Recent claims about AI, SaaS valuations, and the death of the roadmap have generated more heat than light. Here is what is actually happening.

Every product has a lifecycle.

Hardware. Software. Services. The paradigm changes but the principle doesn’t. Things rise, mature, and decline — and the organisations that understand where they are in that cycle make fundamentally different decisions to those that don’t.

Software is not dying. But it is late in the cycle. The businesses currently under existential pressure are not under pressure because of AI. They are under pressure because they built on the wrong foundations — and AI has made that visible in a way that a decade of strong market conditions kept hidden.

The $285bn correction was not a technology story. It was a discipline story.

Feature velocity was mistaken for enterprise value. Shipping speed was treated as a moat. When every competitor could deliver at the same pace — and now, when AI can deliver faster than any team — speed stopped being a differentiator. What the market protected was defensible value. What it punished was the absence of the process that creates it.

This is a board-level problem. Not a product team problem.

Products, hardware, software, and services have always required the same underlying discipline to create and sustain value. NPD governance. Operating models. Lifecycle management. Product economics. Portfolio rigour. These are not new ideas. They are standard practice in every industry that builds products at scale. They simply never made it into the software product management curriculum — because delivery was the bottleneck, and the discipline that was built solved for delivery.

AI has removed that bottleneck. The capability gaps it made invisible are now priced into valuations.

I have spent a career watching this pattern repeat across paradigm transitions. The survivors had one thing in common — they understood product as a commercial discipline, not a delivery function. The ones that didn’t were acquired, consolidated, or made irrelevant.

This series is my attempt to close that gap.

The Product Leader’s Playbook. A working practitioner sharing what the discipline actually requires — structured, sequenced, and built for three audiences: the strategic leader diagnosing a capability gap, the practitioner building one, and the decision maker understanding what they are buying when they hire for this seat.

The carousel below is Module 0. It sets the context. The series follows.

#ProductLeadership #CPO #ProductManagement #ProductStrategy

First Comment

A few things worth naming directly.

The businesses with genuine value moats are not worried. Deep vertical integration. Proprietary data that cannot be replicated by a model. Platform economics where switching cost is structural. These survive the cycle — not because they got lucky, but because discipline built them.

The ones without that foundation are navigating a problem that should have been solved years ago. AI didn’t create it. It just made it undeniable.

The series that follows is not a commentary on the moment. It is a working playbook for building the kind of product organisation that doesn’t need to worry about the next disruption — because it’s built on the foundations that outlast them.

Module 1 follows: The Four Ms — the operating model that has to be right before any other framework functions.

If this framing resonates — or if you’d push back on any of it — I’d be interested in the conversation.