Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise)

0:00 what if the product manager came to the meeting with prototypes what if you come to the design team and instead of a PRD you actually already have your mocks with AI it's super feasible for a product manager to come to a meeting and say hey I already have some ideas here I wanted to mock them up this way they're probably wrong but at least the starting point now looks a little bit higher resolution for people that want to say

0:22 pivot their career to be an aipm what helped you move in that direction it's almost counterintuitive but I actually think it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before there are these incredible videos that are being put out right now on YouTube on how to build an app in like an hour that would not have been possible even a year ago before you actually probably needed to have more of a foundation and background in machine

0:47 learning to get a shot at one of these companies building AI products what have you seen separates the typical AI product manager from say the top 5% really the question you have to ask yourself is today my guest is Aman KH Aman is director of product at arise Ai and over the course of his PM career he's focused on Building Products in the AI space including at Spotify on the ml platform team and rolls at Cru zipline and apple

1:19 he's also very intentionally stayed an individual contributor which feels like a trend especially with the rise of AI tooling making PMS much more productive and companies cutting back on management layers and so in our conversation we go deep on these two topics how to get into Ai and how to become an AI product manager what the different types of AI product managers are how to thrive as an aipm and what Aman has learned about how to be successful and continue his career

1:47 as an individual contributor PM longterm when asked people on Twitter and Linkedin who their favorite individual contributor product manager is Aman was near the very top of the list and so I was really excited to get him on the podcast and to learn from his experience if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast

2:09 tremendously with that I bring you Aman con Aman thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast amazing thank you so much for having me Lenny it is truly an honor to be here so let me give a little context on this conversation I put out a call on Twitter and Linkedin asking people for their favorite IC product managers and you came up near the top of the list across both Twitter and Linkedin so I knew that

2:37 I needed to meet you and you're super interesting in a couple ways one is if I think about the vend diagram of some of the most interesting Trends in product right now you're kind of at the center of AI and stay in ic an individual contributor for a long time and my sense is a lot of PMS are thinking about how do I get into Ai and how do I do more AI work two the there's

2:59 this trend of just like ic's super ic's less managers and you've been doing AI for a long time you've been in ic for basically your whole career very intentionally so with that there's a few things I want to spend our time on one is how to get into AI how to become an aipm essentially two is how to thrive as an aipm and three is how to thrive as an IC outside of AI but I know AI plays

3:24 into that Broadley how does that sound yeah that sounds great I mean I I think that was like a crazy moment of just seeing how many people piled on to that to those posts and then you know some of our discussion back and forth on on this thread and I I thought it was like super interesting it was like this combination of you know product and AI where I I just happens to be like I think where

3:48 the space is headed or you know what what seems to be catching so much attention so yeah I'm super excited to dive into into that and try and share a little bit what you know that I've learned along the way as well this episode is brought to you by pendo the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product with all the tools

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6:08 when you go to vana.com Lenny that's v.com Lenny let's start with getting into aipm becoming an aipm there's this term that we hear a lot in aipm there's like boot cam certifications become an aipm what's the simplest way for people to understand what that means other than just it's a PM that works with AI is there something more concrete that you think about when you see that title so product manager is responsible for bringing together you

6:38 know design engineering the BISD people operations sales what have you at the organization and going and shipping impact so you're responsible for representing the customer and ultimately getting to a solution to solve their problems I think in addition to that the AI component is I really break it down into maybe three flavors of AI management so the first is AI platform PMs and that's kind of where I find myself these are people who are building tools for AI Engineers so

7:10 for context you know I work at a company called arise we're a observability and evaluation platform for artificial intelligence we've been around for a few years we started with machine learning and you know sort of ranking regression classification model it's basically any recommender system or blackbox you might find in an application and we've slowly been translating pivoting over into broadly speaking any type of AI these days it's a lot of large language models and so I think

7:38 that you know with the rise of all of these tools that are being built on top of you know open AI apis or anthropic apis basically any tools on top of the large language model providers there's it's actually pretty clunky like these these interfaces are pretty new we've only really had people building on top of large langage models for a couple of years and so the whole Space is really nent and the tools that you would use to

8:02 build on top of and understand is my app doing the thing I expect it to do is is really really early so that's sort of the space I'm I'm focused on around you know enabling AI Engineers to understand the impact and you know if you're an AI pm at another company one of our customer companies you understand that you know when you go to leadership that my my app is actually doing something and doing what I expect it to do on the

8:26 end business I think on top of that there's also AI product PMs and AI product PMS are really the flavor of PM where the core product is centered around Ai and an example of that would actually be something like a chat GPT it's the core kind of tech or actually another great example would be you know you had RIS on and notebook LM is a really great example of that too and what I mean by that is the core

8:53 experience is enabled by the model underneath the hood that's sort of the secret sauce it's like you you know you have these researchers and Engineers really pushing the boundaries of Technology forward in Ai and then your job is really to package that technology and make it consumable for either a business or Enterprise or a consumer to really utilize that Tech in some way so that's sort of the AI powered PM role where the core competency the core Tech

9:22 is really the you know what you're packaging and distributing I think the the third type of pm here is really you know the one we were talking about a little bit earlier which is this concept of like you're an AI powered PM and to that end I think that you're going to be enabled by AI technology across the entire stack of the role you might already be doing as a product manager and we'll get into like a little

9:45 bit what that means as well have some ideas and thoughts around that but really what what an AI powered product manager in my mind does is you're not really responsible for building the core model from the ground up maybe you don't have the access access to the resources or research teams that you might have like a Google or open AI but you can still utilize large language models or models of any kind really to build an

10:10 experience that is best for your customers and that's really I think where a lot of PMS will also start trending towards as AI becomes more pervasive from a technology standpoint it almost feels a little bit like AI will be as common as the database to some degree for SAS applications and so I think that's really where you know if you break it down I kind of see in the future you know in the near future most

10:34 PMS are probably going to be one flavor of an AI product manager either building tools for other PMS or other other companies that are deploying AI maybe you're behind one of you know The Cutting Edge models that's going to go and you know be the next notebook LM or you're building around you know a Transformer of some kind or GPT model that's doing some part of the work that you would want to do to solve a

10:58 customer's problem let's actually make it even more real what are some tools you use in your PM work to be more efficient and productive I'm obsessed with cursor I'm obsessed with repet these are tools I use all the time to just really build a prototype and try to understand myself what's possible that kind of is is super enabling for a product manager to show up with a functional prototype it's not going to be the thing you go and ship and

