Product judgment is the learned ability to make good decisions under ambiguity about what software should do, for whom, how simply it can do it, and whether the resulting artifact is actually good.
In the agentic era, that matters even more. When AI agents handle more of the implementation, the scarce skill is no longer simply writing the code.
Software outcomes depend partly on implementation capability and partly on product judgment. A capability is more differentiating insofar as differences in that capability account for a larger share of differences in outcomes across comparable teams. If AI compresses cross-team differences in implementation capability more than it compresses differences in product judgment, without increasing the relative causal importance of implementation enough to offset that compression, then product judgment will become relatively more differentiating. To the extent AI produces those conditions, product judgment is becoming a more important differentiating human capability in software development.