Field Notes: The Product Manager as Builder
Observations from the frontier
Over the past three months, we’ve spoken with nearly 100 founding Product Managers. One theme keeps coming up:
PMs are now builders.
AI is changing how quickly teams can build. PMs can prototype entire products. Engineers can operate with increasingly autonomous AI systems. The constraint is shifting from “Can we build it?” to “Do we know what to build?”
What we’ll discuss
Building with AI as a PM: What does the day-to-day job look like when PMs can prototype entire products and engineers can operate with AI agents?
The modern PM skillset: What skills become more valuable when leading AI-powered teams? What skills remain essential—and why?
Increasing the speed of insights: When code is no longer the scarce resource, how can PMs use AI and existing tools to increase the speed of learning and decision-making?
The founder → founding PM relationship: The ultimate bottleneck on speed is trust. How do founding PMs build trust with their founders that lets them move quickly?
We’ll bring together Founding PMs and Founders to share four case studies from the field, followed by breakout discussions with fellow founding PMs.
Field Notes is for founding Product Managers at early-stage startups who want to learn what’s actually happening on the frontier, from others living it—not generic PM advice. Four case studies, peer breakouts, and candid conversations about the problems that keep coming up regardless of company or stage.
Schedule
6:00 PM – 6:30 PM — Drinks + bites
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM — Lightning talks + breakout groups
7:30 PM – 8:00 PM — Networking
Presented by
Scout is a career copilot that creates the connections, community, and knowledge to accelerate your startup aspirations. We bring together 1,500+ engineers, product managers, and startup builders across SF and NYC to help each other find opportunities, build relationships, and navigate what’s next.
Obvious is an applied AI research lab. They spend their days closing the gap between what’s possible and what’s doable, treating their own company as the experiment for what it means to operate at agent scale. In less than a year, they’ve reinvented their product, reshaped their team, accelerated revenue, and 10x’d their shipping velocity. Less chat. More work.