Player-Coach Product Management & AI
The hardest part of managing PMs isn’t giving up control. It’s deciding what you should still personally stay close to. If you do too much, you cap your team’s growth; if you do too little, you drift away from the craft and lose credibility. For me, a “Group Product Manager” who still likes to identify with the Staff Product Manager IC title I used to hold, I’m dealing with this tension, but AI is turning it into a career-defining advantage.
In 2026, a year where the inescapable discourse of AI is causing existential dread in every corner of the software world, I am finding the player-coach role to be uniquely valuable. If you follow a substack like “The Skip” you’ll hear that senior PMs with management responsibilities everywhere are filled with anxiety about getting left behind as others gain hands-on experience with AI. My take is that these PMs should be thrilled with the position we’re in because, as is often the case, AI is an enabler more than a blocker.
The New Definition of Leader-Level Work
Richard Miranov, in 2020, wrote: “Successful product leaders need to delegate most hands-on product work, focusing instead on leader-level activities.” While this is patently true, I think it needs to be updated for the AI-era. The new “leader-level” activity in 2026 is AI adoption, leading by example, and showing others how to adapt to the new world.
This means 3 things:
- Acting as a pioneering IC
- Coaching your team to follow suit
- Leading your organization to support more AI initiatives
What Player-Coach Looks Like in Practice
Over the past year, I have truly enjoyed pioneering whatever enterprise-approved AI tools I can get my hands on. Whether it is using Claude Code + Obsidian to revolutionize my own task management system or building proto-types and proof of concepts with Cursor on the dev-servers that are usually provisioned for engineers only, it has been a valuable use of my leadership time to become an expert in the tools that the PM role is increasingly expected to be proficient at, both for my own career prospects but also for the purpose of fostering a performant team culture.
Using this hands-on experience, I feel like I’m fully realizing the player-coach model. My team meetings need to be extended by 15-30 minutes so that we can have hands-on demos of how we’re adopting AI tools for the product management craft (systems for generating PRDs or 1-pagers, more efficient customer intake entry points, more automated backlog and sprint management, etc). This accelerated pace for the team ultimately does pay off: as a leader, I can trust that my team isn’t entirely bogged down in lower-level transactional tasks (file this ticket, prioritize that bug) and has more capacity for the delegation that Mironov originally advocated for. The first two points — pioneering as an IC and coaching your team — are largely within your span of control. The third is where most player-coaches hit a wall.
The Real Blocker: Incentives, Not Capability
The biggest blocker I’ve seen isn’t capability—it’s incentives. When PMs are rewarded for shipping the next thing and not for building the internal leverage that makes shipping easier next quarter, PM teams will stagnate and not keep up with the AI wave. If you want widespread AI adoption, you have to make it culturally and procedurally real: celebrate the wins, share the artifacts, and build it into existing rhythms (staff meetings, planning, retros) instead of treating it like optional enrichment. This is where leading as a player-coach helps: you can translate what’s possible into concrete habits for your immediate team. Driving that local change sets the stage for the broad product leader work of influencing neighboring teams to do the same.
If you’re a PM manager feeling anxious about “falling behind,” don’t mistake distance for leadership. Treat AI adoption as the new leader-level work: learn it deeply enough to teach it, embed it into team rhythms, and fight for incentives that reward leverage. Do that, and the player-coach role stops being liminal—it becomes a competitive advantage.