What is the one thing you will do different if you are promoted to a Product Leader? Evaluate yourself with a handy survey. The results will astound you and guide you to change behavior.
The Identity Crisis Every PM Faces (And Why AI Makes It Worse)
Preview from Bernie Maloney and my upcoming book on becoming a product leader in the AI era
“I got hired as Head of Product. I’ve never worked harder in my life, and I’ve never felt more useless.”
It’s 9 PM on a Tuesday. You’re still at your desk, “cleaning up” a report for tomorrow’s executive review. If you’re honest, you rewrote most of it. Again. This is the story of every day and sometimes weekends.
I lived this exact moment in 2014 at JP Morgan Chase. I’d been hired as an Executive Director to lead a major Client Onboarding Initiative. 200 people worldwide working on a massive product.
During my interview, the Managing Director said: “I need you to think bigger. We’re not talking about features, we’re talking about where this product is going in three years. I’m hiring you for your strategic perspective, not to provide roadmap updates.”
As I sat there rewriting that report, those words haunted me. When exactly was I supposed to think about three-year strategy? Between sprint planning, stakeholder meetings, the “quick syncs” across the globe that somehow multiply, and the reports I kept rewriting because no one else got them quite right?
Here’s what no one tells you when you become a product leader: you’re now supposed to do two fundamentally different jobs, and you’re currently failing at both.
You’re the worst executive in the room. In leadership meetings, you show up with detailed feature timelines while your peers talk about market positioning and competitive moats. You have so much data but somehow it never answers the questions the CEO actually cares about.
And you’re the Product Manager your team wishes would just leave them alone. They’re capable. They’re talented. They know what they’re doing. But you can’t stop yourself from jumping in, reviewing every decision, catching every error before it happens. You call it “quality control.” They call it micromanagement, though never to your face.
This is the identity crisis.
The Promotion That Changed Nothing
The strangest thing about becoming a product leader is how little changes on day one. Your title is different maybe you’re now a “Director” or “VP” or “Head of Product” but your calendar looks identical. Same meetings. Same Slack channels. Same people asking you the same questions about the same features.
The job description, if you even got one, probably said something vague about “setting product vision” and “leading a team of PMs.” No one explained that these words mean something entirely different than what you’ve been doing. No one told you that the skills that got you promoted: your attention to detail, your ability to ship, your deep knowledge of every corner of the product are now the very things holding you back.
What does “good” looks like.
As a Product Manager, you were measured on shipping features. You owned a roadmap, maybe a product area. Success meant delivering what you promised, on time, with quality. The feedback loop was tight: ship something, see if it worked, iterate.
As a product leader, you’re measured on outcome. Often outcomes you don’t and can’t directly control. You’re accountable for metrics that five different teams touch. You’re responsible for strategic bets that won’t pay off for eighteen months. You’re evaluated on whether your Product Managers are growing, whether your stakeholders are aligned, whether the organization is making good decisions.
None of these things fit neatly into a sprint. None of them give you the satisfaction of checking a box and moving on. And none of them can be done by working harder at your old job.
Why AI Makes the Identity Crisis Worse
Consider these numbers:
- 88% of organizations report that AI increases annual revenue
- Klarna saved $60 million while achieving a 152% increase in revenue per employee
- JPMorgan reported 10-20% efficiency gains for engineering teams using AI code assistants
If you became a product leader in the last two years, you have a problem previous generations didn’t face: AI is making it dangerously easy to stay in Independent Contributor mode.
Think about what you can do now that you couldn’t five years ago. You can draft a product spec in thirty minutes instead of three hours. You can analyze a dataset without scheduling time with a data analyst. You can respond to a dozen Slack threads while waiting for coffee because your AI assistant already drafted the responses.
This feels like a superpower. And it is—if you’re still an Independent Contributor.
For leaders, AI tools create a dangerous illusion. They whisper: “You can still do it all. You can write the specs AND think about strategy. You can review every decision AND develop your team. Perhaps you don’t even require a team”
This is a trap. A seductive, productivity-flavored trap.
Here’s what actually happens: You use AI to do Independent Contributor work faster, which gives you time to do… more Independent Contributor work. You fill the efficiency gains with more of the same. The strategic thinking, the team development, the organizational design, all the high-leverage work that only you can do gets pushed to “later.”
And “later” never comes.
Meanwhile, your team is also using AI tools. They’re shipping faster than ever. They’re more capable than ever. And here’s the part that stings: they don’t need you as much anymore. At least, not for the things you’ve been offering.
When your team ships something excellent without your involvement, how do you feel? If the honest answer is “threatened” rather than “proud,” you’ve discovered the heart of the identity crisis. You’ve been gauging your value on being indispensable to execution and execution just got a lot less dependent on you.
Five PM Behaviors That Kill Leaders
The habits that made you an exceptional PM are now the habits most likely to derail your leadership career.
