects of something greater. I’m here to give you the space to own this. But you must take the initiative."
It's an electric energy. First-principles thinking leading the way. Every choice feels sharper, more intentional.
The team no longer waits for the "what" to be handed to them—they define it.
The barrier between disciplines dissolves. Allison watches as something unlocks in the team, a sense of autonomy that had been missing.
They aren’t executing orders—they’re creating, problem-solving, owning their contributions. Their discussions more animated. There’s no longer hesitation in their decisions because they understand not just what they’re building, but why it matters.
Deployment becomes continuous. Designs are shared earlier, with higher confidence and contribution by the team.
Conversations spill into breakout rooms, Slack threads explode with new ideas, and whiteboards fill with fresh concepts.
The energy compounds. This isn’t just momentum; it’s ownership. The team isn’t following anymore. They’re leading.
What was once a company grasping for alignment has become a collective moving with purpose. They make decisions because they are trusted to. It's reinforced daily by questioning assumptions, and bringing others into the story.
The more they talk about the future, the more real it becomes. The more they articulate their purpose, the more natural their execution.
Looking back, it’s undeniable—the most significant shift isn’t in the processes or the product, but in the people. Autonomy isn’t granted through new policies; it’s unlocked through conviction. The team doesn’t need more rules—they need belief.
That belief is ignited through storytelling, through an emotional connection to the vision that makes them see their work as something bigger than tasks and deadlines.
When a leader consistently articulates purpose, framing challenges within a broader mission, making decisions becomes an art.
The team stops second-guessing and starts owning.
A great product manager doesn’t just organize efforts; they cultivate belief. The team doesn’t just execute; they commit.
And in that shift—from passive execution to active ownership—the product, the company, and the people evolve to explore new paradigms with courage and unwavering support.
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