The Roadmap to Becoming a Product Builder, with Ankit Shukla

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Today’s episode

LinkedIn shut down its Associate Product Manager program and replaced it with an Associate Product Builder program.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been writing about this shift for a long time. What’s new is that the market just gave it a full-fledged title.

And a title in a job post comes with 3 things: a JD, interviews, and a comp range.

So I brought back the one guest I knew would bring the best-case data. Ankit Shukla, founder of HelloPM, ran 12,500 PM job descriptions through Claude and GPT to see what top companies hire for. His AI PM roadmap is still my most popular episode ever. His evals episode is #2.

This one goes further than both.

10 Key takeaways

1. The product builder role is real, and the data says so - 12,500 PM job postings analyzed with Claude and GPT. More than 30% now ask for hands-on AI building. The title has not caught up everywhere, but the requirements already have.

2. Judgment is the skill being paid for, not the tools - Across those postings, RAG, agentic AI and prompt engineering were not the number one skill. Identifying the right use case for AI was. The engineering part is what AI can already do for you.