DHH spent 20 years dismissing product management.
Then 1h21 into his Pragmatic Engineer interview, he caught himself and admitted he was wrong.
He was listing what matters now that AI writes the code: figuring out what to build, how to build it, which customers to talk to, where to focus.
Then his exact next words: "It's product management. It's so funny for me too because historically I've not necessarily had the highest esteem for product management as a function. I thought there was a lot of BS."
He explained why. Implementation was always the constraint. Engineers needed four weeks to ship anything, so PMs spent those weeks talking, planning, strategizing. Nothing looked like output until the code landed.
"They were underutilized. They were not the constraint." They were rate-limited.
The loudest PM-skeptic changing his mind (and DHH has strong opinions!) -- that should count for something. let's toast to that 🥂