By Simon Sovič, Senior Product Manager
Vibe coding will not make product managers obsolete. The question surfaces every time a new AI tool launches, and with vibe coding now generating entire features from a single prompt, it's fair to ask whether the PM role still matters. It does. Here's why, and what's actually changing about the role.
What Vibe Coding Actually Does (and Doesn't Do)
Vibe coding tools excel at writing boilerplate, refactoring code, and turning specifications into working features. They compress the engineering time from days to hours. But they don't ask which problems users actually face. They don't decide whether to build or buy. They don't know if a feature moves the needle on retention, revenue, or engagement. That's the product manager's job.
Why Product Strategy Still Requires Humans
A product manager translates user needs into roadmap decisions. They answer: Should we build this at all? Who benefits? What trade-offs matter? Vibe coding doesn't solve the prioritization problem. It solves the execution problem. Teams with strong PMs and fast engineering win. Teams with fast engineering but unclear strategy burn resources on features nobody needs. Speed without direction is waste.
Has the Role Changed? Yes. Is It Ending? No.
Vibe coding shifts what product managers actually do. Less time spent explaining requirements to engineers. More time spent validating assumptions, talking to users, and defining what "done" looks like. The daily work of a product manager becomes more strategic, not less. You're no longer waiting for code. You're shaping what gets coded and why. I've worked alongside teams using Cursor and similar tools, and the thing that changed most wasn't the output volume, it was how quickly a vague idea could become a working prototype that still needed someone to ask whether it was the right idea at all.
The Real Risk: Conflating Speed with Value
The danger isn't that vibe coding makes PMs extinct. It's that companies with bad product strategy will move faster toward the wrong goal. A team shipping ten features a quarter instead of five is only valuable if those features matter. If anything, vibe coding makes product discipline more critical, not less. Speed amplifies both great decisions and terrible ones.
What Skills Matter More Now
Technical depth helps but isn't required. What matters: user research ability, judgment on trade-offs, cross-functional influence, and metric literacy. You need to understand what success looks like and defend it when the pressure is on. Core PM skills like prioritization and stakeholder alignment become more valuable when engineering execution moves faster than ever.
Can One Person Do It All Now?
Some solo founders and early-stage teams use vibe coding to ship fast without hiring engineers. But they still need product judgment. They still need to know whether to ship or iterate. In larger organizations, the PM and engineering team remain separate functions. Vibe coding makes that team more productive, but it doesn't eliminate the need for someone thinking about users, strategy, and roadmaps.
The Bottom Line
Product managers aren't becoming obsolete. They're becoming essential in a different way. The teams that win won't be the ones that code fastest. They'll be the ones that ask the right questions, prioritize relentlessly, and ship features customers actually want. Strong product management paired with fast engineering is a competitive advantage, not a liability.
If you want to stay sharp as a PM in this environment, the most useful thing you can do is spend more time with your users and less time justifying your roadmap to people who haven't talked to a customer recently. Start there.
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