11:23 production but at least the buttons work and maybe it's like wired up you know reasonably correctly to tell to tell a story there's a really great tool a lot of folks might be familiar with versel if you're trying to create a landing page so versell now has a sort of starting point called vzer which allows you to type in a prompt and get a really beautiful landing page on top of that and so you it doesn't have to be

11:49 just a landing page if you prompt it correctly and iterate with it you can actually get a pretty good working UI as well so I think that kind of gives you a good starting point for some of those initial mockups you might be having with the design team I also think if you're designing interfaces you might want to use AI for graphic design perhaps you're trying to come up with a logo or you're trying to come up with something that

12:12 you know resembles almost like the user story you want to tell in some way and make it like a visual user story I think that becomes so much more approachable with tools like mid Journey or even Dolly and it's really at at your fingertips to how well can you prompt this thing to get you the output that you want so to me it really depends I think if you're an experiences company you're a little you're you might Trend a little

12:35 bit more visual tools like image generation might be really powerful too so that's one example and then I think even for like 3D modeling you know there's some emerging tools there I'm definitely not the expert on that domain but there's a lot in terms of you know if you're building physical products that's gotten a lot easier as well okay awesome I want to come back to kind of where we started here so you shared three types of AI product

13:00 managers we've been focusing on the third which I wanted to get to and I love that we went there which is just how to be more productive efficient better as a PM using all these amazing tools that now exist the first two are just to refresh folks memory one is becoming kind of basically an infrastructure PM that's something that you're doing basically building like the base models and tools and then the other is building the ux and actual like

13:25 consumer experience of a product that happens to integrate AI to make it better so I'm guessing when people think aipm that's probably where they're like I want to build products that deeply integrate AI for people that want to say pivot their career to be an aipm what helped you move in that direction slash what would you recommend folks try to do and learn to be able to get a job in one of those two buckets now I I feel a little bit like an

13:55 outsider on the space myself so I I studied you know I wasn't related at all you know the field I studied was mechanical engineering I didn't really take computer science courses or you know had to learn a lot of that on my own and I I didn't take like machine learning or AI courses either I don't have a PhD or Ms in the subject but coming back to the to to both types of product managers you just described

14:17 there's the AI PM who's building infrastructure for other AI engineers and there's the AI you know power product manager who's building AI products really and I think in both you care about the End customer at the end of the day you really want to be in love with the problem I know Yuri said that that was like a great great great quote in my mind as well of if you're in love with the problem you're trying to

14:43 push the boundaries of what's possible with technology to solve that problem and for me I just I I really became kind of obsessed with trying to help really technical users AI Engineers data scientists with problems that I thought were you know not super challenging like how do I I build a dashboard to understand how my model is working that can't be that hard to do right and then as you get deeper the complexity sort of starts to emerge in that part of the

15:08 stack and you have to realize you're you're pushing you're pushing you're actually responsible for pushing technology forward in some ways you're trying to see what's possible and keep pushing the space forward to solve that customer problem I think the same thing is true for AI product you know product managers meaning you know you're really trying to design the best customer experience really solve your customers problems and I think if you are obsessed with that and you spend time just trying

15:37 to realize what would an ideal experience look like that I'm trying to solve you'll kind of find tools along the way to help you know un unbox that really that that problem so I think if we like take take an example of that like let's imagine that you're you know you're working for a company that you know might might be having customers that have like customer support problems or people coming in with complaints and when you think about like the surface

16:01 area of customer support it's it's not that great like you usually have to you know type in some questions with a chatbot that's like WR routing you know perhaps incorrectly you know you to some document to go solve a problem or if you're trying to call in you have to like describe your problem but you're not really sure if you're being heard correctly you're there might be super long wait times and if you're the product manager of that experience I

16:27 think an ideal product experience really looks like a customer reaches you with a problem and you're able to really you know solve that problem for them and it doesn't really matter what's in between you kind of want to reduce the friction of that as much as possible and so now when you think okay let's assume that I'm starting with a phone call there's a ton of tools that that are starting to emerge and I think a really

16:50 cuttingedge one from the last couple weeks has been open AI releasing a realtime API and the real-time API is basically a voice API where you can provide some text and almost have this real time experience with a bot that is actually AI generated and if you use and if you're a consumer you can even try that out in the application yourself you can open up chat GPT and if you're a plus subscriber you can try this

17:16 Cutting Edge sort of voice chat bot experience and why is this interesting because if you're a consumer and you're and and you're trying out technology and you're trying out AI technology and trying to push the boundaries of what's possible I think can kind of have that like light bulb aha moment of I can take this thing that kind of feels like it's like early but it's could be something here and go take it to my team and say

17:39 you know maybe it's possible for us to use this thing and so I think that's really what this whole Space is about I want to underscore that it's really you know you're really driven by your own curiosity and your curiosity can push you in a lot of different directions in terms of the types of tools you might want to pick up or you know for yourself or even Implement in your own product so I think like it

18:04 it truly is this opportunity for for people to you know see what drives them and try and find the tools that that really help you know make that experience possible to pull on this thread a little bit more say someone wants to like apply I want to be an aipm there's kind of two questions here one is what do you recommend they specifically learn skill-wise technical wise to have some chance at becoming an aipm if that's like a Thing versus just

18:33 like hey just Europe PM build awesome products and they happen to integrate AI that might be the best solution like if that's your advice definitely say that I I think you're you're hitting on something on a point that's super relevant to today which is it almost feels you know really competitive now to be in Tech and to be a product manager and the struggle is you know really to your point what are the skills I should

18:57 have in the to you know to really kind of even apply for this role in the first place and then how do I stand out as an applicant I kind of feel like these are maybe two distinct things it's you kind of want to start with a foundation of what is what is machine learning what is AI what's the the the the knowledge that has really powered this evolution in technology and you kind of want to keep

19:20 driving in that direction with what are your interests so if there's really two Dimensions you're trying to understand okay what are the things I need to know and then how can I use that in the the problems I'm trying to solve or the industries that interest me so I think there's like this propensity of you want to be driven by that Curiosity so start you could start with your fundamentals of looking at videos on YouTube of

19:43 you know Andre karpathy talking about the foundation of lens it's this great amazing resource he put out this video you know a little while ago it's about an hour long but you know you could put it into notebook LM maybe get like a more sync version but the idea is that you can you know really understand the technology in terms of how it works and what the boundaries are and then I think that the other dimension is just

20:06 trying to use the tools to figure out yourself how can I push the boundaries of what's possible so I think the combination of those two things are really what Drive the skill level here there's no maybe maybe to bring this back to an earlier point there there is no program you know there's no college degree on product management so there definitely isn't a college degree on AI product management and so I think the way that you stand out is through

