Where "product manager" really started going off the rails was when enterprise agile achieved hockey stick level popularity as all of a sudden the "product owner" role wound up being in the "product manager" job family.

All of a sudden you had "product managers" inserted deep in the bowels of large systems, instead of focusing on big picture topics.

> I think pure Product Manager - idea person and feature gate - as a role has limited days left, but Technical Product Manager - often people with recent dev experience and strong tech chops who can build a lot with AI - might be the new role.

This depends on the org, but product managers I've worked with spend a lot of time speaking directly with users, particularly in B2B shops. Between speaking with customers and communicating product plans both upwards (to GMs/VPs/exec etc) and outwards (to your own team + external teams) you really shouldn't have a lot of time to build anything as a PM, even with AI.