# Product Manager Practices for Delegating Work to Generative AI: "Accountability must not be delegated to non-human actors"

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02504/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15597/) (2026)
- [How Do Practitioners Build SE Agents? Insights from a Mixed-Methods Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10856/) (2026)
- ["Nobody Did This": Contribution, Originality, and Accountability in Agent-Mediated Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26387/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative AI (GenAI) is changing the nature of knowledge work, particularly for Product Managers (PMs) in software development teams. While much software engineering research has focused on developers' interactions with GenAI, there is less understanding of how the work of PMs is evolving due to GenAI. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study at Microsoft, a large, multinational software company: surveying 885 PMs, analyzing telemetry data for a subset of PMs (N=731), and interviewing a subset of 15 PMs. We contribute: (1) PMs' current GenAI adoption rates, uses cases, and perceived benefits and barriers and; (2) a framework capturing how PMs assess which tasks to delegate to GenAI; (3) PMs adaptation practices for integrating GenAI into their roles and perceptions of how their role is evolving. We end by discussing implications on the broader GenAI workflow adoption process and software development roles.