Your job changed. You didn't.

The wave that shrank your job title is creating new ones faster than companies can fill them. You have spent years running discovery, shipping products, and herding stakeholders - and suddenly every interesting job posting demands "AI experience" you don't have. Maybe the layoff already happened. Maybe you're watching it circle. Either way, the fear says you're starting from zero, and the fear is wrong. Almost nobody is ahead of you. AI transformation as a discipline is barely three years old, and companies have learned - expensively - that AI projects don't fail for lack of engineers. They fail because nobody picked the right problem, defined what "working" meant, or managed the humans. That is your entire career. What's missing is the AI layer on top, and the AI layer is the smaller half. This book treats your career change the way a product manager would: as a project with a plan, a budget, a portfolio, and a deadline. In six months, at 10-20 hours a week and a total budget of about $500, you will:

• Learn the landscape - what AI transformation actually means, every role on an AI project, and exactly what the AI product manager owns versus data science and engineering
• Master the concepts - LLMs, prompts, RAG, agents, and evaluation, each translated into plain English with zero code required
• Build real proof - five portfolio projects you can create without permission or a job, from a prompt library to a working document Q&A system to an AI governance pack
• Earn the credentials employers notice - a named, priced, sequenced certification stack of roughly $350-400, with an honest read on what certs do (pass screens) and don't (win jobs)
• Reword the experience you already have - before/after resume translations and a LinkedIn rebuild, without a word of exaggeration
• Run the search like a pipeline - a week-by-week six-month master timeline, a twelve-week fast track, and an interview playbook for the AI product roles being created right now