20:32 showing interest in the space and and building your own skill set and skilled stack around what is the foundation of AI and how do I apply it to the industry I'm interested in and that's actually related to the second point of how do I stand out as an applicant and it kind of feels like this moment where you can actually go and have a you know almost like a portfolio of products that you've tried to build and maybe they're just

20:56 prototypes but they really help you stand out to a hiring manager that might be deciding you know who's the person I want to bring on board and maybe like you know to zoom out for a sec as someone who's been a part of the like hiring process for AI PMS before I think the hiring process is really designed to understand sort of three things about a person and that's can this person do the job I'm hiring them to do are they

21:23 excited to do the work that we do here and do I like to work with them and so I think by having this portfolio where you've you you know if you have that Foundation of of AI and ml of at least being able to describe what the technology can do and then you have this portfolio of products who actually answering both of those questions for the hiring manager even before they talk to you so you're kind of shortcutting

21:48 the process by showing them how you think and how you like to spend time in what your interests are and hobbies are and then all you have to do is really nail that phone interview and you know as long as you're you know like kind of match the culture of the company I think you've actually shortcut it part one and part two which is what most interview processes are designed to do which is why they're like this sort of

22:10 you know you have to go talk to like three different people to see can you do marketing can you do engineering can you do you know like core product management and so I that's really my advice is really you could start with building your skilled stack and you know starting with the foundation up let your curiosity drive you and then turn that into a portfolio that you can use as an applicant to stand out so what I love

22:31 about this is basically the I wouldn't say the the hack to get hired as an aipm but just like the way you will come across as clearly this person is worth paying attention to is you've actually built things with AI like actual products especially now that it's much easier to do as a you know you can use tools like the ones you mentioned cursor vzer repet you can storyboard out your ideas using the stuff you mentioned maj and

22:58 Dolly and things like that so I love that it's super tactical so it's almost like if you're applying for an aipm role and you don't have a products that you have built and ideally like put out into the world you're not going to have a good time I actually think it's it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before so let me kind of hit on that point a little bit more which is before you

23:22 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 you know types of models and you were probably more deeply involved in like what should this 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

23:47 someone who's building experiences around or for other AI product people and so I I'll kind of you know 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 like an hour and and and you know I I credit Greg Eisenberg he's really kind of like pioneered some of this format of you know he'll he'll show up and just like here's how I built a

24:12 product within like 45 minutes and kind of how you use the same tools we just described and I kind of have this like tongue-and-cheek example a little bit too that's that's pretty relevant which was I was trying to describe repet to someone to to a friend of mine who actually you know was basically saying oh like I don't really have time to learn another tool right now there's it feels like there's so much in the space and I think there's really nothing

24:35 better than just showing someone what's possible so I open up my phone and repet you can just go to as a URL on your 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 kind of built this like example of like build me a signup page for this newsletter

24:58 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 you kind of prompt it 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

25:18 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 try you you know that that I just pulled up and you know 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

25:36 the role too is like being interested genuinely C curious of the space too I'm really happy you shared that and it's 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 that there's this sense that as AI tooling emerged that product managers are screwed why do you need product manag when you could just build things engineers could use all these tools

26:02 designers like 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 articula it

26:28 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 like exactly the job of a product manager so I'm curious to hear take if you agree with that basically that PMS are the best positioned function to thrive in this world yeah I I totally believe that I think that there's a sort of like feeling that Executives might have or

26:53 like VPS companies might have of like we need to get into AI but the the challenge is that you know there's this inclination towards you know doing the same thing that's working so far and so I think the role of an AIP 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 kind of combine the earlier notes of like you know you know what this

27:18 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 that's a really powerful you know position to be in at a company and then I'll kind of actually build on like one of the core product skill sets that you know people you mentioned on your podcast too which is influence and what

27:43 this these tools really allow you to do is like uplevel like max out that influence meaning you can now communicate ideas kind of coming back to the Prototype note to design you can communicate ideas engineering and you can communicate ideas to the higher ups of the company around what should go and get built so I think you know when you can when you're able to translate the idea to the person that you're trying to communicated to these tools are really

28:08 incredible at that and I think it it allows an AI product manager to be super high leverage so to me it's like I I totally agree like 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 mahika before we started recording and one of her superpowers and wellink

28:31 to her episode is that she is designer engineer PM she can just do a lot of all of it and that partly has been why she was has been so successful at figma and influencing leadership to build these products that they were like I don't know if we need a slice product and so now everyone can be a Mika basically that you can build and design as a PM so anyway I think we've gone down that road

28:55 far enough I want to shift a little bit to talking about how to thrive as an aipm 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 kind of this let me try it this way what have you seen separates the typical AI product manager from say the top five percent AI product managers we kind of talked about like what are AI product managers you know how do you

29:23 build AI Power Products around what the fundamental technology is I think there was this really interesting moment where you know about two years ago actually almost roughly to this time Chachi BT launches and I think everyone who kind of tried it out you know was was pretty impressed by a couple of things there was the interface was super easy to use it felt really intuitive the model was pretty capable it felt almost like humanlike of course that was actually an

29:50 earlier model that once even available today and you when you look back on it it's almost like looking at like the old iPhone or something like you kind of have to like have this moment of wow that was really impressive at the time but now if you try to use it you're like this thing sucks you know like it's like it doesn't even do half the stuff I you you get kind of condition to you know

30:07 the technology continuing to get better but when that moment happened and it did kind of feel like this iPhone moment around AI products it was really interesting to see what happened next and what I mean by that is you know we sit at a in sort of in the landscape at a place where we get to see where a lot of other companies are building so we have you know customers that are super well known household Brands Spotify

30:35 and instacart and these sorts of companies that people love and use every single day and what ended up happening was you know we we talked to a lot of folks of like well what are what are you doing around you know building around this technology this really gamechanging sort of shift in Ai and the first thing that everyone seemed to build was actually another chat PT but on top of their own data and for some reason every

31:02 everyone gravitated towards this particular use cases all the AI product managers I knew were like oh we're building like an internal chatbot on top of our knowledge base and it's going to be able to answer questions and it's going to be great and when you kind of look at like the the products that were built like how much usage do they really have is is pretty I think like not very well understood like was that the right

31:23 thing to do so coming back to your earlier question like how do you how do you kind of go and Thrive as a you know be a top 5% aipm versus you know maybe an aipm that isn't as Stellar I actually think it's kind of coming back to that to that earlier point of don't do what everyone else is doing just because it feels intuitive to go and like replicate this interface that feels really great and feels you know everyone's bought in

