The End of Software as We Know It: Why Product Managers Need to Stop Building Tools and Start Building Intelligence

A Letter to Product Managers in 2026

We’re standing at a strange crossroads. On one side, we can build and ship prototypes faster than ever before—what used to take months now takes weekends with tools like Cursor and Claude. On the other side, our users are drowning. Not in lack of features, but in the opposite: too much software, too many notifications, too many dashboards, too many AI-generated summaries that just create more things to read.

And somewhere in the middle, Sharon from Procurement is still emailing Excel files named “Budget_Final_v3_ACTUAL.xlsx” because at least Excel doesn’t try to change her workflow every six months.

If you’re a product manager reading this in 2026, I want you to consider something uncomfortable: the software you’re building might be making your users’ lives worse, not better.

The Firehose Problem

Here’s what’s happening in enterprises right now. Every tool has added an AI layer:

Slack channels with AI summaries
Microsoft Copilot generating meeting notes, emails, and presentations
Dashboard alerts multiplied by 10x because AI can now “detect patterns”
Automated insights that require you to read three paragraphs to understand what used to be a single number

The promise was that AI would make work easier. The reality is that AI has created a content explosion that makes business software feel like social media doom scrolling.

Think about it: We collectively realized that infinite scroll was making us miserable. We gave social media the side eye. We started setting screen time limits. We deleted apps. And now? We’ve taken that same dopamine-destroying pattern and imported it directly into the tools people use to do their jobs.

The average knowledge worker now processes more information in a day than a medieval scholar encountered in a lifetime. And we keep building features that add to that pile.

The Speed Asymmetry That’s Breaking Everything

Here’s the paradox product managers are living in:

We can ship a working prototype in a weekend. We can A/B test ideas at lightning speed. We can iterate based on data in near real-time. We’ve never been faster at building.

But our users? They’re slow to adopt. They’re skeptical. They’re tired.

They’re not wrong to be. They’ve seen 47 “transformative” tools come and go. They’ve been through digital transformation initiatives that left them with more tools to learn, not fewer. They’ve watched their company spend millions on software that promised to make their lives easier but just added another login to remember.

This speed asymmetry is breaking the old B2B playbook.

You can’t out-feature your way to adoption anymore. You can’t out-onboard your way to engagement. You can’t out-dashboard your way to value. Because the problem isn’t that users need more—it’s that they need less.

The B2C Lesson B2B Is Finally Learning

For years, we’ve talked about bringing “consumer-grade experiences” to B2B software. We’ve added animations, improved onboarding flows, made things more “delightful.”

But that’s not actually what consumer software taught us.

The lesson from consumer tech isn’t about delight—it’s about disappearance.

Uber didn’t win because it had a prettier app than taxi dispatch systems. It won because you stopped thinking about transportation logistics entirely. You pressed a button and a car showed up.
Spotify didn’t win because it had better playlists than iTunes. It won because you stopped curating music. You just pressed play and good music happened.
ChatGPT isn’t winning because it has great UX. It’s winning because you don’t have to navigate a UI at all. You just ask a question and get an answer.

The pattern? Technology that disappears wins.

And now enterprise users—your users—are developing that same expectation. They don’t want to operate your software. They don’t want to learn your workflows. They don’t want to attend your training sessions or watch your tutorial videos.

They want decisions made. They want work done. They want to move on with their lives.

Why Excel Still Rules (And What That Tells Us)

Let’s talk about why Excel persists in enterprises despite decades of “Excel killers” and “modern alternatives.”

Excel wins because it asks the least of its users. It’s a blank canvas. It doesn’t have opinions about your workflow. It doesn’t force you through onboarding. It doesn’t send you notification emails about “features you might have missed.” It doesn’t require you to restructure how you think about your work.

Every “modern” replacement tries to impose structure, processes, guardrails. They try to teach users “the right way” to do things. They try to be helpful.

And users resist. Not because they’re luddites, but because they’re exhausted.

Here’s the insight: The future B2B tool needs to be like Excel in one critical way—it adapts to YOU rather than forcing you to adapt to IT. But unlike Excel, it should have intelligence working in the background doing the actual work of aggregation, processing, and analysis.

The tool you barely notice you’re using because it just handles things? That’s the winner.

From Operators to Decision Makers

This brings us to the fundamental shift product managers need to make in 2026 and beyond:

Stop building software that turns users into operators. Start building intelligence that turns users into decision makers.

What’s the difference?

Operator Mode:

User logs into dashboard
Reviews 15 different metrics
Clicks through reports
Exports data to Excel (ironically)
Analyzes in their head
Makes decision
Logs into another tool to execute

Decision Maker Mode:

User asks: “What needs my attention today?”
System surfaces: “Three supplier contracts are at risk based on delivery patterns. Here are your options with projected impact.”
User decides
System executes

The first mode keeps users busy. The second mode keeps users effective.

And here’s what most product managers miss: Users have hit their technology threshold. They’re done. They don’t want more features. They don’t want more integrations. They don’t want more “innovative capabilities.”

They want you to leave them alone and just make the right thing happen.

What This Means for Your Roadmap

If you’re a product manager, here’s what this shift requires:

1. Stop Measuring Engagement, Start Measuring Elimination

Your OKRs probably include metrics like:

Daily active users
Time in product
Feature adoption rates
Session duration

These are operator metrics. They measure how much your users have to work in your tool.

Start measuring:

Decisions made without tool interaction
Time saved from previous workflow
Questions answered without dashboard visits
Tasks completed automatically

If your users are spending less time in your product but getting better outcomes, that’s success. Not failure.

2. Build the Filter, Not the Firehose

Every product team is adding AI features right now. Most are building AI that generates MORE:

More summaries
More insights
More recommendations
More alerts

This is backwards.

The real opportunity is AI that shows users LESS. AI that ruthlessly filters what reaches them. AI that says “I handled 200 things today, here are the 3 that require your specific judgment.”

Your competitive advantage isn’t how much your AI can surface—it’s how much it can suppress.

3. Default to Automation, Not Notification

Right now, most enterprise software follows this pattern:

Detect something
Notify user
Wait for user to act
Execute user’s instruction

The future pattern:

Detect something
Execute appropriate action based on policy/context
Notify user only if action failed or if override needed

You should be building software that apologizes for interrupting you, not software that’s proud of keeping you informed.

4. Make Onboarding Optional

If your product requires extensive onboarding, training sessions, or certification programs, you’re building for operators, not decision makers.

The goal should be: Someone can ask your product a question in natural language and get a useful answer on day one, zero training required.

Everything else—the power user features, the advanced capabilities, the deep customization—should be discoverable progressively, not required upfront.

5. Treat UI as a Failure Mode

This is controversial, but hear me out: Every pixel of UI you show a user represents a decision you’re forcing them to make or information you’re making them process.

Start thinking about your UI as a failure mode—what shows up when automation can’t handle something, or when a user specifically wants to drill deeper.

The best interaction with your product might be no interaction at all. Just outcomes.

The Hard Questions

This shift raises some uncomfortable questions for product managers:

“If users interact with my product less, how do I prove value to leadership?”

You prove it through business outcomes, not product metrics. Revenue improved. Costs reduced. Risks mitigated. Decisions made faster. Look at what your users are trying to accomplish, not how much they’re using your features.

“Won’t this make my product easier to replace?”

The opposite. It’s far easier to rip out a tool users interact with daily than to replace intelligence that’s deeply embedded in their workflows. The product that disappears becomes infrastructure.

“What about power users who want control?”

Give them an opt-in mode. But don’t design for them by default. The power user who wants 50 configuration options can have them. But the 95% of users who just want things to work shouldn’t be forced through that complexity to get started.

“How do I compete with vendors who are shipping more AI features?”

By having the courage to ship fewer, better AI capabilities that actually solve the firehose problem instead of adding to it. Your competitors are in an arms race to add more. You win by being the only one who subtracts.

The Convergence Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s where this all leads: The distinction between B2B and B2C product management is collapsing.

Not because B2B needs to be more “delightful” or “consumer-grade” in the traditional sense. But because users—whether they’re booking a ride or approving a purchase order—have developed the same fundamental expectation:

Technology should work for me, not the other way around.

The consumer apps that won did so by disappearing into the background of people’s lives. The enterprise apps that will win in the next era will do the same—disappearing into the background of people’s work.

This means product managers need to start thinking less like software builders and more like service designers. Your product isn’t the dashboard or the interface or the features. Your product is the outcome your users get without thinking about your software at all.

A Final Thought from the Trenches

I’ve spent 15+ years building B2B products. I’ve led teams building AI features. I’ve shipped enterprise software to thousands of users. And I’ve watched the pattern repeat over and over:

We build something. Users resist. We add onboarding. We add training. We add “user-friendly” features. We measure engagement. We celebrate adoption. And then we wonder why usage drops off after three months.

The users weren’t wrong. We were.

We kept building more when they needed less. We kept building tools when they needed intelligence. We kept building software that required operation when they needed systems that just worked.

2026 is the year to stop.

Stop building dashboards nobody asked for. Stop building features that create more work. Stop building “AI-powered” content generators that flood your users with more stuff to read.

Start building intelligence that filters, synthesizes, and acts. Start building systems that eliminate decisions instead of surfacing them. Start building products that your users can forget about because they’re too busy doing meaningful work.

The software you build should make your users feel like they have a brilliant assistant who handles all the tedious stuff, not like they have another job managing yet another tool.

That’s not just good product management. In 2026, it’s survival.

The best software is the software you don’t notice you’re using. Build that.

Anthony Ludwig