Product Management in the Age of AI: Master It or Get Left Behind

Narrator: Foreign.

Rob Carroll: Building a great B2B go to market engine starts with understanding what works and evolving it. I'm your host Rob Carroll and this is a go to market perspective where marketing and sales leaders share how they're transforming their organizations, foundational best practices, smart trade offs and practical AI delivering value and scale. Today, product management remains one of the most consequential roles in any tech company. At the earliest stages they influence and determine product market fit. And as the company scales, they're pivotal in influencing strategy, customer research, engineering clarity, sales enablement and go to market activation. But just like every other function in B2B tech, the PM role is being disrupted. With shifting leadership expectations that AI, uh, can easily make everything better. AI has already accelerated engineering velocity which shifts the truism that PM delivers and engineering delays. Nowadays PMs are being seen as the new bottleneck. Today I'm sitting down with Chris Mann, founder of fractional PM consultancy and research firm Brock AI and a seasoned product leader to talk about how the PM role is being genuinely transformed. What's changing and why mastering AI may be less of a competitive advantage for PMs and more of a basic survival skill. Chris, welcome.

Chris Mann: Hey Rob, great to be here.

Rob Carroll: I'm excited to dig uh, into the changing world of the product manager. Why don't we start though, introduce uh, yourself, give a little quick background and what are you working on today?

Chris Mann: Yeah, so my background in product management actually started in 1998. I got my first product management job at IBM when the Internet was just taking off and was there for nine years through the kind of dot com crash. IBM is where I learned my product management foundation and most of my chops, which was really great. I left IBM and went into a startup which gave me the bug, uh, for working in really small companies. You know, the energy is really high, the consequences are high for everything that you do and the learning is just so accelerated. And I kept kind of finding myself working in smaller and smaller company situations. Uh, over the years I worked in web analytics. I went into advertising technology before there was, you know, advertising on Facebook. Uh, we built an ad tech company called Bizo that I joined as the 16th employee, the first product manager. We grew that to 150 people and sold it to LinkedIn. That was like one of the most phenomenal experiences of my life. After LinkedIn I got a kind of CEO turnaround job in a 40 person startup. Was uh, able to kind of clean the company up and, and sell that. I went into cryptocurrency at that time and Then left crypto, did some more things in marketing and ad tech. In November of 2022 I was just winding down a startup, I was trying to raise money and couldn't raise for it. I was, you know, in October, finished winding this down and then the consumer version of Chat GPT came out and I was just like oh my gosh, this is like the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I'm, I'm almost glad I didn't raise for that last company idea so that I can work on this new frontier. And so I completely immersed myself uh, in this AI space, you know, and it was difficult at that time because you're either a developer or a founder or they're just, there weren't really jobs and it took a year and a half of studying, reading, writing and I started getting you know, consulting gigs and part time gigs in small AI startups. And I finally landed a head of enterprise AI role@u.com, which is a, uh, leading company that uh, builds search and search infrastructure for, for LLMs and worked there for a year and a half and really was on the forefront of what was happening in AI. And then recently I've left, I'm doing fractional product management work. Currently working in uh, a startup called Context Bridge Part Time which was founded by the CTO of Bizzo, the company that we sold to LinkedIn and happy, uh, to get in uh, if relevant to what we're doing there.

Rob Carroll: Obviously being from IBM, the most mature and structured PM processes probably unearthed to the startup environment, you've kind of seen the full spectrum of how product management is run and uh, how the role probably differs across different types of organizations, but also how it's evolved over the years. So when we start, you know, especially for the uninitiated, how would you even define the product management role today and how do you think it maybe has evolved over the last five to ten years?