31:49 because they're familiar with it like it you really have to think is this the thing our business needs right now is this the problem that we need to go and solve and I think if you look deeper at that you'll actually find that the interface for AI might look really different it won't necessarily look like a chatbot it might look like you're trying to optimize or speed up a part of the process that humans have to do today

32:14 that you can make their life easier and for us that was Data analysis we have to look at a lot of data to make decisions within our own company and so we decided to try to automate that there is there's sort of you know we we did Al ship a small chat plot just to understand how the tech work but on top of that our interface around AI looks so so different and I think that a lot of The

32:34 Cutting Edge sort of experiences around AI kind of look like that too they don't really always resemble chat Bots and and I think that that's really the question you have to ask yourself is what's the right interface when I'm designing a a product like this so what I'm hearing is if your team is building something that's very similar to some other to a foundational models product for example probably a red flag probably not going to be h opportunity so optimize for

33:00 things that feel different and new anything else you want to add there because I have a question yeah I I think there's there's like so that that's that's almost like a point of like what did people do for the last two years and now there's this moment of this actually kind of happening again and this moment is sort of happening around the term of like AI agents and I think again like you know I think if you really look

33:23 at it like I again I I actually bring up like Yuri's Point again because I was listening to that episode I thought that was so insightful of like he gets so many emails every single day of like we're AI for this we're building an AI agent for that but again you're sort of trying to fit this technology to solve a problem that you know you're not really describing the problem you're describing the solution an AI agent to do something

33:45 so if you look at it you know does it really I'd really ask yourself does it make sense to build an AI agent within our company or is it just better to allow the foundation model companies to build build this agentic layer within their technology and then your job is to make that experience so amazingly seamless in your existing product that it doesn't even feel like AI in the first place and I think that's really powerful that's the area where product

34:12 managers can truly innovate because let's be honest you're probably not going to have those these Cutting Edge researchers that can go and design and model from the ground up or maybe design some new technique to build a next agent you know framework but what you can do is take that technique technology and find a way to apply it in your organization and that's where I think the role of the aipm really stands out this episode is brought to you by

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35:37 use p a r a n.com I imagine a lot of product leaders are hearing this and be like thank God I need everyone on my team to hear this because I am guessing every pm and every company's like want is like looking and proposing all these ideas all these AI based ideas just because it's like oh we got to do AI here here's an idea here's an idea and there's all these people chasing AI products and so I think this

36:02 advice is really important is and this has come out a number of times people just try to keep reminding folks focus on the problem you're solving and AI is a tool to solve it not AI for blank just because how have you found ways to find really interesting actually good ideas for how to leverage AI within your company or companies you've seen as like hackathons is it like here's we have our goals and just like make sure there's AI

36:26 parts to a solution is there anything practically that you find helpful in finding good ideas that are AI oriented there's sort of like three things you could do in your company that I think will really you know if if you try to implement this tomorrow you'd probably see start seeing those ideas coming back so the first one is I you you actually brought up an earlier point of how do I measure you know what what what should I be measuring here and I

36:55 think that PMS kind of gravitate towards me metrics and I actually think that you know every aipm actually needs a metric and every PM within a business is tasked with moving some business metric but there actually isn't one for building prototypes with AI which is really interesting I've like talked to so many companies and I'm like how do you measure what the impact is of AI within your business they're like oh well we're not expecting it to like move a business

37:19 metric it's not moving Revenue so then how do you really measure if what you're doing is working and I think that's where you kind of need a metric of like how many shots are you taking in the first place and that kind of ties into like the the next point which is I think hackathons are great I think that getting people to be Hands-On in the first place it really removes that feeling that this this technology is not

37:41 approachable so the goal is really to get everyone in the organization to try to use this thing and I think that's really actually a great position for an aipm to be in as well so you often times you know I think I think I think there's like this aversion sometimes to hackathons because like take away taking away from company time but what you can do is try to come with some ideas of problems to be solved and then see like

38:02 how can I use AI to actually solve those problems what you're going to come out with is maybe a list of 10 problems and nine of them you Tred to apply AI towards and doesn't work it's like this thing doesn't work as well as I thought it would or it's like you know you're trying to get a very specific answer but it doesn't actually lead to you know like AI doesn't actually do a good job of that I actually have an example here

38:25 of we actually did our own hackathon a couple weeks ago and the engineering team had all these ideas and one of them was this slackbot that actually alerted a person that was on call for a problem so we thought it was going to be so simple like if someone posted in like a support Channel hey I'm having a problem with this thing the slackbot would take that question and actually ping the right person we thought oh this is going

38:48 to be great this is a perfect use case for AI we'll kind of give access to this table and we'll look at problems classify them and then P the right person it turns out that's actually really hard problem to do because there's so much context that is missing in you know well this this person was working on this problem two weeks ago but now they're working on this other project and some other team took over and I think the challenge there is

39:10 really like identifying the right problems to solve in the first place and a good intuition to build around that is through hackathons through coming with problems and then seeing where the ideas actually stick versus where they actually you know aren't aren't super great and then I think the last kind of Point here is really obsessing about the details of the user experience in the first place and you know you were looking for problems to go and be solved with with

39:40 AI but I think part part of that is really looking at like what are successful AI products today and you can probably you know try a few name a few but you know a good example of that might be and and really like if if I kind of zoom out like the goal is really to find experiences where AI is actually magical and what do they get right so like an example of that might be like

40:04 there's this like fun like funny anecdote of what what a lot of people are trying to do with AI is like automate the job away entirely and there's there's this story of you know Betty Crocker like actually you know launching this this cake mix where all you have to do is like mix water and they all you have to do is mix water and you could you know kind of bake a cake with just like one

40:27 ingredient all you needed was this cake mix and it turns out that actually like tank their sales so all they had to do is you know basically change the instruction so that all you have to do is add eggs and that one thing kind of created this effect where they're scale they're s skyrocketed because they realized that the customer actually wants to have a little bit bit of control over the experience and you can kind of see that even now if you've like

40:49 taken you know if you've been if you've been able to like take a wh or a self-driving car like the car is fully self-driving but you can still control the air conditioning you can still control the music and so you want to kind of leave some knobs and levers for your customer to feel like they're still in control of the experience and that's kind of like the Ikea effect applied to AI like people feel more empowered when

41:10 they can when they actually have an impact on the end experience versus everything being taken care of them so that's just like one Insight we realized from looking at successful AI products versus ones that try to automate everything away and I think if you're like looking at the space you're going to find so many more examples like that that's such an important point that even if you can build a product that is fully automated you may not want to and that

41:31 Betty Crocker example is really interesting it reminds me of like blue apron and all these food food making I have I have a friend who's like tell who told me that he cooks he's cooking a lot these days and just like finding all his time to cook and then turns out he's using blue apron and it it feels to you like you're cooking and you can tell people hey I'm cooking a lot but but it's not you know it's it's not quite

41:52 the same yeah actually if you were mind I could like prob on that like that's a really interesting point with like blue a because like if you look at that product what's the problem that they're trying to solve is it are they trying to get people to be fed or like you know eat food I don't think so actually like I think if you're really trying to solve that particular problem you'd probably build something Clos to like door Dash

42:16 which is just you press a button and food shows up and blue apron on the other hand is trying to get people to feel like they're getting closer to cooking or feeling closer to the experience of making something and I think that's that's sort of what you know really amazing AI products do as well they're making your experience or the the product you know AI makes your product easier to use and it brings the barrier to Creation down and I think

42:40 that's really what it's good at not necessarily just trying to automate the the problem away such an important Point again coming back to your main point here is just focus on the problem you're solving in AI could help you solve it may may not okay we went on tangent from advice you sharing on what separates typical aipm from 5% top 5% PMs and what else you what else you got what else you got on that list oh actually I'll kind

43:09 of Steal This one a little bit from our friend Kevin Yin who I think he had this advice when he was on on a your pod which really resonated with me actually at a personal level which is you have to be able to walk and chew gum so as an aipm you're your job is is not to go and ship AI products it's to go solve customers problems I think we've come back to that a little bit but

43:34 you're constantly going to be you know pushed by your team and your company to go and solve a business metric you know move a business metric in some way the goal though is to make space for the other things we were kind of talking about which is prototyping you trying the tools firsthand yourself making space for your team to you know have hackathons and try the tools themselves as well breaking down product experiences that are really great so as

44:03 an example like we did a tear down of the notebook LM product just yesterday as part of our company so we like live streamed it and we're going to do this you know probably every week or two where we'll take a Cutting Edge AI product and have a webinar around it and trying to break down how it works and the goals there are you know to really understand the space better ourselves but by the way none of those three

44:23 things are going to move your kpi or business metric right so I think I come back to that point of you have to be able to walk and CH gam you have to continuously deliver a customer value while also creating space to iterate and fail and find that the experiment that you tried to launch and people really excited about may not work but you know in the process you learn something and that's I think like a really powerful

44:48 takeaway which is to really stand out as an aipm you have to accept this technology is changing really fast it's you know you might might think it's going to do something great or maybe you have a bad product experience it's like I think you had a point earlier as well which was like you know to to be a really great chef you have to you know you have to have a lot you know occasionally you're gonna have a bad

45:08 meal I think that's gonna have this that's going to be the same thing here with your AI product diet you're gonna try some bad experiences you're G to have some some failures but the goal is to keep iterating and that's how AI gets better I think that's how companies can deploy AI better too so don't give up on the Northstar just find ways to make space to have ai sort of propagate within your organization and that's I think really

45:31 Stellar aipm do that I feel like as matter for of walking and chewing gum doesn't communicate the difficulty of what you're of Kevin's now that I think about it of what he's trying to describe doesn't feel hard to walk and chew gum I wonder what a better metaphor would be yeah well I think and Bubbles maybe gum Bubbles and dance yeah yeah I don't know why that is the like that's the expression but it's always L to like describe something hard

46:00 that you realize like you can't do more than one thing anyway we don't want need to solve it right now okay so be I want to talk about being an IC being successful as an IC before we get to that is there anything else along these lines that you think would be really valuable to share or get into about how to be successful as an aipm specifically that we haven't touched on I know we've talked about a

46:22 lot of things now your organization might want to do something and you're you're trying to get them to do something else and that's really the the challenge in this type of role is there is so much Buzz there is so much excitement around AI that knowing what the right thing to build is really what this job needs to kind of convey so I think when you take all of that signal and you try and put it together and

46:45 solve that customer problem that's really what being a successful aipm is at the end of the day so that's really I think that's that's the the hard part about the job but also maybe the most important impactful part of it I love that okay so let's put it AI to the side for a moment but not totally off to the side I imagine we're going to touch on it in this next area and this next area

47:07 is talking about how to be a really successful IC you've very consciously decided to stay an individual contributor and not move up the ladder of product management and director and VP and all these things and there's a specific skill set that it takes to be successful and to thrive as an icpm most people either can't move up the chain and become really successful ic's long term or they don't want to and they or don't even think it's an option so

47:33 here's my question here what are some of the biggest habits mindsets lessons you've learned about how to be really successful as an I see long term when I think about my own like career Journey here it's so much of that comes down to like what drives you personally and I'm just obsessed with solving that you know customer's problems and so to do that you know that might mean I have to spend a lot more time trying to get into the weeds

48:00 and get into the details so I think that there's kind of really three areas you know kind of like three things that come back to me of like what the hard part about being an icpm is and how you can kind of break through that so I first want to like set the tone a little bit which is being icpm is really hard it's it's you know I made a point earlier of like it's Bec easier to break into

48:27 product management to some degree if you can use these tools and now you have all these tools at your disposal to go build an next prototype but I think the bar just got higher for product managers within a company and what the impact needs to be and by the way that's always going to compete with your you know being able to like jump on a quick call last minute or try to unblock someone or you know have some like internal

48:50 stakeholder discussion to figure out what to go do next and so I think the challeng is you know you have a really hard job there's constant signal things are constantly changing how do you really power through that so I think that there's really three things I think about there which are energy waiting versus wandering and then amplifying the signal to make a decision yeah so so maybe even just kick off like energy can I I really think

49:18 about this like this was maybe you know the one of the most important things I realized like working from our with our CEO a little bit over a year ago which was energy can count a lot when you're not sure which direction to go if you kind of show up to a meeting and you're you're bring a little bit more of that energy you'll find that like a lot of friction tends to go away versus if

49:40 you show up and you're a little bit you know a little bit down or a little bit you know not as infused of about an idea like people pick up on that and we're still dealing with people today and I think that you know even if you just change that mindset a little bit of bringing a little bit of that extra energy you'll find that that can actually break down barriers and people like the the conversation feels like

50:00 it's like flowing feels like a dinner table conversation versus a hard conversation even if it might be something about something tough so I think to me there's this concept of like when you're you know you might still be CH you know faced with this challenge of I'm not sure what the right decision is and I'm you know I'm struggling to really kind of you know do this analysis and really get something going and I think that I think except thing that

50:27 that happens to everyone it sort of feels like a product block as opposed to like a writer's block if that makes sense we're like you know as as a writer you might be trying to get to that like next paragraph and and as a product manager you're really trying to get to that next idea for that next Milestone so I can give you an exam like an example there as well which is yeah you know we had this moment a little

50:50 over a year ago where we were not sure which direction to take a product feature and we were we were kind of faced with this decision that felt pretty existential which is like how much do we want to you know invest in llms and like the sort of new wave of large language model Tech versus our what our existing customer base was and it wasn't immediately clear what the decision should be and so the energy I

51:15 kind of just brought was you know I'm just going to be our like outbound salesperson and just start writing LinkedIn messages to people that have the title AI in their LinkedIn profile so I just went on it and Linkedin and literally just started like finding ways to get them on a phone call so I'd like you know write some copy and iterate on it and I had to like sit with our sales team to like understand how do you how

51:35 do you do this like I maxed out my like five LinkedIn messages a day like what are you trying to do here and I think what what that really accomplished was sort of two things one you know I did kind of learn a little bit of like what goes into this role in terms of you know how to message our problem and product more you know in a way that actually got people engaged but two it also

51:56 demonstrat to the team that I was like willing to get into the details with them I was willing to spend time you know even when I was like trying to push on our day job of you know building a product and keeping it growing and I think that counts for a lot when the team is already feeling you know like they're not sure which direction to take something and so just being that like player coach and just having that

52:17 mentality of showing up bringing the energy can move the bar so much higher for the whole team to operate so that's kind of the the example I give of like you know you're kind of like being LeBron James like you're telling you're coaching people you're kind of like drawing up the play but you're also just trying to be you know like as involved in you know all of the tough stuff as well and and I see that happen I think

52:38 that that really comes from leadership from our CEO as well like you'll be tired I can tell but it's just when he shows up to a meeting like he just doesn't show it you just have to kind of bring that energy so what I'm hearing is there's kind of two things you're sharing here which is awesome so one is there's like actual energy in a meeting of staying positive and and energetic and then two is actually just doing the

53:00 thing to figure help solve the problem like getting into sales like becoming the salesperson potentially reaching out doing customer development in your own kind of going rogue a little bit in that first bucket what does it look like to bring the energy is it just like volume is it just like being bright I actually think this depends a lot on the person like I think that's actually like a personal personal thing so what I mean by that is like you know yeah I for

53:24 me that might mean like I'm showing up I'm super enthused I'm really like you know I'm bringing my version of energy but to other people that might mean you know smaller things like just asking how someone is doing trying to kind of keep keep the tone of the meeting more like positive I think to some degree so to different people that might resemble different things but I I actually think this comes back a little bit to an

53:48 earlier point of humans are really good at picking up on these like subtle signals with other people and you kind of want to just be put putting out this like subtle like energy where people feel like you are engaged you're in it you know 100% so I think that's part of it I think it's like the the ideas you know for other people to feel like you know you're bringing the energy level of the room up versus bringing it down I

54:13 have a I I had a PM I was working with at one point that is the epitome that every meeting he walks into he's just like solve some problems oh let's do this like he comes in just positive and and energized and just changes the whole I remember this like early lift anote I have some friends from like the earlier days at lift and I think this may have been in the self-driving car division but like they would literally

54:37 I'm not even kidding this was like their ritual where they would actually end the meetings with like the phrase make it happen and I thought that was so powerful because it's so simple but it's like all right we're going to do this was like one of their values and we're going to you know we walk away from a decision we're going to make it happen and I think even just as something as small as that could be like a

54:58 contribution back to the culture for your team and maybe there's like a point there of like building culture too like you get to determine the culture of the people around you you get to build the culture of the team and that can really work its way up like there there's top down culture there's values but you get to kind of Drive what you know people in the room are feeling and and I think that's really really

55:19 powerful as especially in the role of a PM where everyone kind of looks to the PM for making a decision or solving a problem even if it's a tough one to make but you know you get to kind of Drive the energy that that you're bringing to that so absolutely so okay so your first piece of advice for doing well and doing and thriving as an icpm is essentially that energy can count for a lot that if

55:43 things aren't actually going smoothly you can pull people through that by bringing energy which is both like meetings and being positive and bringing you know energizing folks in the into discussions and also just like doing the work yourself to like get to the core problem and helping people see that you're actually putting in your own effort and time to solve the problem yeah and and I like even just to Riff on that like second Point like you're you

56:12 know I think that there's a there's a there's this component of like when you are doing the thing with someone and you pair with them on a problem you have a lot more empathy for what they do as well because they'll describe to you like what's challenging or what's hard about that job and I think that there's this like feeling that at least that you know teams I've been a part of where like there there is no job that isn't

56:37 important right and so you kind of you know as a PM you're you're I I think if you're like spending that time with with someone like that that also that means that you're learning something from them and you're learning you're learning you know having empathy for what they might be doing day in and day out but you're also pushing back and contributing and trying to make you know the whole team kind of push along better as well

57:00 awesome so let's keep talking about other things you found helpful in helping you be really successful in icpm you mentioned this term wandering versus waiting maybe we go in that direction or if there's anything else I actually I think this one is so so powerful which is like the concept of waiting versus wandering and like to me this is this is super relatable again from the the standpoint of trying to figure out what to go do next so we kind

57:26 talked about like energy bringing energy but that still doesn't actually solve the problem of where should we go that's just the the latent like energy you're going to bring to solving a problem but like at the end of the day you as a product manager have to figure out where do things go what's the problem to be solved and how do we solve it really for a customer and I I like there's this like thought exercise of this like zoom

57:51 out of it you know it kind of feels a little bit like you know if you're you're all kind of like at a camp where you're trying to figure out okay where do we go send the scouts to go like take the rest of the camp and like move things along and like there's definitely this this you know inclination towards Executives and companies like especially broader companies to sort of do what's been working so far and that

58:16 can often mean the like let's just wait and see and I think that's super interesting from the concept of AI right there was this feeling of should we wait and see where things go or do we go and try and figure out what direction to move our our team and most companies will maybe wait you know might lean towards waiting to see how things pin out and we're seeing that even with AI they're like oh we'll just wait for the

58:41 next open AI model to come and then we'll go like build a product around that like this one I keep hearing that there's like this rumor of like some other model or we're going to wait and see like but I think at the end of the day there's times when waiting might make sense to see what Technologies get built initially but then there's also this component of wandering and trying to figure out where should the where

59:04 should we go where should we take the team and to me I actually think the role of a PM is to be that Wanderer and I have this like story of like we you know there was this moment in the in the company's history where I I was like I was like grabbing a beer with one of my engineering managers and he was like look man like I I kind of show up and I'm like I maybe I wasn't bringing 100%

