20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: 20Product - Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely? (with Fernando Fanton)
This 67-minute episode of 20 Product features Fernando Fanton, CPO at Property Finder and former CPO at Monzo and Just Eat, discussing product leadership, the impact of AI on product development, and the enduring nature of the Product Manager role. The conversation is framed by Fanton’s personal philosophy, heavily influenced by his early dedication to competitive tennis.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on Product Leadership & Strategy, with significant tangents into Personal Philosophy (Discipline, Resilience), the Impact of Generative AI on Product Development & Engineering, and the Evolution of Product Teams (specifically the PM role).
2. Key Technical Insights
- AI-Accelerated Prototyping: AI tools (like Lovable or those from Y Combinator) are drastically reducing the time to create meaningful prototypes, allowing teams to test concepts with users in a single day, bypassing traditional, slow mockup stages.
- Code Quality in AI Output: The next hurdle for AI prototyping tools is ensuring the generated code output is clean enough for engineers to easily “reverse engineer” into production-ready features, rather than just serving as a design concept.
- Automation of Mundane Tasks: Repetitive engineering tasks (like boilerplate code or unit testing) are being eliminated by AI, leading to a shift where fewer engineers might be needed for mundane work, but the remaining engineers will focus on higher-impact, abstract problem-solving.
3. Business/Investment Angle
- The “Crap Product” Problem: Most products suck because companies lack the capital, the team, or, most commonly, the sustained care to continuously improve them beyond the initial launch. Great products require constant iteration (“It’s never good enough”).
- In-Housing vs. SaaS: The idea that companies will stop buying valuable, non-core SaaS tools to build everything internally is dismissed. Maintaining numerous internal products becomes an unsustainable maintenance burden.
- Founder DNA vs. Scale: Companies starting out need “crazy” founder energy to defy reality, but as they scale, they often require more risk-averse leaders focused on steady improvement and protecting established value.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Fernando Fanton: The interviewee, highlighting his experience at Monzo, Just Eat, Rappi, and Property Finder.
- Roger Federer: Used as an analogy for the mental discipline required for elite performance.
- Microsoft: Referenced as a past employer where Fanton learned about the balance between creative thinking and analytical execution (the “chess and guitar” analogy for PMs).
- Nothing (Phone): Mentioned as a recent example of a company showing renewed care and design innovation in a mature market (smartphones).
5. Future Implications
The industry is moving toward hyper-productivity, where smaller, highly cross-functional teams can achieve significantly more output due to AI tooling. This necessitates a shift in skillsets across the board, demanding more creativity and analytical depth from every role, including product and engineering.
6. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Senior Product Leaders (VPs, CPOs), Engineering Managers, and Founders interested in scaling teams, navigating the integration of AI into the development lifecycle, and understanding the evolving definition of product excellence.
Comprehensive Summary
The podcast episode features an in-depth conversation with Fernando Fanton, a highly respected European product executive, covering product philosophy, personal resilience, and the future of product teams amidst rapid technological change.
The narrative begins with Fanton drawing parallels between his intense early career in competitive tennis and the discipline required in product leadership. He emphasizes that mental fortitude, the ability to hit a wall and rise above it, and relentless self-improvement are more critical than innate talent—a mindset he believes drives elite performers like Federer and Jordan. He strongly critiques the concept of rigid “visions,” arguing they constrain potential; instead, he advocates for a daily cadence of improvement that compounds over time.
The discussion pivots to the challenges of building great products. Fanton asserts that most products fail not due to lack of capital, but a lack of sustained care and commitment to continuous improvement. He uses the example of the Nothing phone disrupting the mature smartphone market to illustrate that “good enough” is a negative concept; superior solutions demand constant iteration.
A major theme is the impact of AI on product development. Fanton notes that AI tools are democratizing prototyping, allowing teams to test concepts in days rather than weeks, effectively solving the initial hurdle of getting something meaningful in front of users. However, this introduces a new challenge: ensuring the AI’s code output is compatible with internal engineering standards. This acceleration is forcing designers to focus less on static mockups and more on anchoring the team to the core mission.
Crucially, the conversation addresses the future of the Product Manager role. Fanton firmly rejects the notion that the PM function is dying. Instead, he predicts teams will become smaller and more cross-functional. The PM’s role is evolving from backlog management (a perceived European trait) to being the “connective fabric”—the creative and analytical nexus (like playing chess and guitar) that elevates the team’s overall creativity and strategic thinking, even as engineers become more capable of handling technical execution. He concludes that while the sheer number of people doing repetitive tasks may decrease, the demand for high-impact, visionary product thinkers will remain essential.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"OpenAI can be both iOS and Google Cloud or Amazon services together. And I don't think we've seen how many years you have to go back to feel that way."
"The quality is determined by the quality of the model. When Claude 3 Opus released, it went significantly up. That is a fundamental change to product."
"Can you imagine if I said to you, hey, there's going to be some externality and for your Monzo product, it's going to get way better and it's got nothing to do with you. So good luck, but I'll"
"Does the world change a lot in product when the quality of the customer experience and the output of your product is determined by a third party? And what I mean specifically by that is you mentioned it, Lovable earlier, fantastic product, amazing outputs. The quality is determined by the quality of the model. When Claude 3 Opus released, it went significantly up. That is a fundamental change to product."
"You're kind of pushing them, helping them to do something that is good for them. So it's almost like you're doing both things. This is something good for you, and now I'm going to be your, help you to actually do it. You know, like your trainer goes and says, do this exercise every day, and it's good for you. And then he gets you to do it..."
"The way I think about it now is whatever experience you add should improve the retention of the whole. ... The more things you add, the more you should retain that user. And frequency should go up."