Chris Mann: Yeah, sure. So for those of us who are new to this, in fact Rob, you being in product marketing, back in the IBM days, we did not have the product marketing function and so the product manager was doing that as well. And over the years it became obvious that these were two separate jobs and we needed to create the product management function in order to speed up, not only speed things up, but allow people to work effectively. Just too difficult to work in the product management mode and then shift gears and be able to do the kinds of things you need to do in product marketing. So that that role uh, kind of emerged for me and like I guess when I met your brother, Dave Carroll in 2010, he was the first like real, you know, solid, first class product marketer I work with. But the fundamentals for those who are new to product management are really like defining the product vision and the strategy. It's like what is the long term direction and vision of the product area which you're working on as if you're a CEO. You need to articulate this mission and vision in a way that's really compelling and will draw all of the people that you're working with, from your employees to your customers and your partners, to where you're going. It's owning a product roadmap. It's the features and the initiatives and the things you're going to build to make that vision happen. Gathering and synthesizing customer insights and market insights is the core that allows these other things to happen. You're writing really clear product requirements and translating those in a way that works for your engineering organization. Every engineering organization wants to receive and communicate things in different ways. Uh, it's very heavy cross functional alignment. You're working with all the other people in the company that will make the product strategy happen, which is really the center of what allows the company to be successful. You're defining success metrics like what you should measure. You're making prioritization trade offs all the time, uh, not only features, but things that impact all of your cross functional partners. And then you're in the middle of driving go to market and company execution. I think the thing that is left out like the highest level of product management is when the product manager is functioning as a key member of the executive team and driving collaboration across the executive team to have the executive team give heavy and clear input into the product strategy and roadmap. I think one of the things that took me a while to learn this is I always felt it was something I needed to go off and kind of do and present to the executives. That's an unfair thing for a burden for the product manager to take on. And it really is the role, particularly in technology companies, of the executive team to participate in and think through and be highly and deeply collaborative on the overall product strategy. Not the features, what the product strategy is. They all own that. And there needs to be a working process for how the executives really work together to drive that strategy, product strategy process. And I think that's a missing thing. I just, I don't see that done well. And M, more often than not that's not done very well.

Rob Carroll: Absolutely. And I know For a fact, you didn't even share all the things that PM is responsible for like in terms of analyst engagement and uh, activation, in terms of like speaking at events and on webinars and you know, all the customer engagement that you do. There's so much within a PM role that's, you know, probably taken for granted. Where would you say, and I know every single company in PM is going to be different, where would you say? Ideally, if you were to like identify where the most percentage of your time should be spent, not where all the time is spent because that's probably not always in the most efficient places, but of all these activities at the highest level, where do you think the majority of PM time moving forward should be spent versus those long tail activities that you're responsible for?

Chris Mann: Well, I think it depends on the individual PM's role in the company and in the product management organization. I think that the time when I was functioning at the highest level was the kind of the last couple years at Visa, uh, when our company was like over 100 employees and we were really onto something. I was doing everything I could to spend all of my time, as much of my time with customers and in the market, doing, doing research, getting smart enough to really continue to hone and drive uh, the strategy. And then the rest of my time was collaborating and communicating internally to gather and share learnings. And then my product management organization was doing a lot of the grinding execution of all of the other things I would quote on my product managers to try to push them to make sure that they were moving in that direction of they had a certain amount of customer interviews, uh, and a certain amount of market research they were always doing, um, to push them in that direction as they evolved.

Rob Carroll: No one could argue credibly that you should spend less time with your customers. So I think it's a good call. But let's talk about where are you seeing the breakdown happen in organizations with the PM role? Is that on that inbound research side where you're trying to work with customers and understand what's going on in the market? Is it working with engineering and trying to translate requirements into capabilities, or is it on the go to market activation side saying we got to launch this thing, we've got to get adoption, we've got to make sure it's supportable? Like where do you feel that things are just not working the way they should in this?

Chris Mann: Uh, yeah, unfortunately they can break down. Depending on who your PMs are or depending on who your cross functional partners are, uh, the Breakdown can happen in all of those places. It's very common in a kind of worst case situation. A product manager can kind of sit inside the company and hang out with their engineers and work with kind of the data that easily comes to them. And they don't do the uncomfortable things of, you know, getting in front of customers or if you're in a marketing and sales led organization, you know, getting out and really handling the painful and grinding work of selling and supporting customers. Um, and so you can hide inside the company. And this happens all too often. I remember when I got to LinkedIn, I felt like the LinkedIn product manager had never met a customer and I, uh, found that uh, very frustrating. Although they had such an asset of the LinkedIn company data that, you know, the company was um, growing leaps and bounds because that was such a differentiated thing.

Rob Carroll: It was almost like the product telemetry and data that was collected in product was the proxy for actually talking to customers. Is that fair?

Chris Mann: That is, that's definitely, definitely fair. Yeah. So can it. Unfortunately it can really break down in any of those areas. I think the, the other place that I just like to keep emphasizing is the role of the executive team to have a process. Like, there's a lot of things that I learned at LinkedIn that I, I think were still first class in my mind. Number one was that product management reported to the CEO, to Jeff, and that product management is, and I would say

Narrator: this, the people who seem to get more done than everyone else, they're not working longer hours or running on more caffeine. They've just stopped wasting time on the stuff that doesn't move work forward. Switching apps, re explaining context, hunting for files. Those aren't small inefficiencies. Their hours wasted every week. Superhuman Go gives you those hours back. From the makers of Grammarly. Go is an AI chat that sits inside every tab and tool you already use, always available and ready to help you with what you're working on. Ask it to draft something, summarize a long thread, pull up a file, or prep you for a meeting. Go handles it without you ever leaving the page you're on. This is what it looks like when AI actually fits into your work instead of adding to it. It's like having a teammate whose only job is to help you be better at yours. Go keeps up so you can move forward. With Go working with you, you can show off what you do best. See what Superhuman Go can do@superhuman.com that's superhuman.com Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