59:28 of my energy you know at this end of the workday and I was like like just I'm just not sure where to take things and like what we're doing right now and it was so interesting to hear his perspective of in in his world everything was actually going pretty reasonably well it was like we kind of knew like he had his road map he knew what to go build he had the next feature you know the next like three weeks of

59:48 Sprints planned out or something like this and he was he was like oh the team's actually doing really great the morale is really high and yet on the product side we we were we were like confused we were not we were really unsure about what to do and I think it's it can be hard to be that wander it felt it felt really tough to be like out there in the unknown just trying to like find any sort of signal that we could

60:12 bring back and say okay here's where we need to go and take you know the next features and next next part of the company and that that part was was really tough but I actually think that's where you know kind of to to an earlier like part of the discussion where where an aipm can really stand out is in being a natural Wanderer and naturally feeling a little bit like their role is to push the boundaries of what the company

60:39 thinks is even possible and to do that you sometimes have to be in this space that feels really squishy and I remember like talking to our founders of I'm not sure what we should be going and doing next and it was actually really reassuring to hear from them like the I remember having this conversation and and apara our chief product officer was like that's what building zero to one really feels like it kind of feels like

61:06 you're not sure what the right decision is or where the right decision you know where the right direction to go is but at the same time you kind of know when you get there and so you just have to keep wandering and iterating until you you feel that drag of like the product pulling you in that direction and so I think there's just this like feeling comfortable with not being sure what the right decision is and just wandering and

61:29 trying to figure things out while the rest of the camp might have to wait and and see what that next move is so that to me I thought was like this this really visceral feeling of you know like where where do we go where do we go from here so my takeaway here is if you're feeling like you have no idea where your product is going to go maybe be okay with that and in your experience

61:52 you eventually find find the PATH as you wander and with AI tools making it much easier to prototype and design an id8 Theory makes that a little less stressful because you can actually just try stuff yeah and I think that's like the amplifying the signal with like through the noise with AI like the signal can be super sparse you get back at times too and then what you can do is like you know there's really powerful

62:15 tools like we use gong for instance to like understand like what are maybe prospects or or really Engineers to me it's like potential customers what are they talking about what is their pain point and I can't go eat in like a hundred meetings right like every single week but what I can do is take those transcripts and we literally did this we fed them into some of these large language models that have super long context Windows now and what you can do

62:41 is actually pull out what's the most common problems that come up you know ask having a conversation around that can be really powerful too now you can do it with voice too so you can like pull all of that in maybe you want to turn it into a notebook LM episode but what you can do is actually just find ways to find signal through the noise and that kind of gives you an ability to almost have like a superpower

63:03 because you can be in so many places at once and and kind of use technology to your advantage to get that signal back so I would really try to find ways to scale yourself up with AI and come back with that signal anything else along these lines of things that have helped you be really successful as we wrap up and approach are very exciting lightning round product management can kind of feel pretty serious you like there's some big decisions that sort of

63:32 weigh on your shoulder but I honestly I I remember having this discussion with one of one of our board members actually and who's he's a Serial entrepreneur he's taking compies public and I was like what advice do you have for me is like a PM you know early in this company and I was so surprised by the feedback he had which was just have fun and I think if you let that drive you and you keep learning and you know

63:54 you're kind of keeping the curiosity and building products for customers that you care about it's just going to help you go so much further and I just think it's just more fun to have you know to to be the to to be like high energy it's it's just more fun to you know like really care about the thing that you're working on and I think if you're constantly learning and having fun you're going to iterate so much faster

64:16 too so that's really my my note is like just just have fun along the way it really is about that journey and yeah sometimes you're wandering but have fun with that too love that so much and it resonates so deeply with me as I've shared a couple times on this podcast to folks that listen probably have heard this but I have this little post it that I put right in front of me as I do podcast that just says have fun yeah and

64:39 it's like the lamest little post it just s here is it like really Tor up at this point from or is it like it's like you know I just bent to post it in half and just wrote have fun on the edge and then it just sits here I don't know Post-its are meant to like you know stick to stuff but this is how I decided to use it this also came up recently in this episode that I think is going to come

64:57 out right before this around public speaking this course that I took all Ultra speaking the biggest piece of advice they have is speaking should be fun so just think about how do you have fun while you're doing this even though it feels really scary and that works really well so I really love that it's just more fun than not having fun that's like a really silly lie but yeah it is and and even if it's like very stressful

65:23 and scary just reframing too how do I have fun most cases the end of the world the end of my career the end of something really serious most of the time you can have fun totally yeah awesome well Aman with that we reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready ding ding ding yeah ding ding ding there's a ding that comes that we overlay so I always have to resist not saying ding ding ding I know yeah yep

65:51 I'm ready let's do it first question what are two or three books you recommended most to other people I really love Short history of nearly everything by Bill brys I don't know if that's a you know that that book to me is so is so interesting because I'm a bit of a nerd around like science I used to read a lot of like fiction growing up too and I think weirdly enough Bill kind of tells this like story of The History

66:15 of Science really and how we know the things that we know and he kind of tells it from the perspective of learning about the scientists that discovered these things so for instance you learned that like Newton was kind of an to like the the co-workers he had or you know or like Darwin was it maybe perceived as like such an amazing scientist at the time like and so a lot of and a lot of these scientists like

66:38 their discoveries don't become famous it's almost like being an artist where like you realize the relevance of a scientist's discovery years later at times and people don't get credit for things they discovered so to me it was really interesting to hear to one listen to read more about the Scale of the Universe and how long we've been here and I think I think it just puts a lot of things into perspective of like our time here how we

67:05 spend it and even the age we're living in now with AI like it's such a blip in the cosmic scale and then you also get this like these really fun anecdotes from scientists along the way so that one I I recommend to like almost everyone because it's pretty easy to read as well and then I think another one which is maybe like a little bit more in the like career lens is the this book called designing your life which is

67:28 written by these actually you know one of the founders of Ido and these these folks are Stanford professors in the design lab and what's really powerful about this for me is it's actually pretty practical so it comes with exercises that I remember I did myself as well when I wasn't sure which direction to go in my career that helped me really figure out you know the most powerful exercis and like take away from this book for me was basically in like

67:52 the first or second chapter I think you write out one page on the meaning of work to you and like what does work mean is it a way for me to make money is it a way for me to feel fulfilled with what I do or how I spend my time and then you write out one page on the meaning of life and what's really powerful is it's really really hard to do those two things and then you have to find the

