I wrote this in June 2018, six weeks into a discovery phase using the Double Diamond framework. It was my first real corporate product role and the lessons have only gotten sharper.
Six weeks into a discovery phase using the Double Diamond framework. The thing nobody tells you about corporate product work is that the design process is the easy part. The hard part is stakeholder management — learning to read the room, build allies, and navigate politics.
What's changed
In 2025, AI can do the research and synthesis faster than any PM. It can run competitive analyses in minutes, generate user journey maps, summarise interviews, and draft PRDs that would have taken a week.
But it can't read the room. It can't sense when a stakeholder is nodding but not buying in. It can't tell that the VP in the corner has already decided this project is dead and is just letting the process play out.
The soft skills of product work are now the only skills that matter. The technical craft of product management — the frameworks, the artifacts, the methodologies — has been commoditised. What's left is the human part: persuasion, intuition, and the ability to make people feel heard even when you're not going to do what they asked.
If you're a PM in 2025 and you're not investing in those skills, you're competing with a tool that's faster and cheaper than you at everything else.