Narrator: I Don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Narrator: Um, payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate, first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com a lot

Chris Mann: when I interview with CEOs I would say, you know, the product management function is the most important function in the company, more important than your role. And that is, is that if we don't get this right, the rest of this doesn't matter. And so at LinkedIn they behaved and thought that way. And there was an internal process that was well defined around how product management engages with the executive team and when to collaborate and evolve the product strategy. And this, there really needs to be a structured process. It really comes down to a structured company strategy process where 80% of this is all about the product strategy. So companies need to figure out what that process is, how often the process is engaged, what the artifacts are of that process and get this in place. And it's, it's not ad hoc meetings where all the executives get together and talk top of mind about what they think is happening. You know, these have to be. Ideas need to be written down, thought through, talked about, debated. So I think that's one, that's the most strategic and critical missing thing I see all too often.

Rob Carroll: And so on the strategy layer, which um, it makes all the sense in the world. It's like when the executives get involved and they're helping to, if all is going well, they're helping to guide product strategy and align those with company objectives. What everyone else is trying to accomplish. These are not mutually exclusive things. We're building the product to hit these objectives. How effective is that? Because you know, so often we're building this and the company is trying to um, target this audience and those things do not match. So you know, clearly we know what happens when they um, break down. But how do you get that alignment with, let's say non product sales, marketing, support, leadership that might not be understanding the product strategy? How do you bridge that gap?

Chris Mann: Well, like the, the target customer, your ideal customer profile, uh, in the successful kind of company strategy and product strategy environments I've been in, that would be one of the first things that, that everybody would discuss and debate and measure, um, before you even got into, you know, iterations on the product, it's like, who are we going after and why as a company? And then, you know, those things get nuanced and different by product line and product capability area. But it would be incredibly important to continue to focus on who is our ICP for the company and for the different product capabilities and why, and make sure that all of the executives agree to and align on that. Uh, because you can have marketing, marketing to different segments of the market because it might be easier to reach and engage certain segments and you might have sales going after certain, you know, segments of the market because they're just comfortable or easier or whatever it is. And then you have product building for a slightly different place. So, you know, agreeing on that ICP is super critical. And then keeping everybody on it, uh, is an ongoing, you know, uh, thing that you have to keep an eye on.

Rob Carroll: I love that. And I think one of the things that often breaks down is people maybe don't agree on what makes up a product strategy. Like I could tell you, you know, I've heard people think that being cloud native and AI powered is a product strategy. It's like, no, that's a product architecture. Maybe, uh, it's a design direction. But how would you summarize? Because thank you for talking about ICP and the fact that we have to actually sell to someone who cares. Right, but how would you define some of the major components of a product strategy versus design principles or architectural principles? Because I've heard way too often these things are called product strategy. When in actual, actuality it's just, how are we building this?

Chris Mann: Yeah, I was just, uh, I was, I'm, I'm reflecting on a recent company that I was in where the CEO would say that our strategy is, is this. And it'd be some really high level kind of thing that was like, almost like our strategy is to make money. It was so high level and there was no more specifics. And um, ultimately what you, your strategy should describe the market that you were in. The size of that market, that size of that market is who are the customers, how many are there, where is the competition, you know, estimates on how much revenue opportunity there is in that market as a whole and what, what sub segments you're going to focus on and what is your phasing for expanding out in that market. And when you're describing that market, then you're moving into specific problems that you're going to solve. And as you're focused on those specific problems, there's real detailed descriptions of what those problems are and what the pains are and how customers are solving those and how you're going to solve those. And then that rolls back up into, okay, who is the ICP in the sub segment of the market for that problem and the way that we're going to go about solving it. And these things kind of iteratively redefine themselves as your, uh, iterating on that full stack of that, those set of things. The market, the customer, the icp, the problems and how you're solving those all kind of help redefine uh, everything as you fine tune each one of those, those layers and that kind of. And then how the company is going to go about reaching those customers and winning in that market is how the company strategy comes together.

Rob Carroll: And then you can figure out what you're going to build and how you're going to build it. That's after you've defined all this other stuff that you just framed. So I think very often it's cart before the horse. When they're like, we know how we're going to build it, then we'll figure out what we're going to build, then we'll figure out what problem we're going to solve. Is not necessarily the best strategy to be, uh, a successful business. Right?

