The Product Management Bottleneck in Agentic Coding

The invention of modern writing instruments like the typewriter made writing easier, but they also led to the rise of writer’s block, where deciding what to write became the bottleneck. Similarly, the invention of agentic coding assistants has led to a new builder’s block, where the holdup is deciding what to build. I call this the Product Management Bottleneck. Product management is the art and science of deciding what to build. Because highly agentic coding accelerates the writing of software to a given product specification, deciding what to build is the new bottleneck, especially in early-stage projects. As the teams I work with take advantage of agentic coders, I increasingly value product managers (PMs) who have very high user empathy and can make product decisions quickly, so the speed of product decision-making matches the speed of coding. PMs with high user empathy can make decisions by gut and get them right a lot of the time. As new information comes in, they can keep refining their mental models of what users like or do not like — and thereby refine their gut — and keep making fast decisions of increasing quality. Many tactics are available to get user feedback and…