180 / Oji Udezue: The Renaissance PM – Core Skills for Today’s AI-Driven World

The Product Momentum team first met Oji Udezue following his keynote at INDUSTRY 2025. And we just knew we had to have him on the pod. Oji is a highly skilled product leader whose CV includes companies like Calendly, Atlassian, and Microsoft. In addition, he co-authored (with wife, Ezinne Udezue) Building Rocket Ships, Product Management for High-Growth Companies a manual for product leaders, product managers, and executives who want to build faster, better, and more profitably (raise your hand if that describes you!).

In this episode, we begin broadly by discussing the evolving role of product management in the era of AI. We then pivot quickly, drilling into some of the new challenges that require today’s product leaders to:

• Readjust to the accelerated pace of product development in today’s AI-empowered world (the three-speed problem),
• Re-emphasize product management’s core principles that remain constant, and
• Reconsider what counts as essential skills for today’s product manager.

AI’s Impact and the Three-Speed Problem

Companies do three things to build great technology products, Oji says: customer science, construction/development, and go-to-market. Each step on this cycle moves at its own pace. Before AI, engineering speed was the process bottleneck. But with AI-driven automation, construction has become much faster, creating new challenges in synchronizing these three phases.

“We’re all going to spend a lot of time balancing that equation,” Oji adds, “finding the practices, the team structure, the team ratios, the new AI tools that help us keep this thing fast but then speed up customer science and GTM.“

Essential Skills for Today’s ‘Renaissance PM’

The AI transformation calls on product managers to add new arrows to their quiver of skills – e.g., curiosity, humility, agency among them. In the same way we transitioned from a pre-internet to internet environment, Oji adds, AI “requires brand new thinking.”

But the old skills still apply: “These are worth bringing up because a lot of PMs don’t have them: communication, creativity, the ability to ship, and leadership – being the kind of person people want to follow – all of that has to do with judgment. The role is evolving into that of a “renaissance PM” who blends traditional skills with new AI-related capabilities.

Evolution of the PM Role

Has the PM role evolved so much that the skills required to perform it are now preeminent to the role itself? Is that where AI is taking us?

“I’ve always thought the skills…the mindset…was way more important,” Oji offers. “The title just gives us a way to put it in a box. The title is nothing without the skills. That’s why I wrote the book. Because I want more people to have the skillsets” required to succeed in this new world order.

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