Chris Mann: That's right. That's right.

Rob Carroll: As you identify, I kind of come from a product marketing background. You come from a product management background. And in the early days it was one and the same. It was one role.

Chris Mann: It really broke out in the last

Rob Carroll: 20, some odd, uh, 20, 25 years. What do you feel just in terms of role clarity? Because so often I join companies and like one of my first jobs is just helping to create the guardrails of where does product management end and product marketing begin? Like how should they work together? So what's your best practice? If you could define like the best role for what the product manager does and when do you start engaging and handing over to product marketing in that

Chris Mann: partnership we should be tied to the hip, uh, product marketing and product management. There should be a very high overlap in what we're doing, particularly as it relates to understanding the market and the customers and doing customer discovery. And you know, for example, who owns customer discovery almost doesn't matter as long as we have a healthy customer discovery and market discovery process and that we're both deeply involved. You know, at LinkedIn, the product marketing team owned the discovery process. So if we had A new product, uh, concept. The, uh, product marketing team drove the validation process and they drove getting the customers and having the meetings and having the conversations. And I think that was incredibly healthy because it puts the product marketing team in front of the customer and it gets them kind of on the field with the customer doing heavy work and gets them very opinionated about what uh, needs to happen because they get deeply involved. And then you get this healthy tension of uh, someone who's capable of debating on the product strategy and the product roadmap because they come to the table with a, a lot of a, uh, strong and informed point of view on what has to happen. But because the market and customer and competition knowledge is so critical, it's hard to over invest in developing that and then debating and understanding so that you're formulating, you know, decisions on what to do, uh, based on that central set of knowledge.

Rob Carroll: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And then obviously the more shared insights can bring, the more you can leverage that context to create the right strategy and roadmap and priorities. Where have you seen friction between kind of the product, uh, management and product marketing role? Just based on the fact that across so many organizations there's so much gray area in terms of handoff and in terms of ownership and who drives and who contributes, et cetera?

Chris Mann: Yeah, well, there was definitely friction at LinkedIn when we didn't agree between myself and my product marketing or we had multiple product marketers and multiple product managers working in the same area. We were on the, you know, the, the marketing, LinkedIn marketing solutions or the advertising business. So, but that was really healthy tension. I think that the gap happens. Let's take the opposite. Let's say the product marketer and, or the product manager is not deep in the market discovery. Let's just poke it. The product marketer was, uh, this happens to me a lot where the product marketer just doesn't know the customer, doesn't know the product. And then it's very difficult for them to pick up and do the kinds of writing and the messaging and the positioning and really enabling the field because they're just not as deeply involved. Um, and so that is a common, like the product manager who kind of is sitting back in their seat and not deeply enough involved, uh, in the customer and in the market. Uh, you see this with the product marketer and then you spend a lot of time like educating the product marketer and iterating on messaging and things like this. Where I think one of the smoothest experiences I ever had was working with uh, your brother, uh, David Carroll at Bizzo, where he knew this craft so well and I had never worked with a product marketer at this point and he was just so cleanly able to take my raw product ideas and turn around and tell us how we were going to position and message and he'd come up with these market textures and the ways that the product would all fit together and how we would tell a story. In fact, the way that he described and put our products together in a product suite was a breakthrough for me in my thinking and how we might evolve our product strategy over time. It was really interesting how that was a major flip that led to a breakthrough that I think had a lot to do with our uh, getting acquired by LinkedIn. Was that real high level strategic. How does this all fit together and what is the big story we're telling? It takes a lot of time and craft and thinking to do. Dave calls it category creation.

Rob Carroll: Uh, mhm.

Chris Mann: You know, and so it's a very special craft and uh, for a product manager to also be able to, you know, do category creation is a lot to ask, which is why we have these two functions. And so Dave was doing this kind of as his natural way of running the marketing organization and the product marketing function in that category creation and the ideas and artifacts that came out of that were really symbiotic for me in terms of building the strategy.

Rob Carroll: Yeah, that's really cool. And it's, you know, and again what it comes down to is I have no doubt, you know, Dave speaks so highly of the relationship that he's had with you and your team back then was you've taught him what's going on with the technology. You talk him m what's going on with the customers, what their needs are. And that was informing how he could then based on what he and his team were learning from the market and the competitive marketplace and you know, what analysts are saying, et cetera, to be able to say, well how do we distinguish ourselves? Right. And that's what product marketing does is the whole point is we have something that's really valuable, but how do we differentiate? Break through the noise, make sure people can understand at a very simple level. And that's, you know, I love the symbiotic call out because I think a really positive product marketing m and product management relationship is when they are both learning from one another.

Narrator: Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint M You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment

Narrator: of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com get that Amex Gold Card ready.

