LinkedIn has killed one of Silicon Valley’s most coveted entry points. After years of running a prestigious Associate Product Manager program, the company is replacing it with something radically different: the Associate Product Builder program.
Starting January 2025, new hires don’t just learn product management, they learn to code, design, and ship products end-to-end.
It’s a signal that the ground is shifting beneath the entire product management profession.
What LinkedIn Is Actually Building
Under Chief Product Officer Tomer Cohen‘s leadership, LinkedIn fundamentally restructured how it builds products around what it calls the “full-stack builder” model.
Traditional product teams split work across specialized roles: product managers define what to build, designers create the experience, and engineers write the code. LinkedIn’s new approach enables employees to bring a product from idea to launch themselves, regardless of their role in the stack. These builders combine skills that were historically separated across different functions.
The company has also moved away from large functional teams toward small, cross-trained “pods” of builders. Instead of large groups split by function, LinkedIn has adopted small pods of cross-trained builders, allowing it to be more nimble, adaptive, and resilient.
The new Associate Product Builder program reflects this philosophy. Rather than accepting traditional resumes, applicants must submit a 60-second demo of something they’ve actually built. The application focuses on what you created, your role in building it, the impact it had, and what AI tools you used, not your job history or pedigree.
Why This Matters Beyond LinkedIn
LinkedIn isn’t acting in a vacuum. This shift reflects broader forces reshaping product development across the technology industry.
AI code generation tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Windsurf have collapsed the barriers between idea and implementation. What once required weeks of coordination between PM, designer, and engineer can now happen in hours with a single skilled builder and the right AI tools. The friction that justified specialized roles is evaporating.
Cohen wants builders to develop vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment – the ability to make high-quality decisions in complex, ambiguous situations. Everything else, he noted, the company is working to automate.
This isn’t about replacing people with AI. It’s about recognizing that when the cost of building drops dramatically, the bottleneck shifts. Strategy, judgment, and vision become more valuable. Coordination overhead becomes less acceptable. Small teams that can move fast become more powerful than large teams optimized for scale.
The Skills That Will Matter
If LinkedIn’s vision represents the future, product managers need to evolve beyond their traditional toolkit. Here’s what matters now:
Technical fluency becomes non-negotiable. You don’t need to be a senior engineer, but you need to understand how products are built well enough to prototype your own ideas. You should be comfortable with AI coding assistants and able to evaluate technical trade-offs without always deferring to engineers.
Design thinking shifts from coordination to execution. Understanding user experience principles isn’t enough anymore. You need to be able to create functional prototypes, test interfaces, and make design decisions with confidence. The ability to move from concept to clickable prototype in a day, not a sprint, becomes table stakes.
Strategic judgment becomes the core differentiator. When anyone can build, the value shifts to knowing what to build. This means developing strong product intuition, understanding user psychology, synthesizing market signals, and making high-quality decisions under uncertainty. These are the skills that can’t be automated.
Speed and autonomy become competitive advantages. The ability to take an idea from zero to shipping without waiting for cross-functional alignment is powerful. This doesn’t mean working in isolation, but it does mean being able to make progress independently rather than being blocked by dependencies.
Communication evolves from coordination to conviction. Product managers have traditionally spent enormous energy coordinating between functions. In a full-stack builder model, communication shifts toward building alignment around vision, synthesizing user insights, and making clear strategic calls. You’re communicating less about process and more about direction.
What This Means for Your Career
If you’re in product management today, this doesn’t mean you need to become a software engineer tomorrow. But it does mean the definition of “product skills” is expanding rapidly.
Start building things yourself. Even small projects teach you more about the craft than another stakeholder meeting ever will. Use AI coding tools not as curiosities but as core capabilities. Build a portfolio of shipped work, not just strategy documents.
Develop genuine technical understanding. Take the online course. Read the engineering documentation. Sit with your developers and actually understand what they’re building. The goal isn’t to replace engineers, it’s to collaborate more effectively and reduce the coordination tax.
Invest in the irreducible skills. Strategic thinking, user empathy, business acumen, and decision-making under uncertainty can’t be automated. These become more valuable as the tactical work gets easier. Double down on developing judgment and vision.
The bottom line
Embrace the discomfort of learning new skills. The PMs who thrive in this new model won’t be those who defend the traditional boundaries of the role. They’ll be those who see the expanded capabilities as an opportunity to have more impact with less friction.
Zuhair Imaduddin is a Senior Product Manager at Wells Fargo. He previously worked at JPMorgan Chase and graduated from Cornell University.
Image: DALL-E
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