Your profession isn't gone. It's restructuring.
How to move when the ground is shifting.
“Quick catch-up.” No context. Fifteen minutes.
I knew immediately. Most people do.
After the call, I laced up my Brooks and walked around the block. I wasn’t thinking about the market yet. I was thinking about my mortgage.
How much buffer did I have? What the next few months actually looked like.
Then I started thinking about the market. How long would this take? Whether the level I’d been at was even something companies were hiring for right now.
That last question is the one that didn’t go away.
Product and tech roles scaled in a way almost nothing else has in recent memory. Not just in salary - in sheer volume of need. Companies were creating roles faster than universities could produce people to fill them.
Mid-career professionals could lose a job on Friday and have real options by the following week. The landing zone always existed.
So most of us never had to think too hard about what we actually brought. The profession itself was stable ground. You didn’t need to define your value clearly when there was always somewhere to land.
That’s changed. Not because the work disappeared, but because the growth outran the foundation. Companies built org structures around a hiring environment that no longer exists the same way.
The roles got compressed, consolidated, and redefined. And AI is accelerating a restructuring that was probably coming regardless.
Nobody knows what the floor plan looks like on the other side yet.
So when someone asks, “What do you do?” the discomfort isn’t really about the title. It’s about confronting the honest answer: I’m in a profession that’s restructuring, and I can’t point to where I land when it’s done.
That’s uncomfortable. It’s also a more useful starting point than pretending the old answer still works.
For me, the footing started coming back when I stopped waiting for a role to give me the answer. Building all these mobile apps (aka my 2026 side quests), taking on consulting work, writing this newsletter - none of it came with a title. It just required me to be clear about what I actually do and who it actually helps.
That clarity was harder to find than I expected. Which told me something about how much work I’d been letting the credential do.
The skills didn’t change when the market did. The ability to figure out what’s worth building, to read what users actually need, to make the case for one thing over another - none of that was on the org chart.
It just lived there for a while. It needs a different container now. One you probably have to build yourself, at least for a while.
The profession is catching up with itself.
Getting honest about what you actually bring - without a title to lean on - is harder than it sounds. Most of us haven’t had to do it seriously in years.
Here’s where to start:
Write what you do without using a title, a company, or a level. If it takes more than three sentences, keep editing.
Find one person you can help right now - a job seeker, a junior person, someone building something. Outward action rebuilds footing faster than introspection.
Build something on your own terms, even if it’s small. It forces the clarity that waiting for a role won’t.
You’ve never had to answer that seriously. The market let you skip it. That window closed.
Until next week,
Mike Watson @ Product Party
P.S. Want to connect? Send me a message on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.