Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | GrowthShow Notes
Nikhyl Singhal is the founder of The Skip, a community for senior product leaders; a former product exec at Meta, Google, and Credit Karma; and a many-time founder. He’s also one of the most honest, unfiltered voices on what’s actually happening in product management right now.
In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 1. Why the next two years will be the most chaotic period in product management history 2. Why half of current product managers are at risk, and what separates those who’ll do well 3. Why you need to find your “moments of joy” with AI 4. The “smiling exhaustion” he’s seeing across the product community 5. The psychological barriers that prevent people from reinventing themselves 6. Why your resume’s fancy logos matter less than ever, and what matters now 7. His prediction that companies will shed 30,000 people and rehire 8,000—all AI-first — Brought to you by: WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI — Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-half-of-product-managers-are-in-trouble — Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 — Where to find Nikhyl Singhal: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhyl • X: https://x.com/nikhyl • Podcast & Newsletter: https://skip.show • Skip Community: https://skip.community • Skip Coach: https://skip.coach • Skip.help: https://skip.help — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Nikhyl Singhal (02:25) The big picture: what’s changing for product managers (10:00) Are product leaders doing better than 2-3 years ago? (11:44) What will change in the next couple of years (14:23) How companies are changing the way they build products (15:51) What “judgment” really means for PMs (17:46) Why there won’t be any more bad software (20:25) The skills you need to be effective today (23:31) Why there are more PM roles than ever (24:27) The builder versus information-mover divide (30:14) The non-builder problem (30:53) Should PMs code? (34:15) Why experienced leaders still matter (35:44) The diversity setback nobody’s talking about (37:21) Why your brand doesn’t matter as much anymore (39:54) How valued skills are flipping upside down (40:49) Why change is so hard for humans (43:53) The “equal disappointment” algorithm (46:39) You must cross the threshold (48:37) This chaos will settle (53:19) Finding your moment of joy (58:50) Nikhyl’s AI stack and what he’s building (1:00:53) The obsolescence mindset (1:05:24) Specific advice for PMs right now (1:08:58) The four jobs that will exist in the future (1:11:59) Why alignment is changing (but not disappearing) (1:15:40) How engineering is changing even more than PM (1:17:04) The surprising design plateau (1:18:49) Finding optimism in the chaos (1:21:12) Lightning round — Referenced: • Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-a-long-and-meaningful-career • COBOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL • United Airlines: https://www.united.com • State of the product job market in early 2026: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/state-of-the-product-job-market-in-ee9 • Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run • Demis Hassabis on X: https://x.com/demishassabis • Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama • Dario Amodei on X: https://x.com/DarioAmodei • Cross on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Season-1/dp/B0D6X7ZZHC • Jack Ryan on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-Jack-Ryan/dp/B0CNDCMN8R • 24 on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/24-Season-1/dp/B0
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Emmanuel Ameisen is an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, where he looks inside LLMs like Claude to understand how they think. Before joining Anthropic, he spent years in applied ML at Stripe and Insight, and is the author of Building Machine Learning Powered Applications. His research has produced some of the most striking findings in the field: that models form general representations of concepts, plan many tokens ahead without stating those plans explicitly, and may exhibit something structurally similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious processing in humans.
Josh Woodward is the head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio. He has spent over 17 years at Google and oversees its longest-running and largest labs team, whose products include NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook), Project Genie, and Flow. His job is to find, experiment with, and scale new AI products, and he has built one of the most distinctive product cultures in the industry for generating ideas, running experiments, and, even more importantly, knowing when to quit.
Tibo Sottiaux leads ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI. Under his stewardship, OpenAI has shipped some of its most consequential consumer launches: Codex, ChatGPT Work, and most recently, the new Dots personal agent platform. He joined me at DevDay, hours after his team launched more than 20 new products, to talk about where things are heading.
Molly Graham is back for round two, and this one is even more powerful. Molly has spent more than 20 years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She’s held leadership roles at Google, Facebook, Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is the host of TED’s WorkLife podcast (which she took over from Adam Grant). She also runs Glue Club, a leadership community for senior operators, and writes a popular newsletter called Lessons.
Peter Sellis was the first product manager at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most beloved consumer products in history. He went on to serve as Head of Product at Discord, where he helped drive some of the fastest user growth the platform had seen. Having left his role at Discord, he gets to be especially real and unfiltered — nothing to promote, no PR, no comms team.