Why I Stopped Calling It "AI" in My Product Roadmaps
(And what I learned by being afraid of it first.) Few years ago, I used to want to become an "AI Product Manager" . That was the next cool title to have. I would see the title on LinkedIn, in job descriptions, in conference speaker bios, and feel a quiet pull toward it. It sounded like the future. It sounded like the place where the most interesting problems were being solved. There was just one problem. I was afraid of it. There I said it. Not professionally afraid. I mean genuinely uncertain. I did not have a data science background. I could not read a model architecture diagram with any real confidence. When conversations turned to training pipelines, feature stores, or precision-recall tradeoffs, I would nod at the right moments and resolve to read more later. I wanted to be an AI PM. I just did not feel like one yet. What I did not know then was that the journey to getting there would teach me something that had very little to do with AI at all. What I knew before...
