LaunchDarkly's CPO: AI Will Kill the 'Nowhere Land' PM Role

The traditional product manager, long idealized as the ‘CEO of the product,’ is heading for extinction. Claire Vo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LaunchDarkly, doesn’t mince words about it. In a recent interview, she laid out a future where the classic PM—a strategic coordinator who bridges engineering and design but owns neither—gets automated out of existence. She describes this middle ground frankly as a ‘nowhere land of influence without ownership.’ It’s a blunt assessment from an executive who holds a joint title specifically designed to shatter that old model.

Vo sees two viable escape routes for PMs. The first is a hard pivot toward commercial ownership, morphing into a general manager role where compensation ties directly to the business line’s performance. The second path collapses traditional disciplines entirely. In that scenario, product, design, and engineering converge under a single leader who handles end-to-end development. Sticking with pure coordination isn’t a long-term play. At LaunchDarkly, Vo lives this hybrid reality, overseeing both product and engineering to holistically manage R&D investment. She argues there’s no reason to decouple the product concept from its technical build, especially when infrastructure directly shapes user experience.

Her personal approach to AI mirrors the organizational shift she preaches. Vo maintains what she calls an ‘anti-to-do list,’ a habit of automating anything she finds annoying. She recounted building a custom GPT loaded with customer stories in seven minutes flat. The tool now fields routine field requests about banking use cases, freeing her from repetitive Q&A. It’s a small but telling example of how she believes leaders should examine their own workflows—not just their teams’—for AI leverage points. She finds it amusing that executives grasp AI’s impact on staffing but rarely consider it will change their own jobs.

For teams, Vo’s principles are ruthlessly pragmatic. Speed compounds, so drafting and getting real customer input faster is the only metric that matters. Leadership bottlenecks, particularly around quality control and expertise, can be dismantled with asynchronous AI tools. Even converting just a quarter of a team to a cross-functional ‘triad’ model can dramatically expand what a group can deliver. LaunchDarkly’s core product—decoupling configuration from code—naturally aligns with this AI-native philosophy, enabling feats like day-zero model upgrades. The message is clear: the safe, middle-ground PM role isn’t being disrupted. It’s being deleted.