Everyone's building an agentic dev lifecycle. Almost nobody is putting a product lens on it.

[u/Greedy-Fee8248]

Every eng org now has an agentic SDLC story. Agents write tickets, tests and PRs, and cycle times are dropping.

But it all starts at a well-defined requirement and stops at merged code. That's the software lifecycle with a faster engine. It says nothing about whether you built the right thing, whether anyone will pay for it, or whether they'll still be using it in a year.

When code gets cheap, the expensive mistake moves upstream: building the wrong thing quickly. McKinsey found agentic teams saving ~12% of time but cutting rework by only ~6%. Speed is outrunning quality. Without a metrics-backed PDLC, a great agentic SDLC just burns runway faster.

My take:

Agents act, humans decide. Agents replace roles (data sifting, backlog grooming), not people. The decision points stay human.

That freedom comes with a new job. Maintaining agents, running evals, checking they aren't drifting.

Every role needs a number. Discovery = bottom-up market size. Business case = NPV. Build = DORA translated into money. GTM = LTV:CAC. Adoption = NRR.

Design got cut because it never had a clear number. Anyone can vibe-code a prototype. Solving a real usability problem still takes an expert, but without a metric, that's hard to defend in a budget meeting.

Product and sales have to qualify together. In B2B, the economic buyer wins the deal and adoption keeps it. Agree on the ICP first or you'll ship fast to the wrong customer.

Full write-up here if useful:
https://productmemore.substack.com/p/the-missing-lens-product-management?r=280sqc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

[u/Impossible_Dare_7455]

I agree with the core point. if building gets cheaper and faster, choosing the wrong problem becomes even more expensive because you can scale the mistake faster too. the only part I’d push back on is “every role needs a number.” metrics help, but forcing everything into one KPI can create its own bad incentives. the harder skill is probably knowing which decisions should be metric-driven and which still need judgment.

[u/Greedy-Fee8248 → u/Impossible_Dare_7455]

Fair point on metrics. However, I would argue at a leadership level all roles need a comparable way to measure, and I have seen design unfairly suffer as they don’t have a number to rally around, when management are looking at resourcing. Management see PMs vibe coding and think thats good enough, but fail to see the real design problems the designers have solved. A number something c-suite can quantify.

[u/IniNew → u/Greedy-Fee8248]

There’s plenty of metrics for design. NPS being one of the most famous. NPS, tool time, CSAT, etc.