Last year, I wrote about two product management mindsets: the Architect who blueprints everything upfront, and the Gardener who plants seeds and discovers what grows.

That framework made sense when humans did all the work. Not anymore (or not very soon).

AI is changing the game. It can architect better than architects—generating requirements, writing specs, and creating test cases. It can garden better than gardeners—running thousands of experiments, adapting in real-time, finding patterns we’d never see.

So what’s left for product managers?

The Orchestrator Emerges

Think of a head chef in a modern kitchen. They don’t chop vegetables—machines do it faster. They don’t perfect recipes—AI optimizes them better. But they do something crucial: they decide what experience to create and ensure all the pieces serve that vision.

That’s the Orchestrator. You’re not competing with AI at execution. You’re conducting a hybrid team of humans and machines to create something meaningful.

What Orchestrators Actually Do

They manage paradoxes. AI says remove that barely-used feature—it’s dragging down your metrics. But you know it’s why your power users stay. AI suggests surge pricing would boost revenue 23%. But you understand it would break trust with your community. The Orchestrator holds these tensions.

They protect the soul. Every AI recommendation optimizes for something measurable. But not everything that matters can be measured. That delightful animation that adds 200ms load time? The AI wants it gone. The Orchestrator knows when efficiency becomes sterility.

They design for emergence. You’re not building a product anymore. You’re building a platform where AI agents generate features, ML personalizes everything, and the experience morphs for each user. The Orchestrator ensures it still feels coherent, not chaotic.

The Daily Reality

  • Your AI generates 15 feature variations based on user behavior. All test well. You pick the three that strengthen your product’s identity, not just its capability.
  • AI identifies an optimization that would improve conversion 8%. You recognize it would also make you look exactly like your competitors. Pass.
  • A platform partner wants integration. The AI models show clear revenue gain. You dig deeper—would this partnership amplify your core value or dilute it?

This isn’t about being anti-AI. It’s about being strategic with AI.

Building Orchestration Skills

Develop taste. You need to recognize quality without creating it. Study products that resonate. Understand why some features feel right even when metrics disagree.

Get comfortable with indirect control. You’re not writing every requirement or reviewing every design. You’re setting boundaries, defining principles, and shaping the environment where good decisions emerge.

Learn to speak multiple languages. You translate between AI capabilities and human needs. Between engineering constraints and business goals. Between data insights and customer intuitions.

The New Success Metrics

Forget velocity. Measure coherence—does your product feel like one vision or a grab bag of optimizations?

Forget just retention. Measure resonance—do users feel something, or just return out of habit?

Forget coverage. Measure courage—are you brave enough to say no to AI recommendations that would boost metrics but erode meaning?

What This Means for You

The Architect and Gardener were about how to build. The Orchestrator is about what’s worth building and why.

AI will make product management easier in some ways—less grunt work, faster validation, better insights. But it makes leadership harder. When you can build anything quickly, choosing what to build becomes everything.

The companies that win won’t be those with the best AI. They will be those with the best Orchestrators—leaders who ensure that in our rush to optimize everything, we don’t optimize away what makes products worth using.

Ready to conduct?