Barbell product: two kinds of PMs, not the middle

Rich Mironov is saying the product manager job is splitting in two. At one end, the builder — the person who ships features, runs sprints, wrangles the team. At the other, the strategist — the one reading the market, setting the compass, figuring out what to build next. The middle is getting squeezed. Those folks who do a bit of both are becoming harder to find.

The post is part of a longer thread about how product orgs should stop pretending every PM does the same thing. The barbell shape — heavy at the ends, light in the middle — is a better model than the bell curve we keep using. It matches what's actually happening in companies that are figuring this out.

Why this matters for us: if you're a primo running a side business, you're probably already living this — doing the shipping and the strategy yourself. The ones trying to hire for a single "product manager" role are the ones wasting money.