Sunday Jul 5
STRATEGYOther

The PM Job Is Splitting Into Ladders

5JUL
RUNG ONETOP RUNG

The coordinator PM is fading fast. Colin Matthews, who has trained 30,000 PMs on AI, lays out three leverage ladders: personal, product, systems. The top rung means handing AI a task, then checking it.

Most PMs sit on rung one: asking AI to draft docs, then copying the answer elsewhere by hand.

The top rung looks different. PMs connect Claude or Codex straight to their codebase and analytics tools, hand off a full task, and just review the result.

Matthews says the shift already happened at the top. Executives now expect full task completion, not just faster drafts.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • The job description for 'product manager' is quietly being rewritten by what AI can now finish alone.
  • Technical fluency is becoming a bigger PM differentiator than stakeholder management.
  • This maps a concrete skill gap: most PMs don't know they're stuck on rung one.

🔍 What happened

  • Colin Matthews published the framework as a guest post on Lenny's Newsletter, June 30.
  • Three ladders: personal leverage, product leverage, systems leverage.
  • Personal leverage rungs: writing text, creating artifacts, completing a full to-do item via connected tools.
  • Product leverage rungs: web prototypes, code-based prototypes using the real codebase, agents shipping pull requests.
  • Matthews has trained 30,000+ PMs across healthcare, legal, and streaming companies.

💬 Smart takes

  • Colin Matthews: before, executives expected basic prototyping and productivity from AI. Now they expect employees to complete entire tasks with it.
  • Skeptic: the framework is also a pitch for Matthews's new paid course, launching the same week the essay published.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. LikelyMCP-style tool connections (Claude to Figma, PostHog, Amplitude) become standard PM setup within a year.
  2. Likely'prompting' stops being a differentiator as the bar shifts to full task delegation.
  3. Possiblecompanies start hiring PMs explicitly for codebase fluency, not just roadmap skills.
  4. Wild Cardthe PM title itself splits into two tracks, technical operators and pure strategists, within 2 years.

🥄 The Spoon Take

The PM who just coordinates meetings is running out of runway. The ladder here isn't about prompting better, it's about wiring AI directly into your actual tools so it can finish real work unsupervised. That's a technical skill gap, not a mindset one.

🤔 Pushback

Framework comes from someone selling a course built on it. The 30,000-PM number is Matthews's own training tally, not an independent survey of the market.

·Lenny's Newsletter - PM leverage ladders·Colin Matthews - Substack author profile·Become an AI-Native Builder - the course the essay promotes