According to Lenny newsletter,
Production Management areas (PMs) are seeing the most value from AI tools to firstly write product design (21.5%), secondly create mockups/prototypes (19.8%), and thirdly improve their communication across emails and presentations (18.5%).
Prototyping, at #2, signals one of many role-boundary shifts happening now. With tools like Lovable, v0, and others, PMs are increasingly going from idea to prototype without waiting on design.
But look farther down the list and a pattern emerges : AI is helping PMs produce, but it lags in helping them think. The top jobs are all production tasks (docs, prototypes, comms), while strategic and discovery work sits near the bottom (user research at 4.7%, roadmap ideas at 1.1%). PMs have cracked how to use AI for the “last mile” of getting ideas out of their head, but they still have a big opportunity to embrace AI for the upstream work of figuring out what to build.
Designers are finding AI most helpful with user research synthesis (22.3%), content and copy (17.4%), and design concepts ideation (16.5%).
AI is helping designers with everything around design de(research synthesis, copy, ideation), but pushing pixels remains stubbornly human. Meanwhile, AI is unlocking skills for PMs outside of their core work (at least in the case of prototyping), whereas designers aren’t seeing the marginal improvement benefits from AI doing their core work.
Founders lean heavily toward productivity and decision support (32.9%), product ideation (19.6%), and vision/strategy (19.1%).
Unlike others, founders are using AI to think, not just to produce. The top three jobs are all strategic : decision support, ideation, and vision/strategy. That’s a stark contrast to PMs (whose top jobs are documents and prototypes) and designers (research synthesis and copy). And look at that #1 category : “productivity/decision support,” at 32.9%, is unlike anything else in the survey. No other role has a single use case this dominant. Founders are treating AI as a thought partner and sounding board, not just a tool for specific deliverables.
Engineers are the outlier. For them, AI is doing just one big job : writing code, the core engineering task. Whereas for the PMs and designers, AI is helping them with supporting work. Engineers have accepted AI as a coding partner ; now they want it to handle the tedious work that comes after the code has been written.
