Aman Khan: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm really happy you shared that. And it reminds me, I'm just going to go on a tangent here, I want to get your take on this, I had this kind of hot take a month ago or so, there's this sense that as AI tooling emerged, that product managers are screwed. Why do you need product managers when you could just build things, engineers could use all these tools, designers? What's the point of a PM in a world where AI can just build things for you? And I realized it's exactly the opposite, that you may not need any other function if you have a PM, because if you think about it, what are these AI tools amazing at? They're amazing at building things. You tell them what to build, they build them. The hardest part becomes knowing what to build, finding opportunities, problems people need solved, and then articulating it very clearly to an AI tool, what to build. And then having the taste and sense of what is good and great and what will work in the market. And that's exactly the job of a product manager. So I'm curious to hear your take if you agree with that, basically that PMs are the best positioned function to thrive in this world? Yeah, I totally believe that. I think that there's a feeling that executives might have or VPs of companies might have of like we need to get into AI, but the challenge is that there's this inclination towards doing the same thing that's working so far. And so I think the role of an AI PM in this type of organization is really to be the representative of how can we use these tools to their highest leverage. And so if you combine the earlier notes of, you know what this technology is capable of, you know the customer problems deeply, you're the representative of the customer at the company, you're really in the best position to get the point across of what should go and get built. And I think that's a really powerful position to be in at a company. And then I'll actually build on one of the core product skill sets that you mentioned on your podcast too, which is influence. And what these tools really allow you to do is up level, like max out that influence, meaning you can now communicate ideas, coming back to the prototype note to design, you can communicate ideas to engineering, and you can communicate ideas to the higher ups at the company around what should go and get built. So I think when you're able to translate the idea to the person that you're trying to communicate it to, these tools are really incredible at that. And I think it allows an AI product manager to be super high leverage. So to me it's like, I totally agree, being an AI product manager feels like the highest leverage position you could be in at the company right now, especially in the age of AI. Awesome. Okay, I'm glad we agree there. And what you just mentioned, we were talking about Mihika before we started recording, and one of her superpowers and we'll link to her episode is that she is designer engineer PM, she can just do all of it. And that partly has been why she has been so successful at Figma and influencing leadership to build these products that they were like, nah, I don't know if we need a slides product. And so now everyone can be a Mihika basically that you can build and design as a PM. So anyway, I think we've gone down that road far enough. I want to shift a little bit to talking about how to thrive as an AI PM. Say you got into this role, you're building with AI tools, or you're building platforms for folks to build on. Let me ask this, let me try it this way. What have you seen separates the typical AI product manager from say the top 5% AI product managers?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.