What is AI Product Management in 2026?

Updated February 2026

In February 2023, AI Product Exec Yuying Chen-Wynn and I wrote that AI product management was about building products whose behavior is based on patterns in data, not just rules. That definition still holds.

But let's be real: almost EVERYTHING else has changed. (Although our advice for hiring and developing AI product talent and teams remains golden!)

The world before ChatGPT went mainstream

That original piece dropped right before the real explosion. Most product leaders were still treating AI as a specialist's domain — something you handed off to ML teams while you focused on roadmaps and stakeholder management.

Three years later, every product leader is expected to have a point of view on AI. The question isn't whether to adopt AI, but how fast and where.

What's different for leaders now

Senior leaders absolutely have higher-level concerns than ICs. Strategy. Build vs. buy decisions. Risk frameworks. Org design for AI-augmented teams. Vendor evaluation.

But here's what catches people off guard: the leaders doing this well aren't delegating their way to AI fluency.

They're building.

Why "getting out of the weeds" is the wrong instinct

For years, the path to senior leadership meant zooming out. Stop doing the work. Focus on enabling others. Delegate.

That instinct will kill your credibility in the AI era.

The leaders I see thriving are the ones who've actually used Claude Code to build a workflow. Who've prototyped an agent themselves. Who know firsthand what these tools can and can't do — not from vendor demos, but from their own hands on the keyboard.

This isn't about becoming an engineer. It's about refusing to lead something you don't understand at a visceral level.

Lead by building, not by telling

There's a phrase I keep coming back to: lead like a builder.

It means showing your team what's possible because you've done it yourself. It means having technical credibility that comes from building, not just reading. It means being able to call BS on hype because you've tested the claims.

The "What is AI Product Management?" question from 2023 was about defining a discipline.

The 2026 version is about how you show up. Are you leading from behind a strategy deck, or are you in the arena with your team?

The answer matters more than any framework.

Want to build your AI leadership credibility? Join my free masterclass where I break down how senior product leaders are getting hands-on with AI — without going back to being an IC. Register here.

Polly Allen is the founder of AI Career Boost and former Principal Product Manager at Amazon Alexa, where she led the first generative AI answers on the platform in 2020. She helps senior product and business leaders build AI leadership credibility through hands-on experience.