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- LinkedIn is dismantling its associate product manager program.
- It’s replacing it with an associate builder track that trains hires to code, design, and product manage.
- LinkedIn’s chief product officer said the company has adopted small “pods” of full-stack builders.
LinkedIn is dismantling one of Silicon Valley’s most familiar early-career tracks: the associate product manager program.
It will be replaced with a new program that trains people to code, design, and build products end-to-end.
LinkedIn’s chief product officer, Tomer Cohen, said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Thursday that the company’s long-running associate product manager program will end this year.
Starting in January, new hires will enter the associate product builder program, he said.
“We’re going to teach them how to code, design, and PM at LinkedIn,” he added, referring to product management.
The shift is part of a broader internal transformation built around what LinkedIn calls the full-stack builder model. Instead of splitting responsibilities among product managers, designers, and engineers, the company wants employees who can bring a product from idea to launch themselves, “regardless of their role in the stack,” Cohen said. These builders can combine skills that were once separated across different job functions.
Cohen said he wants these builders to develop vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment — especially the ability to make “high-quality decisions in what is complex, ambiguous situations.”
“Everything else, I’m working really hard to automate,” he added.
The model is also reshaping how teams are structured. 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.
“They can actually match the pace of change to the pace of response,” Cohen said.
It’s “less about an engineer, designer, PM working together” and more about people “who can flex across,” he added.
Cohen, who has worked at LinkedIn for nearly 14 years, said in a post on the platform last month that he is leaving the company in January.
The end of product managers?
Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover reported last year that product managers are increasingly seen as critical in the tech world, but some remain skeptical about the role’s value.
Some companies have reevaluated their need for product managers. Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in March that Microsoft wants to shift its workforce composition by increasing the number of engineers relative to product or program managers to run leaner. Other companies, like Airbnb and Snap, have been rethinking the need for product managers.
Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published in July that early-stage teams don’t need product managers at all.
Engineering leaders should drive product direction until they no longer have the bandwidth. “Your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well,” he said.
Others take the opposite view. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said in an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published in August that product management, not engineering speed, has become the bottleneck in AI startups.
In the past, building a prototype might have taken three weeks, so waiting another week for user feedback was acceptable. But when AI tools let teams build a prototype in a day, having to “wait a week for user feedback” is “really painful,” Ng said.
That pressure forces startups to make faster product decisions, the kind of calls product managers are trained to make, he added.
