Behind the Craft Ranking 15 PM Skills: What Survives vs. Gets Disrupted by AI | Nan Yu (Linear)
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Aug 31, 2025 
In this discussion with Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, the talk ranges from the astonishing scalability of a two-PM team to a ranking of essential PM skills in the AI era. Nan dives into how AI disrupts strategic roles and the necessity for new skills like context and agent management. He shares insights on Linear's unique 10% rule for rapid shipping and demonstrates how AI agents can streamline tasks, transforming project management into a futuristic collaboration of humans and machines.
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Practice Empathy As Incentive Analysis
- Build emotional intelligence by mentally adopting users' roles and incentives to predict behavior.
- Use incentive-based thinking to convert empathy into explainable decisions.
AI Levels Up Strategic Reasoning
- Strategy and prioritization are vulnerable to AI because models excel at broad, logical reasoning and evidence synthesis.
- When everyone uses similar AI tools, strategic thinking alone won't differentiate PMs.
SQL Skill Gap Shrinks With AI
- Data work shaped like repeatable logic is ripe for AI automation, shrinking gaps between PMs with and without analytics skills.
- PMs must move from raw querying to higher-level interpretation and judgment.