Narrator: I'm too tired to cook.

Narrator: We feeling Five Guys or the Cheesecake Factory? Both earn up to $120,20 a year in statement credits of participating partners up to $10 each month when you pay with the AMEX Gold Card. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore Gold enrollment required terms

Rob Carroll: apply Feeding off one another and you know one plus one equals three is the goal of any collaboration. And so I love the uh, I love the example and I think that's what it, that's what it comes down to is the product marketer is never going to be as well, um, steeped in the customer pain point and the product differentiation. The product understanding or the technology understanding doesn't mean there's not technical product marketers out there. But at the same time PMs don't have the time to get deep into understanding how the market's talking about this. How do you influence the analysts? What are the things that are driving customers attention spans and budgets, uh, et cetera. So I uh, love that example. Obviously a big piece of this goes down to that customer and market discovery. We're talking about how do we learn what's necessary out there to make sure we have that product market fit so we can define our icp. So AI is talk of the town. You know, you m mentioned it, you know that when uh, when it suddenly became this consumerized thing at the end of 2022. And one of the very first things that everyone started doing in uh, B2B is let's use it to do our competitive research. Let's do it to summarize all of this information and provide recommendations. So where are you seeing and where do you believe AI can and should help accelerate and improve this whole input market research process? And where's the human have to still play a significant role in making sure that that information is translated into a way that'll inform your strategy in roadmap?

Chris Mann: Yeah, that's a pretty meaty topic because the change that's happening with the product manager right now is, is big. Many CEOs are feeling now that ah, and you not only CEOs, but this is just a discussion point, is that the bottleneck is no longer with engineering, it's with product. Um, and that engineering is getting ahead of product. And that product doesn't have the strategy and the prioritization and the stack ranking and the, the feature definitions and all the things that engineering needs to continually move quickly, ready in time, because the capacity to deliver is increased so much with, you know, the progress of AI, uh, coding. And this is a real thing. You know, customer discovery can be sped up for sure, uh, through automating, you know, market research. And you can go through thousands of customer reviews and G2 crowd and automated processing of your support tickets. And these things can be done in minutes. Now to synthesize this, or if you have conducted, you know, 15 or 20 customer interviews, or you can go listen to call recordings with the sales organization and process all of this through AI and very quickly synthesize, uh, this information. But you still ultimately need in many cases to be getting in front of customers and having this grinding old school conversation and interviews with the customers. And you also have to have, there needs to be time for the executives and the product team to absorb and debate and discuss the information. And I think there's a few risks here. Yes, AI can automate a lot of this and speed things up, but it can dangerously mislead you because it's so sure of itself and the way that it writes. It can summarize customer interviews, for example, and be very sure, uh, of the summary of what's happening in the customer interviews. And if you are not personally intimately aware of what happened in those customer interviews, a big mistake can happen. For example, when I was@you.com, we had done uh, interviews with like 15 consultants and 15 people in finance and we were trying to determine if we were going to focus on consultants or finance in the AI summarization process. A couple of these consultants were also in the finance field. And so the interviews that were in the summarization bled across both topics. And the summary suggested something that was completely wrong about what was important for the consultant community. Because the interview information from finance got into the area that it was summarizing. And AI isn't smart enough to make that distinction. And had you not had that intimate knowledge of what each interview I was on, all of these, you can make big mistakes really quickly. And so you really do have to slow down and take a lot of this back down to the physics when you're doing these summarizations and really look at the underlying data or else you're, you're going to make very big mistakes.

Rob Carroll: Yeah, it's like, it's this answering the question, um, and I do that when I'm using AI for like messaging, diagnostics and recommendations is what doesn't the AI know? What did it not learn from this? And what do you need to tell that? Because it help you iterate wonderfully. But to your point, the human judgment of you know the market and you understand the context of those conversations better and you understand where it made a wrong assumption because of just some bulleted conversation, uh, points, you can still use AI, but you have to be the one to direct it to then say with this in mind, this is what the consultants should care about based on our past experiences. Now what do you get from the conversation? It's that iteration. You can still use AI to make the summarize and ideate quicker. Yes, but the judgment calls and the decisions it should not make for you. And I think that's where I'm waiting the witness here. But you're kind of just saying you need to make sure that the person that actually understands the market and the uh, product strategy is making the final call.

Chris Mann: We could go back and talk about how the product management role is changing, but since you teed that up, uh, I mean I think that the skills that are going to matter is taste, you know, knowing what good looks like and what is mediocre and kind of sorting through all of the slop, you know, judgment under ambiguity. AI gives us more options and not often better decisions.

Rob Carroll: Mhm.

