Beyond the buzzwords: 2026 playbook for product management

Welcome to 2026! 🎉 We hope you all enjoyed the break, and you're ready to take this year on…

We spent some time reflecting on what's coming this year, and have some interesting predictions for you.

If 2025 had a soundtrack, it would have been a loop of AI jargon. Agentic workforce. LLM-powered. Vibe coding. Product sense.
It was everywhere — in every deck, keynote, strategy doc, and investor update.

But inside actual product organizations, the vibe was very different.

Teams on the ground, the ones responsible for decisions (not slides), discovered something uncomfortable: Most companies were wildly unprepared for the AI they were racing to implement.

The AI hype machine ran into operational reality. And product leaders learned the hard way that buzzwords don’t build winning products. Systems do.

We spoke to:

Chris Butler, Director of Product Operations at GitHub

Lauren Kearney, Director of Health & Platform at Twitch

Commentary from Malte Scholz, Head of Product and co-founder of airfocus by Lucid

To find out what 2025 really taught us and what will separate the winners from the noise in 2026.

But first, here's a few we think people got wrong:

Agentic workforce: The fantasy of replacing junior employees with AI ignored that those roles create judgment, feedback loops, and context — all the things AI desperately lacks.

LLM-powered: The label became so meaningless that you could replace it with “has electricity.”

Vibe coding: A guilty pleasure for prototypes, but production systems remained just as complex.

Product sense: Used in job specs everywhere — and yet no one could define it beyond “my taste, not yours.”

What 2025 actually taught us

AI crushed tasks, collapsed on strategy
 Without structure, clarity, and documented workflows, AI had nothing to leverage.

Product work lives in two worlds — and they’re disconnected
 Whiteboards and vision decks rarely fed into the actual system of record.

PMs didn’t disappear — they drowned
 AI generated endless options; humans still had to evaluate them.

2026: Overrated vs Underrated

Overrated: Copilots everywhere, AI slideware, automated junior replacement.
Underrated: Portfolio-level strategy, product operations, structured context, and real customer conversations.

The 2026 playbook: What winning teams will actually do

Adopt a Product OS (slides and spreadsheets won’t scale).

Lead at the portfolio level, not the backlog level.

Close the context gap AI struggles with.

Operationalize humans in the loop (HITL).

Treat conversation as UX — not a novelty.

What it means to win in 2026

Winning teams won’t chase feature velocity or flashy AI. They’ll build clarity, structure, and context. They’ll connect insights to roadmaps. They’ll combine human judgment with AI leverage. They won’t ask: “How do we add more AI?” They’ll ask: “How do we make AI and humans actually work together?”

That is how they’ll move beyond the buzzwords.
That is how they’ll win.

But do you think we're right?

Let me know in the comments!

Emma

Senior Content Manager, airfocus by Lucid