The Demise of the Product Owner Role in the Age of Generative AI

...and How to Rebuild Yourself as an Outcome-Focused Product Manager

In a recent Airfocus webinar, Marty Cagan—partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and author of Inspired and Transformed—sounded the alarm for Product Owners:

“I am personally very worried… for [European] Product Owners. These are the most exposed roles to generative AI… they’re sitting ducks.”

“I’m encouraging all of my friends who are Product Owners to upskill—fast.

I know that’s upsetting to a lot of people. This is personal for them.

But I’d rather you not like me, and still have your job.”

Let’s be real:

• Generative AI doesn’t care about your Jira tickets.

• It doesn’t get tired.

• It doesn’t procrastinate.

• It doesn’t argue about story points.

…and it already does 80% of what Certified Scrum Product Owners are trained to do:

1. Write and refine user stories

2. Define acceptance criteria

3. Estimate complexity and manage sprints

4. Track burn-down charts and velocity

5. Automate stand-ups, retros, and status updates

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💥 Here’s the cold truth:

If your role is defined by process, not product thinking, AI will outperform you. Not someday. Now.

So the question isn’t if you should evolve. It’s how fast.

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R.I.P. Traditional Product Owner 🫠

You were the glue between stakeholders and devs.

The translator of needs.

The keeper of the sacred backlog.

Welcome to the new world, where tickets don’t need keepers. They need meaning, and they need to drive outcomes.

Feature factory teams and process-first roles are being deprecated—not because they weren’t useful, but because the tools now outpace them. AI doesn’t need a human to shuffle stories around a board.

The Product Owner whose day revolves around refining the backlog and facilitating stand-ups risks becoming a relic of an earlier era. What teams need now are not custodians—they need leaders who can unlock value. The traditional PO must evolve or face extinction.

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Time to Evolve: From Scrum PO to Outcome-Obsessed Product Manager

If you want to stay relevant, you don’t need another certification. You need a mindset shift.

Here’s your step-by-step guide to stop playing it SAFe—and start being bold, creative, and transformative: