Aman Khan: prediction

Transcript context

…So what I love about this is basically, I wouldn't say the hack to get hired as an AI PM, but just the way you will come across as clearly this person is worth paying attention to. You've actually built things with AI like actual products, especially now that it's much easier to do as. You can use tools like the ones you mentioned, Cursor, v0, Replit. You can storyboard out your ideas using the stuff you mentioned, Midjourney, DALL-E and things like that. So I love that, it's super tactical. So it's almost like if you're applying for an AI PM role and you don't have products that you have built and ideally put out into the world, you're not going to have a good time. I actually think it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before. So let me hit on that point a little bit more, which is before you actually probably needed to have more of a foundation and background in machine learning to get a shot at one of these companies building AI products. They required a depth of knowledge in machine learning and types of models, and you were probably more deeply involved in what should the training data look like and the split of the data and how do I launch this thing and all of this infrastructure. But really now, an AI product manager is someone who's building experiences around or for other AI product people. And so an example there would be, there are these incredible videos that are being put out right now on YouTube on how to build an app in an hour. And I credit Greg Isenberg, he's really pioneered some of this format of he'll show up and just like, here's how I built a product within 45 minutes and how you use the same tools we just described. And I have this tongue in cheek example a little bit too that's pretty relevant, which was I was trying to describe Replit to someone, to a friend of mine, who actually was basically saying, I don't really have time to learn another tool right now. It feels like there's so much in the space and I think there's really nothing better than just showing someone what's possible. So I open up my phone and Replit, you can just go to as a URL on your phone. And what you can do is type in a prompt to their Replit agent and it will literally build a website for you and host it within a matter of seconds. And what's really funny is I just built this example of build me a signup page for this newsletter. And it did actually a pretty reasonable job on first pass, but there's things you want to do to keep iterating on it. So then it prompted again, oh, make it look a little bit nicer, use these colors. And within five minutes, I had a working prototype for a signup page that I built on my phone. That would not have been possible even a year ago. And I think the way that the technology is, trending is things will keep getting easier, and as a product manager, your curiosity is going to keep pushing you forward so that you can be the person out there saying, hey, did you see this cool thing that I just pulled up? And you're really the one that's almost the expert on what's the cool new thing that you can go and apply at your company. So I think that's really part of the role too, is being interested, genuinely curious of the space too. 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?…

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