👋 Hey Friends!
Everyone's telling you the workforce is splitting into two groups: people who "get" AI and people who don't. That's wrong. There's only one group that matters, people who can turn a messy, half-formed request into a decision someone can act on. Everything else is noise.
I know because I failed this test once already, before AI was even the topic. When I moved from customer success into product management, I thought the gap was vocabulary. roadmaps, RICE scores, sprint rituals. So I tried to talk like I belonged. Didn't work. Nobody's fooled by borrowed vocabulary, especially not engineers.
Here's what actually closed the gap: I already had the real skill. I'd been taking angry, vague customer complaints and turning them into clear next steps for years, on the phone, in support tickets, in the sixty seconds before someone hung up. I just didn't count it as "real" experience. It was the job the whole time.
How to tell which side of the split you're actually on:
Stop memorizing the glossary. Nobody has ever asked me to define a term. They've asked me what I'd do. Same thing is happening with AI jargon right now. Knowing what an "agent pipeline" is won't save you if you can't turn a complaint into a call.
Count the reps you already have. Every time you turned someone's wrong request into the right one, that was training. Go find those moments. You have more than you think.
Use AI as leverage, not as a costume. The people winning right now use AI to blow through work they already understand. The ones losing are using it to fake understanding they don't have. That never survives a follow-up question.
Show up with the decision, not the vocabulary. Nobody remembers the acronym. They remember the moment you turned "the customer's annoyed" into "here's what we shipped instead." Have one ready before you need it.
Do this now: Open a blank note. Write down one moment from this week or five years ago, where someone gave you a vague or annoyed request and you decided what they actually needed instead of what they said. Two sentences. That's a product decision. Save it. Use it in your next interview.
The AI-native split is a myth. The real split is who can sit in ambiguity long enough to make a call. You already have reps. You just never called them that.
If you want help finding the decisions hiding in your own story, that's literally what I do in mentor sessions, bring me one messy story, I'll show you the product call inside it.
Not ready for a 1:1 session yet? Join the community instead. Weekly case study practice, plus a job board of early-career roles I hand-pick every week.
