In 2025, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others championed “vibe working”—AI-assisted productivity that makes tasks look spontaneous and effortless. But beneath the marketing glow, a dangerous trend is emerging: enterprise product management risks becoming the next victim of the vibes.
The Illusion of Effortless Mastery
“Vibe coding” and “vibe writing” let non-experts summon complex spreadsheets or generate product plans with a few prompts. The appeal is obvious—speed, accessibility, and democratization. Yet the illusion of mastery hides the erosion of deep expertise. Like jazz improvisation, vibe working only seems effortless because it relies on years of disciplined skill.
When PMs begin relying on AI agents to summarize feedback, prioritize features, and auto-draft roadmaps, the discipline of reasoning behind each decision begins to evaporate. Teams start chasing “vibes” instead of validated data. There are real risks to AI workshop taking over Product Management.
The Executive Trap: Mistaking Velocity for Strategy
Executives increasingly equate speed with innovation. “Vibe PM” culture rewards quick mock-ups over rigorous customer discovery. AI can now generate pitch decks, PRDs, and Jira epics in minutes—but what happens when no one checks whether the problem is real?
The result is a proliferation of beautifully presented but strategically hollow product directions. Metrics dashboards become aesthetic mood boards. The “vibe” of progress replaces measurable product-market fit.
AI as a Crutch, Not a Copilot
Generative AI can empower PMs to analyze markets, synthesize customer input, and model pricing scenarios—but only when guided by human discernment. When PMs delegate those judgments to a chatbot, they risk reinforcing bias, ignoring nuance, and confusing plausibility with truth.
Already, some enterprises report PM teams spending more time “vibe-refining” AI outputs than engaging with users. Meetings devolve into critiquing tone rather than testing hypotheses.
The Knowledge Dilution Problem
Before vibe working, PMs earned credibility through deep domain understanding—knowing customers, workflows, and competitive dynamics. Now, AI tools offer a shortcut: describe the product vision, and the system fabricates the rest.
Over time, this creates what MIT’s Ben Armstrong calls “the mirage of competence.” Teams appear productive, but organizational knowledge fragments. New hires inherit polished artifacts with little rationale behind them. Institutional learning—once a strategic moat—evaporates.
The Rebrand of Labor as Leisure
Sociologists call vibe working a form of “labor aestheticization”—rebranding labor as play. For product teams, that’s a slippery slope. When executives position PM as creative “vibe shaping,” they risk undervaluing the hard cognitive labor required to align user needs, technical feasibility, and business outcomes.
The danger isn’t burnout—it’s atrophy. The skills that once distinguished great PMs—critical reasoning, synthesis, prioritization—atrophy under the pressure to perform AI-assisted spontaneity.
From PM Frameworks to PM Feelings
Classic frameworks—RICE, Kano, Jobs-to-Be-Done—anchor prioritization in data and structured thinking. In vibe PM culture, these are replaced by “AI insight sessions” or “co-creative brainstorms” with ChatGPT or Copilot.
The result: decisions made by sentiment, not evidence. Roadmaps become social artifacts designed to “feel right” to executives and customers, rather than to deliver value.
As one Atlassian exec quipped, “We’ve gone from Agile to vibes-based management.”
The Quiet Erosion of Accountability
When everything is co-authored by AI, ownership blurs. Who’s responsible for a failed launch—the PM, the prompt, or the model? Vibe working decentralizes authorship, making it easier to celebrate collective creativity but harder to assign accountability.
In large enterprises, this erosion is deadly. Without clear accountability, governance breaks down, and post-mortems turn into “vibe reviews.”
The New Divide: Makers vs. Vibe Managers
As enterprises adopt Copilot, Gemini, and Claude across product teams, a new class divide is forming. On one side: PMs who still talk to customers, validate hypotheses, and think deeply. On the other: vibe managers—professionals fluent in AI interfaces but disconnected from reality.
The first group builds lasting products. The second produces an endless stream of demos and decks that impress executives but never ship.
How to Resist the Vibe Drift
To prevent product management from turning into performance art, leaders must:
- Re-center around outcomes, not artifacts.
Reward validated learning and customer impact, not beautifully generated slides. - Institute “AI traceability.”
Document which product decisions were AI-assisted and what data underpinned them. - Restore structured thinking.
Mandate frameworks like RICE or JTBD in PRDs—AI may draft, but humans must validate. - Rebuild apprenticeship models.
Pair junior PMs with veterans to teach how intuition is earned through data, not vibes. - Redefine velocity.
Measure cycle time to validated insight, not to first draft.
Why This Matters for Enterprise SaaS
In enterprise environments, small misjudgments compound. A vibe-driven feature prioritized for its “cool factor” can cost millions in re-engineering or customer churn.
As procurement cycles stretch and compliance demands rise, enterprises need rigor—not intuition. A single misaligned roadmap can derail a quarter’s revenue.
If enterprise PMs succumb to the “vibe” mindset, they risk building shallow integrations, unscalable proofs-of-concept, and shiny but useless dashboards—all of which accelerate SaaS commoditization.
Vibe Working Meets Corporate Politics
Ironically, vibe working may thrive most in bureaucracies that reward optics over outcomes. PMs can now generate instant “strategic narratives,” complete with AI-made personas and market analyses.
To executives juggling quarterly reviews, this looks like innovation. But as the Business Insider article warns, such language can become “a recipe for confusion.” Everyone interprets the vibe differently—until the product fails and clarity returns too late.
The Coming Backlash: Return of the Rational PM
History suggests every hype cycle ends in correction. As enterprises confront the hidden costs of vibe driven output—customer attrition, failed pilots, audit failures—there will be a return to disciplined PM craft.
Future PMs will be expected to orchestrate AI tools, not be seduced by them. They’ll reassert ownership over hypotheses, prioritization, and validation. The title “AI Product Manager” will evolve into “Evidence-Driven Product Manager.”
Reclaiming the Meaning of Work
Vibe working, at its core, is a symptom of cultural fatigue—a desire to make work feel lighter, more creative, less mechanical. That impulse isn’t wrong. Product management has indeed grown bureaucratic, heavy with frameworks and templates.
But the solution isn’t to replace rigor with vibes. It’s to rehumanize product management through meaningful discovery, authentic customer engagement, and transparent decision-making.
True creativity doesn’t emerge from pretending the hard parts don’t exist—it comes from mastering them.
Conclusion: Beyond the Vibes
The rise of vibe working exposes a dangerous truth: enterprise product management is vulnerable to aesthetic fads disguised as innovation. As AI tools grow more capable, the temptation to let them define the “feel” of progress will only intensify.
Enterprises that survive this era will be those that remember the essence of product management: understanding real problems, validating real solutions, and creating real value.
Vibe working might make the journey look effortless—but the companies that thrive will be those willing to do the hard work behind the vibe.
What is “vibe working”?
“Vibe working” refers to the trend of AI-driven work that appears effortless and fluid, popularized by tools like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s enterprise copilots.
Why is vibe working risky for product managers?
It can blur accountability, encourage speed over substance, and erode the disciplined reasoning behind product decisions.
How can SaaS leaders prevent “vibe PM” culture?
By re-centering around measurable outcomes, validating customer problems, and documenting AI-assisted decision logic.
Is AI the problem or the opportunity?
AI itself is neutral—when guided by structured thinking, it can amplify insight. But without discipline, it turns work into performance art.