Chris Mann: The customer empathy, you uh, have got to be able to get down to the physics and see the real deep underlying data, talk to the customer yourself. And then you've got to be able to tell the story and build a coalition, communicate with all the people in your organization that need, uh, to execute. And these things won't go away. I think when you ask the question, well, how will the product management role change? There's going to be very technical product managers now who will be doing coding and will ship certain features directly into the code base. There will be product managers that deeply build agentic workflows and understand systems and system architectures and they're automating kind of their own work or they're, they're automating the work of customers. And so you'll have kind of this AI product architect and then you'll have, you know, the strategic operator, the executive product person who's comfortable and living with the executives, is with the customer and is Behaving in a way that's really driving and bringing everybody together and able to tell the story in a way that, you know, makes the team, uh, cohesive. And then in the middle you start to lose the product managers who were doing lots of small, just the grunt work of writing PRDs or filtering the backlog. And so I think those things will go away.

Rob Carroll: So going back to the bottleneck that we talked about with engineering velocity increasing, it's like, let's uh, have some fun. Controversy here. Is less human judgment and intervention required on the engineering side to accelerate code development and just product development? Is that the reason why the expectation for PM to move faster is there, but it's hard to move faster in terms of actually making those pretty strategic, critical decisions of what goes on the roadmap, when and why.

Chris Mann: Yeah.

Rob Carroll: Is that just by definition should be more time consuming than writing, iterating and uh, publishing code?

Chris Mann: Yeah, I think there's like, there's two spectrums. There's organizations who, like, there's many engineering organizations, particularly engineering organizations who are building for engineers or the, the product in itself is very technical in its nature, or the. And or the engineering itself organization has built up a lot of market and customer understanding. The engineering org is capable of uh, then making a lot of good, important decisions and moving quickly. And then you augment that kind of an organization with the product management organization that's tightly intertwined and is, is also instead of contributing, you know, along prd, they actually contribute a prototype, you know, um, that everybody can look at and poke at. Uh, instead of reading a long doc and kind of imagining what they meant to say, you can, you know, look at a prototype. You have a company that can move really quickly and do the right things. And there are lots of examples of companies out there that are growing faster than ever that we could go look at now and, and kind of dissect and see what they're doing. And then on the other side, you could have a company that just decides to build a lot of stuff and they're not exactly sure, but they feel like they're making progress because more code is coming out and they're building. Use the word slop again. And then, you know, the product marketing organization will start to wonder exactly what story to tell because the product is going in so many different directions. So you have the possibilities of being incredibly fast and tight and you have the possibility of just spreading out and um, you know, building a hodgepodge or product that isn't really dialed in for anybody.

Rob Carroll: Yeah, no, it's like uh, are you running really fast to commoditization and unclear differentiation or are you actually building toward a goal? So you mentioned something which I thought was interesting and I'd love to go deeper is just kind of like what is the expectation of PM as the builders of these agentic systems? You know, what does it mean in practice? What do PMs have to start considering themselves responsible, responsible for in automating repeatable processes and scaling those processes? Is it the individual PMs? Is it Chief Product Officer? Is it an AI counselor? How is this structured so it's not just lost with individual PMs doing their own groundswell stuff and then they leave the company and it's gone.

Chris Mann: Yeah, there's like a couple of threads in here. There's. What do the individuals have to do to be on, on the learning path so that they capture this opportunity and don't get left behind? Because like if you're, if you're in tech and you're a product person and you are not learning to code and you are not really uh, getting deep with this technology, you will be left behind. And I would like to extend that to pretty much any person at any function in tech. In is the same story. I believe that to be true because we all can accelerate and speed up what happens as individuals in the company as well as what happens in our organization. Because this is all so new. There isn't roadmaps yet, although they're emerging. And we can talk about one that I think is really exciting and getting a lot of talk in the zeitgeist about uh, like company wide operating systems and things like that. But we should all be taking time to learn how to code. And uh, I say that because once you code something you will suddenly see what the discovery process is and how you can collaborate with AI to learn almost anything. That's a big statement. But you build something once and you start to see now, okay, I could really learn uh, how to build and evolve to do quite anything myself. For example, example for me is I started coding with AI because I was very curious almost a year ago now.

