The AI coding and drafting tools got good enough this year that the bottleneck moved. It used to be: can we build it. Now it’s: should we, and how do we know it worked. Evaluation replaced delegation as the actual job. You don’t hand off the verdict on whether a feature works to an engineer anymore, because the feature ships in an afternoon and the verdict has to be yours, same day.

What this means in practice: the PMs who struggle in 2026 are the ones still writing specs like it’s a six-week build. The ones who are fine are the ones who can look at a rough agentic prototype and immediately name the three ways it will fail in production, because they’ve internalized what breaks at scale, not what looks good in a demo. Systems thinking stopped being a nice-to-have skill on a resume and became the actual differentiator.