PMs Need Cross-Functional Skills in AI Era

In the AI era, Howie Liu believes success requires breaking down traditional role boundaries and embracing a "full stack" mindset. He advocates for product professionals to develop versatility across disciplines rather than staying siloed in specialized roles.

Liu rejects the notion that skills like engineering or design are fixed talents you either have or don't. "Everyone can learn how to be a software engineer if they wanted to," he insists, emphasizing that our "brains are malleable" and capable of growth. This philosophy extends to all product disciplines—PMs should develop design sensibilities and basic technical understanding, designers should grasp product strategy and technical constraints, and engineers should think about user experience.

The most successful team members in this new world are those who can "cross over" between disciplines. As Liu puts it: "As a PM you need to start looking more like a hybrid PM-prototyper who has some good design sensibilities." He believes the minimum baseline for any product role now includes being "good enough to be dangerous" in adjacent disciplines.

This perspective has practical implications for how professionals should approach their development:

Actively seek opportunities to build things yourself rather than delegating or documenting. Liu encourages his team to cancel meetings for a day or even a week just to experiment with AI tools.
Create personal projects that force you to use new tools and develop adjacent skills. Liu himself builds weekend projects like AI-generated videos to develop fluency.
Learn by doing rather than theorizing. "The best way to hone product UX sensibilities," Liu explains, is through "trial and error" and studying other products.
Leverage AI tools as learning accelerators. Liu describes modern AI as "an amazing brilliant software architect, engineer, product manager, designer expert tutor" with "infinite patience."

This approach reflects Liu's broader philosophy about the democratization of software creation. Just as Airtable aims to make app building accessible to non-engineers, Liu believes the barriers to learning technical skills have dramatically fallen. "The gap between the arcane tech that you have to wade through to build something has been minimized so much," making it "never been a more exciting time to be a builder."