This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Morgan Brown, Dropbox’s VP of product and growth for AI products. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re sitting at a really interesting time.
My first job was at a tech startup in 1999 during the dot-com boom, and the world was changing incredibly fast. I’ve lived through a couple of these iterations — the big mobile revolution with the iPhone, then web 2.0.
The AI revolution seems like it’s going to dwarf all of those, and it creates an opportunity for product managers to focus more on the unique attributes of creativity and innovation.
I’ve worked in product management at Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, and now Dropbox. This is my advice for product managers to level up their careers in the AI age.
Spend time with the new tools
I think all product managers and business leaders should be spending a lot of time with new tools, whether you call it vibe coding or vibe marketing.
There’s never been a better time for product managers to test new ideas. Rather than having to write a doc, you can build an app. You can prototype something really quickly to validate some assumptions and learn what may or may not work.
Most product managers didn’t previously have access to moving out of that conceptual realm into the physical reality of what these ideas actually look and feel like. Now, there’s a new opportunity to accelerate how they think about developing their taste, developing their craft, and understanding what makes sense in physical products.
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Use AI as a thought partner
I don’t think the highest and best use of AI is using AI to do something for you. I think it’s really about how AI can be a thought and collaboration partner. There are a bunch of different ways that it can just augment the human capability of innovation and creative ideas.
I try to use it in a way that pushes my immediate thinking capacity in my daily life. For example, if we’re looking at how we can make our product more differentiated, I might feed it some ways that we’re thinking about it and ask it to think of five more ways. I also try to have a council of LLMs as opposed to one, whether it’s Dropbox’s Dash or Claude, or ChatGPT.
I think of these tools as ways to unlock more of that, and I think that’s really the most exciting opportunity. It’s about how you make that deep work time more productive with a thought partner who can help you expand your thinking.
Understand the basics
It’s really important to have a basic understanding of the domain you’re operating in.
Understanding how different components of a technical stack interoperate at a system level really helps you understand what’s possible. And I think the people who understand those the most deeply find the most interesting opportunities to bring new value and new product ideas to market.
I also think being able to speak the language and having an understanding of the system will always be important. If we take everything as a black box, then we lack the understanding of what’s possible if we had a deeper insight into how it actually works.
Adapt to the pace
Another thing product managers should do is realize how fast things are changing. At tech companies, most people operate in six-month performance cycles, quarterly roadmaps, and bi-weekly status updates.
Today, that’s just not tenable. So I think product managers need to really understand the speed at which things are moving. Then, they need to think about how to create learning opportunities, systems, and behaviors to keep up with that.
I think that’s how you augment your skills, whether it’s through AI, reworking how your team works, or reworking how a road map three months from now will be totally obsolete with some startup that launches tomorrow.
Make time for the “deep work”
When you talk to a product manager team and they say 40% of their time is spent on project management, that’s not where you want them. You want them focused on the “deep work,” which they can do more of if they automate the busy work.
You can’t really think about how something might work as a product in between Slack pings. You really need to sit down for a couple of hours, map some stuff out, and play with the problem space. Creating that distraction-free time to do that expansive thinking and then converging on a few ideas is the type of work that most companies would die to have more of.
