PM Was Scrumful, Not Agile: Why AI Can Give Product Its Real Job Back | Naomi Lariviere, CPO (ADP)

AI has made building faster and cheaper than ever. That leaves product leaders with an uncomfortable question: if engineering isn't the bottleneck anymore, what is? And do we still need product managers?

Our guest today thinks much of the PM job over the past decade was spent more on tickets and stand-ups than on understanding customers and markets. She calls it getting "Scrumful, not Agile," and AI is finally a chance to hand that work off and get back to the real job.

Naomi Lariviere is Chief Product Officer at ADP, where she runs a roughly $4 billion mid-market portfolio for a company that pays one in six Americans.

Her take: AI makes building cheaper, but it doesn't make choosing what to build any easier.

In this episode, Naomi shares:

• What happened when ADP's dev team tried to deliver without a product team, and why they came back
• How ADP studied what its PMs actually do all day to find the busywork AI can take off their plates, and what they want PMs doing with that time instead
• Why she's skeptical of the push to turn every PM into a "product builder" who ships code, and why storytelling, empathy, and judgment matter more than ever
• And how ADP keeps innovating quickly when a single mistake could mean thousands of people don't get paid

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomilariviere/
ADP: https://www.adp.com/

Chapters

00:00 Intro
00:51 Naomi's path from business analyst to ADP product leader
02:40 Is AI the end of product management? (Spoiler alert: No)
04:28 AI makes building cheaper, but it doesn't make choosing easier
06:47 How product teams became "Scrumful, not Agile"
11:18 Why ADP has to innovate carefully at its scale
13:52 Process with a purpose vs. Process for its own sake
15:50 Should product managers become product builders?
18:42 ADP's jobs-to-be-done study of the PM role
20:30 Fluid roles and why less technical PMs can deliver more
24:10 Storytelling, empathy, and the human skills AI can't replace
26:46 Conclusion

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