I have read a few books on product management in the past. And a recurring theme in all those books is a strong emphasis on experimentation. Collecting data. Making data-driven decisions. Doing A/B testing and everything. All those books made product management seem like a scientific endeavor. After I read those books, I developed deep appreciation and respect for product management.

And literally data is a PM's bread and butter. And if they don't have data they can't make any decisions. If they are not making any decisions they are just chasing the engineers around. Chasing the marketing folks around. At that point they are just a glorified project managers.

And the problem with collecting the data is that you actually need to build something and put it in front of money customers most of the time to see what they think. You can do surveys and stuff. Call your customers up and ask questions. Talk to the folks in the marketing department and all. But at the end of the day nothing beats having a working prototype that you can show customers to get their feedback. And that is what gets these product managers excited really excited about. Really fast prototyping. A chance to cut off the middle man AKA software engineer and run the experiments themselves.

And I follow so many product managers on LinkedIn. Almost every single one of those people is posting about LLMs and vibecoding incessantly. And I have actually friends on LinkedIn who have a Ph.D. in ML/AI. Even they don't post about LLMs and AI agents as much as these product managers.

A couple of days ago, one of those really famous product managers was saying that Google is including a Vibe coding round in the Product manager interview rounds. And the funny thing is that a director of product management from Google commented on his post and said that this was not true. That whole episode made me feel that these product managers are so desperate for this LLM thing to take off.

They seem to have this fantasy that if LLMs really take off, they will get to do both product management and software engineering? And that all the software engineering jobs will go to them as well.

I feel most of these product managers don't seem to understand the difference between building prototypes and building production ready code. Some product manager on LinkedIn was saying that he built a Chess Engine using Claude. I told him "Great, why don't you host it online. Try to add features to it. Try to do A/B testing with it. Try to fix bugs. Try to incorporate user feedback into it, while ensuring nothing breaks. Tell me how long it took before you gave up and started manually coding again". I got so many upvotes on that comment. This dude never replied back.

Do you folks think that all of this enthusiasm about LLMs and vibecoding comes mostly from Product managers and not actual software engineers or researchers and scientists?