68:15 overlap between the two and I think that exercise is so clarifying and I recommend it to anyone when they feel like stuck in their career because it can at least kind of coming back to like energy Point can give you like a direction to go even if you're not sure how to get there just yet and so I I I just I love both of those books because they're they're really like shifting in from a perspective standpoint I love

68:37 that second book I read it and it was really meaningful to me but it's been long ago and I forgot it now but I remember it was really great and so I'm glad you brought that up next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show youve really enjoyed I I don't usually binge watch TV I got to be honest like I I'm not a binge Watcher but it's been a little rainy in New York

68:55 lately so we've had a little bit more time inside on weekends and I've been obsessed with the tour def France documentary on Netflix I don't know if if you've seen that I don't even know if it gets like pushed up that highly in the Netflix alos but I I think it's super cool like one I love cycling so for me it's like you really realize that competitive level of cycling is just such another level than I even realized

69:16 or gave credit to and then two kind of coming back to like the characters and the story I think they're all just so interesting to hear like what motivates them to at this like extremely high level it's actually the same producers as drive to survive which I know people really got into as well around like F1 but yeah highly recommend it and it's it's intense I'm gonna kind of start there like I didn't realize what I

69:40 was going to get to but it just ramped up in more and more intensity and yeah really enjoyed it is there favorite product you recently discovered that you love maybe an AI product maybe not I so I think we talked a little bit about like AI products that help you prototype repet is incredible it's so easy to use you know vzero and and these are all like really like I think they create really polished products at the end of

70:04 the day but the product that really that I've been like using and having a ton of fun with is webson I think it creates this like almost playful version of the prototype in the first place you might be trying to build or just something so crazy and wacky and zy that you're not even sure it's possible and and it's so hard to describe I remember even you know we I used to saw Pres presentation from some of the founders

70:27 at webson at at you know an AI Meetup here and even they when they were like showing how to use the product they literally just went on Reddit and they were just looking at the at the web Sim subreddit that has like so many posts on it the presentation was just them like looking at the top like three or four and trying to describe what they saw so I I I thought that was like super I I've

70:50 just been obsessed with it lately just to like push the boundaries of what's possible I I also do have another product as well like I initially when I thought about this question I was like what's like the product I've been using the most lately and this is this one's going to sound kind of kind of weird but I'm I'm a little bit old school and I I actually like like you I like to like write note notes and like

71:13 physical notebooks and so I was you know like I'm always looking for like oh what's like a fun you know like a a really practical notebook to use and this was this was really weird but I was recently given a notebook from actually like an AI meet up here and I opened it and it's made from recycled apples and when you open the notebook they it smells like apples which is really interesting because like I didn't think

71:39 that that would like impact me as much as it did but it created this interesting feedback loop where I just really love using the notebook because when I open it I like have this like positive experience immediately it's like sensory experience immediately that it's like just smells so great and then you like want to keep using it and you know coming back to it so I thought that was really interesting cre this like feedback loop in my head of like I I

72:01 enjoy like using that notebook now I'm not sure what that means if when I run out of papers in this one if I'm going to buy another but that was that was really funny I didn't expect to like that one as much you're making me hungry I can almost smell it what is the brand of this notebook in case folks want to look it up it's called app heal a PP e Ling yeah okay I need it I need that two

72:25 more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life feel like you're going to have a good one there is like specifically one that I ended this essay that I wrote a while back with called you I read a bunch of self-help books you don't have to and I like share it with my friends it's literally just called that that you know are not sure

72:43 where what to do when they're in that next phase of their career as well and the quote is from Steve Jobs which is your time is limited so don't waste living someone else's life and I thought that was so powerful because when you think about it like there's there's always this I feel like there's a lot of like career pressure for some people to like get that next job or start a company or like do something you know

73:12 super crazy and and at the same time I think what's been really powerful for me has been to reassess what my goals are and what what life I want to live and not feeling the sort of feeling of what other people's projections of that life are and so that that quote in particular has always been something I've come back to which is like what do you what sort of Life do you want to live and thinking

73:38 about that really deeply and making decisions along the way based on that so I truly love that sentiment and it came up recently in another conversation with Jam Nichols but let's move on actual final question so as I was researching you I was Googling your name and when I Google your name there's a a cricket player very prominently comes up curious how much that bothers you that there's this Cricket player that is number one on Google in many ways oh my God tell us

74:06 about how that feels this is gonna sound crazy but I I was like thinking I literally I was thinking about this yesterday it's gonna sound crazy because I I I was like like the immediate thought that came to mind was my parents really didn't optimize my name for SEO and the only thing I'm going to do now and I think about you know when I have kids like they're going to have some unique names because it gets so much harder like you

74:34 have to type in like aad CAU San Francisco or Berkeley or something to like get that to pop up so yeah so it does bother take away here yeah okay we'll iterate all that for the next or it's a this is a goal I feel like you have the chance to beat beat this guy totally right or you know maybe another way to look at it is like if I if we still keep using search engines and

74:56 it's funny because my partner works at Google the future might look like what if we you know what if we're using llms more kind of gives me a second shot here to like be part of the training data set in a way so yeah amazing I love the Silver Lining there Aman this was amazing I think this is going to be helpful to so many people trying to get into AI trying to thrive as an aipm or

75:18 just wanting to stay down the IC track we went through so many things I there's like my notes were very long and touch on basically everything so thank you so much for being here two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out and maybe follow up on some of the stuff and how can listeners be useful to you LinkedIn is probably the best way I'm I'm not Super Active on X though you know might might

75:39 spend a little bit more time there LinkedIn easily and then to that note you how can listeners be helpful I I think like my my goal is to try to be as helpful for folks that are trying to figure out how to get to this next part of their career whether it's involving AI or they want to Pivot into it or they want to as an AI product manager so love to hear stories of people that are

75:58 interested in this in this part of their career or this career path and I think like the thought I'll leave people with is I'll I'll respond to anyone that messages me and and but I I do have one condition there which is like if you're cold cold emailing cold messaging kind of coming back to like how to stand out I think there was you know this this note from John dur spoke at the college I went to and he put his email

76:21 up on the board and his like note was I'll email anyone who who emails me as long as you send me your three top three favorite books movies podcasts or you or like videos that impacted you in some way and I'll do the same for you and so I actually did that emailed him and got back his top three as well so I I I want to kind of carry that forward and you know would love to hear

76:44 from folks send me your top three whatever pieces of content they might be and I'll do the same for you that's an amazing collection you're going to build I'm I want to see all these things too I love that idea it's almost like a mini lighning round what a clever idea Aman thank you so much for being here thank you so much l this has been awesome really really had fun with this one same for me bye

77:08 everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode