The product skill you must now master: Reinvention

If you're in a career transition right now and wondering whether you did something wrong, you didn't. Every question coming into Nikhyl.AI keeps circling the same idea: do I really have to reinvent? In today’s episode, Carly and I dive into four questions, from people in very different scenarios: A senior PM who feels her career’s gone backwards, an IC5 at a FAANG anchored by immigration constraints, a 50-year-old veteran a year into a job search, and a mid-career operator convinced he's hit a dead end. Each of them feels behind. None of them are. The whole industry is in a state of reinvention — if they'd reinvented five years ago, they'd be reinventing again today.

Key topics:

• Why the first stage of any transition is mourning, and why most people get stuck there

• The builder vs. manager divide: why "capital-P Product Managers" are thriving and "capital-M product Managers" are not

• Why proving to yourself and others that you’re a builder is the currency that keeps you alive in the next round of layoffs

• The uncanny valley of mid-to-late-career PMs and how you can climb out of it

• Why coaching, consulting, and advisory roles are shrinking careers in a world of rapidly-improving LLMs

• The “double-jump” job search strategy and why you should stop optimizing for the 10-year role

• How you can turn a non-PM background into a superpower with AI and product skills

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