Narrator: And Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's what weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront

Narrator: payment of $45 per three month. Plan equivalent to 15 per month. Required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com hi, my name is

Narrator: Lisa and I'm a licensed psychotherapist. Which means my work doesn't magically end when the session does. There are notes to write, appointments to manage, billing, insurance, follow ups, and somehow all that admin, uh, used to creep into my nights and weekends. That's why I switched to SimplePractice. SimplePractice is an all in one electronic health record built specifically for therapists with HIPAA compliant tools and high trust certification. So I don't have to worry about juggling systems or cutting corners just to keep things running. Scheduling, documentation, billing, insurance, client communications, even automated appointment reminders. It all lives in one place. And if you're starting or growing a practice, Simple Practice also offers a credentialing service that helps simplify insurance enrollment, which can be a huge lift when you're starting to scale. Right now, SimplePractice is celebrating mental health provider day with an exclusive offer. Up to 70% off for one year. Yes, up to 70% off for one year, but hurry. Offer ends May 15 at SimplePractice.com SimplePractice.com

Chris Mann: Once I built my first app this like, oh my gosh, the whole world is kind of open to me. And then I started getting curious to see if I could deliver something directly for a customer. And so I started, you know, instead of handing things off to engineering, asking the engineering partners@u.com if I could work on part of the problem. And we were understaffed and so they welcomed that. And what I found was, is that I didn't need a lot of coaching from engineering because I could have present AI with the problem and the challenge and co develop strategies with AI, uh, on how to solve a problem. And then I go back to my engineering manager and I'd say hey, I've kind of reasoned through these options and here's the couple that we came up with and here's the one I'm selecting. What do you think of this? And almost pretty much every time he, this particular individual, super bright guy would always say that sounds like you're on the right path. So I would continue with that. And so I was able to, I was getting confirmation, which was very important from engineering leadership that I was on the right path. But I made a tremendous amount of progress to where I was delivering these kind of multi step orchestrated agents completely built by myself for a customer that would Go into production, um, by spending the time on that journey. Not that everybody has to go that far, but it's just an example of once you start, you learn what you can learn from this technology and how far you can go in these different areas by having the technology guide you. So I guess I should pause there, but I think we were on the path of what do we do for the individual. And then you're also asking the questions about the company and systems.

Rob Carroll: And one, it's kind of like advice for early stage career product managers that are trying to remain relevant and asking the honest question of is this still a viable career path. The other question is really in terms of where is AI today? These are skills or processes or agents that are delivering real value at scale today versus where is um, the hype kind of ahead of the actual benefit. Where are things that AI is not ready to tackle just yet? We talked about some of that earlier in terms of customer feedback and discovery and focus.

Chris Mann: I think a couple things to mention where AI, uh is falling down is, it doesn't, it's poor at crafting a strategy, it's very good at critiquing a strategy. It can make big mistakes like we talked about earlier. So I think we have to be really eyes wide open on that. What is really exciting and what we should all be on this progression towards is starting to have an AI system, or they call them AI assistants. An assistant, an AI system that is really aware of um, everything that you're doing, you're learning, you're thinking and all the conversations that you're in. There are people building and architecting these systems. Starting with a, uh, inspiration was the release of this open claw. But it's this idea that you have an AI, uh system that is connected to your email, connected to your calendar, connected to your Google Drive, Linear slack. Your meetings are recorded, it sees those recordings, you do research in AI and the important artifacts that come out of your work and collaboration with AI, uh, stay in the view of what's going on. Uh, it's connected to your CRM. If you're selling it knows who you're talking to, you know where you are and process with all of your prospects and your pipeline and your funnel. And now you have this partner that can help you really think through and make a lot of decisions very quickly in a way that uh, just was impossible before. And there are companies like Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. And now this company block is imagining a flat organization where the role of middle management historically was about communicating up and down. And now with AI, uh, this can be done instantly if you had a connected system where individuals had their own kind of AI system or comprehensive agent, where departments had a departmental system that had a view of the department and then you had, you know, an organization wide context or set of information that could be available to all the departments. So you know, the CEO and the executives could craft a new strategic update that was important to roll out to the company and it could just be put into the AI system and suddenly every individual and all departments could reason over that to figure out how their roles should change and the things that they should be doing should adapt to move instantaneously with this, this new information. So there's people starting to think and build and test these kinds of systems and I think that this will be a common pattern, something along these lines will emerge to where this is how we will all be doing work in the uh, the very near future.

Speaker G: Right.

Rob Carroll: And I think I'm seeing a lot of exactly what you're talking about of effort and investment being put in to bring in enterprise knowledge and insights centralized, so to speak, not physically centralized, but just available to all employees to be able to accelerate and make sure they're making the best decisions and recommendations based on all the information possible, which is great. Get all the knowledge available. The part that's I'm worried about from a governance perspective, and I love your thoughts on this, is really the actual prompts and the agents and the skills and the apps that are being built by individuals, what those prompts are asking, what the processes that are being asked to be automated are different depending on who's asking. So how that information that's centralized for everyone's benefit is being consumed and translated is different for everyone. So when you're at a large scale, small, large enterprise, and you've got Dozens or even 100/PM's or product marketers, or name your function across this very large thing, where's the standardization and how do you make sure that you know it's no different from old world business intelligence reporting? If you did the wrong query, you're going to get a different answer from someone that asked the very differently. But now we're doing it in this AI probabilistic context which is like so much more ripe for different answers. How is this going to be standardized to the point where it's not just the individual finding ways to improve their own productivity, but it's actually scalable and standardized that the enterprise or the company, ah, has confidence that everyone's using it the right way, obviously leave it the right way and uh, finger quotes.

