Lenny Rachitsky's late-2026 job market report has open PM roles up 56% since January 2023, ahead of software engineering at 43%, with product design down 22% and UX research down 55%. The chart he posted on November 11, 2026 shows 7,303 open PM roles. On openings, PM is the strongest core product role in tech.
Hiring went the other way. The same report says actual PM hiring is flat or declining, with PM's share of all hiring up from 16% in 2021 to 21% because the other roles fell faster. Aakash Gupta's October 22, 2026 report puts postings up 77% from the 2023 low and outside PM hires down 18% since 2023, and down 45% since 2022.
What changed in between
The posting. In April 2026 I pulled 200 PM job descriptions and asked one question of each: could this have been written in 2022? 196 could. Four named the tools, a prototype to ship in the first 90 days, and a metric the PM owns.
Six months later Lenny's skill ranking has LLM first, Claude third, and evals in the top ten. Gupta's data has AI PM at 46% of open PM postings, up from 2% in February 2024, and about 7 of every 100 PM hires. Nearly half the ads and about a fifteenth of the hires.
My read
The PM seat got bigger. A PM prototype takes four to six hours in my practice, which puts the first draft of the design on the PM side. The research question, five users and one question in a week, moved with it. The eval is product's job outright. Companies want more of that seat and have rewritten the ad to say so. The hire count says the candidates who can show it are scarce.
I did not open TrueUp or Live Data Technologies, so this is a reading of two published reports and my own audit, not a proof.
What to do with it
If you are a PM, score yourself against the posting, not against the chart. Six terms, one shipped thing each, last 90 days. If you hire PMs, run the same page on your own job description before you post it, using the four tells in What should a PM job description look like in 2026?