Behavior 1: Being the Best Independent Contributor on Your Team
You can write better specs, make sharper decisions, and move faster than anyone on your team. So you do. When something important comes up, you step in to make sure it’s done right. You’re the hero who saves the day, again and again.
There’s a deeper assumption buried here. Rajeev Peshawaria, in his book “Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders,” names it clearly: the belief that your team needs you to supply the motivation and quality. His research found the opposite—everyone comes premotivated. People don’t show up hoping someone will inspire them to care. They already care.
When you jump in and rewrite the spec, you’re subtracting autonomy. You’re telling a motivated person that their output wasn’t good enough, that the only acceptable standard is yours.
With AI, you can jump into even more situations, faster. The spec gets rewritten not because it was bad, but because you had a spare five minutes and couldn’t resist. You become an even more effective hero—which means your team becomes even more dependent on heroism.
The shift: Move from “I’ll do it” to “I’ll teach you how” to “You own this come to me when you’re stuck.”
Behavior 2: Knowing Every Detail
You can answer any question about any feature in your portfolio. You’re never blindsided in executive reviews because you’ve already memorized everything.
You’re drinking from a firehose and calling it hydration. Your teams learn to wait for your input before finalizing anything, which slows everything down. And most critically: while you’re busy knowing all the details, you have zero time left for the things only you can do.
Diagnostic question: Can you take a week off without checking in? If not, you’ve made yourself a single point of failure.
Behavior 3: Jumping Into Execution
When things slow down or go sideways, you roll up your sleeves. Deadline at risk? You’ll write some specs this weekend. There’s a gap? You fill it.
You’re mortgaging long-term leverage for short-term output. Every hour you spend doing is an hour not spent building team capability, fixing systemic issues, or setting strategic direction.
The shift: When you see a gap, your first question should be “Why does this gap exist?” not “How do I fill it?”
Behavior 4: Making Yourself Indispensable
You’re the person who knows how everything works. The translator between teams. The one executives call when they need something done.
Indispensable people can’t be promoted. If you’re essential to your current role, moving you creates too much risk. You’ve built a prison of your own expertise. And you haven’t developed anyone to take your place, which means your career progression stops here.
The shift: The best leaders build organizations that thrive without them—because that’s evidence they’re ready for the next level.
Behavior 5: Winning Arguments with Data
You’re the PM who always has the numbers. In any debate, you can pull up the metrics, the A/B test results that prove your point. You don’t argue from opinion; you argue from evidence. And you usually win.
At the leadership level, being right isn’t enough. You need alignment, people who genuinely believe in the direction, not people who grudgingly accept your evidence. When you win arguments with data, you create compliance, not commitment. The people you “convinced” will undermine the decision passively, or quietly wait for it to fail.
The shift: The right answer that no one executes is worse than a good answer that everyone owns.
The Leadership Transition Curve
Psychologist Virginia Satir observed that all human change follows a predictable pattern: stability → foreign element → chaos → transforming idea → integration into a new, higher-performing state.
What makes this model useful for product leaders is the part everyone wants to skip: the dip.
When you’re promoted to product leader, your old identity: the best Independent Contributor, the person who could answer any question suddenly doesn’t work. The skills that earned the promotion are the wrong skills for the new job. Performance drops. Confidence drops. You’re no longer the best Product Manager, and you’re not yet a real leader.
The danger zone sits at the bottom of the curve. This is where the identity crisis is most acute. You’ve “never worked harder and never felt more useless.” The overwhelming temptation is to retreat—to pick up the spec again, to jump into the sprint review, to climb back to the comfortable plateau of IC work.
AI makes the dip harder to endure. AI tools let you retreat to IC mode without anyone noticing. You can keep writing specs, keep reviewing decisions, keep being the hero—and the curve never progresses. The efficiency gains mask the fact that you’re stuck at the bottom, doing the old job faster instead of learning the new one.
The leaders who make it through are the ones who tolerate the discomfort long enough for the new identity to form.
The Leverage Ladder
Your impact as a leader can be expressed as: Impact = Value × People × Systems
AI makes Level 1 faster (maybe 1.5-2×) but can’t move you to Levels 2, 3, or 4. Only you can.
So what can you do? A Product Leader Self Assessment
Most books are about the What and Why. Our book has 12 chapters each packed with “How to”. Here is a self assessment tool from our book that will be valuable for you to Inspect and Adapt.
Interpreting your score:
Your Action Plan:
We love your feedback
This is a preview from my upcoming book on becoming a product leader in the AI era. I want to hear from you:
- Does this resonate with your experience?
- Which of the five behaviors hits closest to home?
- Did the Self Assessment help you?
- What’s missing that you wish I’d addressed?
- Would you be interested in giving us feedback on all the chapters of our book?
Reply and let me know. Your feedback will directly shape the final book.
P.S. If you know other product leaders wrestling with this transition, I’d be grateful if you’d forward this along.