Chris Mann: You're right. The risk to be lazy, to not get to the underlying data to make sure that the AI judgment is trustworthy like the examples we gave early is like uh, I'm walking that tightrope constantly all day long every day and I succumb to it several times every day. Uh, when I should should go deeper. That gets compounded. When you talk about an organization wide system it's hard to estimate the timelines but you can imagine back in the days when salespeople all were selling with their notepads and everything was in files. Like when I first got out uh, of College in 1991, none of the sales people in the sales organization did not have a computer computer. And then eventually we have CRMs and Salesforce and we codified things. And so this will now happen again but in a whole new way. And these AI systems will be there and there will be codification and process standard processes and guardrails. The really tricky part right now is that all of this new technology is all being constructed and constructed so fast and moving so quickly that then everybody's so excited and they're on the journey that a lot, we're just going to make a lot of mistakes while we're learning. I think the cool part is, is that this is making for me and the people that I am working with who are on this journey is, it is so fascinating and it's so fun to build this automation and uh, the job of a sales development rep, I'm doing that as part of our startup when it's needed. I uh, am the sales development rep. However I built a system to automate as much of it as possible and it made it so interesting. Otherwise those grinding reach outs, doing 100 reach outs a day would, would I want to shoot myself? Um, and now it's incredibly fascinating because I'm building underlying system that's changing and getting better. Every time I use it I'm making suggestions on how it should change and it's incredibly fascinating.

Rob Carroll: Let's look into the future as we are wrapping up. Right now we're in this crazy fun time with AI and just exchanging everything and everything's still trying to be figured out. Three to five years, let's assume things have stabilized, there's some new normal. What does the PM role look like? And with that what advice do you have for earlier stage product folks that are looking to get into product leadership? What do they need to focus on to be prepared for Where. When that arrives.

Chris Mann: Yeah, I feel, I feel like the advice for the PM is almost the same as I'd give my kids who are in college now or anybody else is. At this moment in time, it is critical that you get intimate and you start to code something. Not that you should be coding all the time, but the breakthrough happens when you see how this works and you start to code something and that teaches you how you can learn and how much learning you can do as an individual and how much you can automate. And then now you can start to really bring AI, uh, into how you work. So I would say that to anybody. And then for the product managers, I think you're going to want to decide what type of product manager you want to be.

Narrator: Be.

Chris Mann: I think there's probably going to be two. As we mentioned earlier, there's going to be highly technical. The person who is coding a lot of the time and is building and automating workflows and systems, be it for your customers, for yourself, or internal for the product that you're. You're building and using AI to do a lot of the synthesis and the grinding work of processing the backlog and that kind of stuff. And you're still going to have the strategic operator who is like the product executive, who is capable of, uh, functioning with the executive team and capable of having high level customer conversations and meeting with analysts or speaking at the conferences and being in sales calls and developing those, those leadership and those executive kind of skills. And you have to decide, I think you should try to decide which way you want to lean. And both are going to be incredibly important. But I worry the latter. The strategic operator is being de. Emphasized right now where the whole thing is how can we all get technical and use AI? And we might forget about these core fundamentals of crafting a strategy and how much, much human judgment and human to human time that takes to do that.

Rob Carroll: In the words of Ratatouille, you know, anyone can cook. No. Now anyone can code. And I think the excitement over it is going to be. I think you're right that everyone has to get comfortable doing it, no matter your role. And it's going to become a new way of coding that everyone. There's going to be specialization with the technical part of it. But I think the pendulum swings back and forth. We've seen it before as well that, uh, I think strategy is going to come back because once there's a new normal and the bubble burst in terms of the hype and we're just at the reality of the AI promise and we're actually delivering that value, then you still need strategy to differentiate and hit that revenue target that you mentioned is really the goal. So, Chris, this has been a great conversation. Really, really appreciate your time. Thanks for being here.

Chris Mann: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having me. I had a great time today.

Narrator: Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Narrator: Uh, payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

Speaker G: See full terms@mintmobile.com you're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, Working Out, Walking the Dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com starting, your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today@rss.com.