The Future of Product: What's Changing, What's Not

Are you ready for the Future of Product?

Adrienne Tan, CEO of Brainmates shared her frank observations about where the product function is heading with Victoria Butt, CEO of Parity Consulting.

It was honest. A little confronting. Genuinely useful.

Here's what Adrienne thinks, and where the conversation landed.

The delivery layer is going away

Adrienne's view is clear. The part of product management that lives in sprint ceremonies, requirement documents, and day-to-day delivery coordination is on its way out. AI will handle a lot of that grunt work. What replaces it is a quality control function: checking that what gets built is fit for purpose and genuinely differentiated in market.

The core job doesn't go anywhere. Identifying valuable problems worth solving. Building the right strategy. Making sound commercial decisions. If anything, it gets more critical as the barrier to building a product drops to almost zero. Anyone can ship a product now. The question is whether it's the right one.

The shift is already happening, faster than most realise

AI has moved further in the last six months than in the previous six years, according to Adrienne. Pockets of experimentation are everywhere: teams building internal knowledge repositories, using AI to surface market intelligence, speeding up research and synthesis. But it's not cohesive yet. There's no standardised, organisation-wide approach to how it all fits together.

Adrienne believes the next wave of transformation, consultants helping companies integrate AI properly into how they work, is probably less than six months away. When it lands, it will reshape team structures, career pathways, and even how people are paid.

From what Parity is seeing on the ground, that wave can't come soon enough. Right now, different divisions inside the same organisation are building and deploying AI in completely different ways. No shared standards. No common operating rhythm. No coherent strategy connecting any of it. Leadership tells product teams to "use AI" without giving them direction on how it should be integrated into day-to-day work. The mandate is there. The framework is not.

There's an emerging problem nobody is talking about loudly enough yet: agents are being stitched together ad hoc, team by team, tool by tool. It works well enough in the short term. But someone will have to unravel that mess. When that moment comes, it will be product people asked to make sense of a tangle of incongruent agent builds that were never designed to work together. That's a genuinely new kind of technical and strategic debt, and it's being accumulated right now.

AI is not the reason companies are cutting teams

This was one of the more interesting parts of the conversation. Adrienne's research, done in conjunction with AWS, found that larger organisations cutting product headcount are largely doing so for financial reasons. Markets shifted. Budgets tightened. Shareholder pressure increased. AI is the narrative being used publicly. It's not the actual cause.

Meanwhile, scale-ups with clear strategies are growing their teams. Around 30% are adding product people, not cutting them.

If you know where you're going, AI is fuel for growth. Not a reason to shrink.

We have to deliberately design for junior talent

Adrienne was direct on this point: we can't let junior product roles disappear by default and blame the tools. The skills that make a great senior product person, judgment, foresight, storytelling, the ability to read a room and make a hard call, are developed over years. Through real work, real feedback, and real failures.

If organisations don't design intentional pathways for junior talent to develop, they hollow out the pipeline. That's on leadership, not AI.

Focus on the skills AI can't replicate

Adrienne's advice for future-proofing yourself as a product professional: go back to the fundamentals. Strategic thinking. Problem identification. Commercial acumen. Storytelling. Stakeholder influence. These are the skills that matter in a boardroom, and they're the ones AI genuinely cannot replicate.

People are already experimenting with AI tools without needing to be told to. What they need to be told is not to neglect the core skills that got them into the room in the first place. A prototype is impressive. Being able to articulate how a product drives business outcomes is what actually counts.

The product function is not disappearing. The title might shift, the team structure will change, and the tools will keep evolving. But the need to figure out what's worth building, why it matters, and how to compete in market, that need is only growing.

More to come from Parity's research on this topic soon.

FAQs

Is AI going to replace product managers?

No. AI is automating the delivery and coordination side of product management, sprint admin, requirement docs, status tracking.
The strategic core of the role, identifying valuable problems and making commercial decisions, is becoming more important, not less.

If AI isn't causing product team cuts, what is?

Research from brainmates and AWS found that headcount reductions at larger organisations are driven mainly by financial pressure: shifting markets, tighter budgets, and shareholder demands.
AI is often cited publicly, but it isn't the underlying cause. Scale-ups with clear strategies are growing their product teams instead.

What skills should product professionals focus on to stay relevant?

Strategic thinking, problem identification, commercial acumen, storytelling, and stakeholder influence.
These are the capabilities AI can't replicate, and they're what determine whether a product actually succeeds in market.

What is "agent sprawl" and why does it matter for product teams?

Agent sprawl happens when different teams build and deploy AI agents independently, with no shared standards or integration plan.
It creates short-term wins but builds a new kind of technical and strategic debt. Product teams are typically the ones left to untangle it later.

How should companies support junior product talent as AI takes over delivery work?

Deliberately.
The judgment and instincts senior product people rely on are built through years of real project work, feedback, and failure. If junior roles are cut by default, organisations lose the pipeline that produces their future senior talent.

About Parity Consulting

— Parity Consulting is a specialist recruitment consultancy helping organisations across Australia hire Product, Digital, Marketing, Communications, Data and Transformation professionals
— Unlike generalist recruiters, our consultants specialise in the disciplines they recruit, giving clients access to deeper market knowledge, stronger talent networks and informed hiring advice. We partner with organisations across financial services, fintech, technology and digital businesses to find people who strengthen culture, drive performance and deliver long-term business growth.

— Whether you're hiring, planning your workforce or looking for market insights, we're here to help. Meet our team.