And so did I.
There is a moment in every caterpillar's life that looks like failure from the outside. It stops moving. It goes still. It wraps itself in something that looks like a dead end. If you did not know what was happening underneath, you would assume it was over for the caterpillar. But that stillness is not the end. It is the most important part of the whole journey. I had my cocoon moment in product management. And I almost missed it because I was too busy protecting what I had already built.
The Crawling Phase
I spent years getting genuinely good at a specific set of things. Untangling convoluted product requirements that arrived from six different stakeholders with six different agendas. Bringing structure to fragmented roadmaps that had no clear spine. Translating obstructed, abstract thinking from leadership into something a cross-functional team could actually rally around and build on. I was the person in the room who could make the unworkable, workable. Who could sit in a room full of conflicting priorities and walk out with something coherent. That was my edge. That was my identity. And for a long time, that was enough.
The Ground Started Shifting
Then AI arrived. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It crept in quietly, the way seasons change. You do not notice it until the temperature is completely different. Suddenly the tools could synthesise fragmented inputs faster than I could. They could structure a convoluted brief in seconds. They could turn obstructed thinking into a clean framework before I had even opened my laptop. The crawling I had perfected over years? AI was doing it. Consistently. Tirelessly. Without needing a debrief or a retrospective. And I had to sit with a question most product people are still avoiding. If the thing I built my value around can be replicated by a prompt, what exactly am I here for?
The Uncomfortable Stillness of the Cocoon
Here is what nobody tells you about the cocoon phase. It does not feel like transformation from the inside. It feels like dissolution. Everything you built your professional confidence around starts to feel fragile. The skills you were proud of start to feel ordinary. The toolkit you spent years assembling starts to collect dust. There is a version of this story where I fought it. Where I spent energy defending the territory, insisting that my way of doing things still mattered, that AI was overhyped, that human structure and synthesis would always be irreplaceable. I have watched a lot of product people take that route. They are still taking it. But I made a different choice. I chose to go still. To stop crawling. To let the cocoon do its work. That meant genuinely accepting, not just intellectually acknowledging, that a chapter had closed. That the skills were not worthless, but they were no longer the edge. That clinging to them would cost me the thing that was trying to emerge on the other side. Letting go of an identity you worked hard to build is not a small thing. Anyone who tells you it is comfortable has not actually done it.
What the Butterfly Is Built For
What came out the other side was not a faster version of the caterpillar. It was something built for an entirely different kind of movement. In product management, the new edge is not in handling the obstructed. AI handles the obstructed. The new edge lives in the layer of thinking that surrounds the output. It lives in judgment. Knowing which problem is actually worth solving before anyone has written a single line of code or a single word of a brief. It lives in pattern recognition. Reading the gap between what users articulate and what they actually need. Sensing the fracture points in a roadmap that looks pristine on a slide but will fall apart in execution. It lives in discernment. Knowing when the AI output is technically correct but fundamentally wrong for the context. Knowing when the clean framework misses the human nuance that changes everything. It lives in the thinking before the prompt and after the output. That is the territory no tool can colonise. That is where I have been building. AI handles the tangled. I bring the direction. That is a fundamentally different value proposition. And it took dissolving the old one to see it clearly.
The Window Is Open Right Now
The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by perfecting its crawl. It becomes one by trusting that what it is dissolving into is worth the discomfort of letting go. Most product people are still in the crawling phase. Protecting territory. Perfecting synthesis and structure skills in a world that has already automated most of that work. Defending the cocoon instead of going still inside it. The transition that is happening in our industry is not a threat to the people who are willing to dissolve. It is a profound opportunity to emerge as something sharper, something more directional, something built for the actual complexity of what comes next. The caterpillar never regrets leaving the cocoon. It just flies. The window to build wings is open. The only question worth asking yourself right now is this.
Are you still protecting your crawl? Or are you ready to fly?
This is a reflection from my own transition in product. If it resonates, I would love to hear where you are in yours.