Nikhyl Singhal: prediction

Transcript context

…We're going to talk about, of the people that are doing best, what are they doing differently? But before we get there, let's think about the future of where things are heading. You talked about a bunch of the things that have already changed and how different the world of product management is. What do you think will change further in the next couple years to give people a sense of where things are heading? Yeah, I had this meetup last Thursday and it was a fun meetup. I have a group of about 125 heads of products, and we tend to gather once a month in San Francisco. During this meetup, we took an approach where lots of people were building things for their own companies or on their own to help themselves with productivity. We said, "Hey, why don't we do a show and tell? Why don't we just have you, if you're a head of product, just show things that are interesting, that are worth explaining." We had a startup go up and show what they're doing, and then we had some insights companies and some late stage companies. It was a few things that were really palpable. One was, there was so much joy in the audience that people were like, "Oh, I've been building this thing and let me show you." Everyone had their laptop and they were one-upping each other and they were like, "Your chief of staff does that. My chief of staff does this thing." That builds on my point that people are having fun being hands-on. But the second thing is that the way they talk about how product decisions are made, the way they talked about how prioritization is determined, the way they talked about how information moves within the company, looked like a completely foreign animal from anything that I had experienced when I was working a few years back. I got up on stage and I said, "If you think about how we work right now and how you folks are all talking about using agents in your enterprise, how you're using chief of staff apps to essentially drive more productivity. How all of you are essentially spending all your time just focusing on judgment and you're spending all your time taking anything that can be obsoleted and writing software around it." I think none of that was even in the language, even in the vernacular 12 months ago. Now, what is it going to look like in 12 months? Everyone had a pause and they're like, "Yeah, it was impossible to anticipate what this conversation would look like 12 months ago." It's pretty hard to understand where things are going. But I would say, I think maybe I'll answer your question around where things are going in the next couple years based on how I think companies are going to change and how people are going to change. I think on the company side, I think that, and then maybe I'll slant it more towards product for a second. Product leaders will increasingly get paid and be asked to drive judgment, and then be the tip of the sphere on trying to essentially obsolete everything else through software, through AI, through agents. This is partly why there's a lot of excitement, because just to be very honest with you and you were a PM and I was a PM, most of the stuff that you didn't like doing are the things that AI is really taking a real crack at. I think that's super interesting. I think that there's a ton of that change that's going to happen. ost of the stuff that you didn't like doing are the things that AI is really taking a real crack at. I think that's super interesting. I think that there's a ton of that change that's going to happen. Some companies are doing it now, some companies will do it, but within two years I think most of these companies will obsolete all the mechanical parts of building product. I think that there will be 10 to a hundred times more changes that will be presented to products than ever before, because now the cost of testing something, the cost of changing is going to be much, much lower. When things are changing that rapidly, that judgment piece becomes pretty much paramount.…

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