The Intentional Product Manager Podcast

Preparing For AI And Standing Out In The Job Market

• Shobhit Chugh • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Join Shobhit Chugh and special guest Ravi Mehta for an in-depth conversation on the most pressing topics shaping the future of product management. Gain insights on:

  • AI’s Impact on Product Management Careers: How advancements in AI will redefine roles and open new opportunities.
  • Building Job Security through Personal Fulfillment: Why prioritizing purpose in your work can be a game-changer for career stability in 2024.
  • Delivering Business Value in 2025: What creating meaningful, measurable impact will look like.
  • Creating Opportunities Beyond Your Experience: The secret strategy that will open doors and fast-track your success.
  • Accelerating Career Growth Beyond the Average Pace: Practical steps to move your career forward at an extraordinary rate.
  • Building a Career Path that Chooses You: How to position yourself as a top candidate for the opportunities you want.
  • Navigating a Non-Linear Career Ladder: Tips for success when career growth doesn’t follow a traditional path.
  • Mastering Product Politics: Why managing internal dynamics is more important than ever! 

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:18 Meet Ravi Mehta: Career Highlights

01:13 Ravi's Accidental Entry into Product Management

02:31 Early Career at Microsoft and Xbox

07:54 Transition to TripAdvisor

08:28 Key Learnings and Challenges at TripAdvisor

14:32 Moving to Meta: Understanding Gen Z

18:20 Joining Tinder: Building for the Future

22:01 Career Insights and Market Observations

24:50 Balancing Builder Skills and Political Aspects in Product Management

25:47 The Importance of Hands-On Work for PMs

27:24 AI's Impact on Product Management

32:18 Navigating Career Paths in an AI-Driven World

37:26 Technical Fluency and AI in Product Development

44:20 Defining Success and Specialization in Product Management

47:56 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

This conversation will equip you with strategies to lead confidently, adapt to the modern product management market, and achieve long-term career fulfillment. Don’t miss this unique chance to learn from two product management experts!


Find out more about Shobhit at https://www.intentionalproductmanager.com/

Connect with Shobhit on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhitchugh/

Find out more about Ravi at https://www.ravi-mehta.com/.

Connect with Ravi on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravimehta/




www.intentionalproductmanager.com

Ready to move to the next level in your product career. I'm Shobit from Intentional Product Manager. Join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career, so you can have more impact and make more money. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Intentional Product Manager podcast.

Today I have a very special guest and I say that many times, but really I've followed Ravi Mehta's career for a long, long time. Ravi is a senior product executive. I've known him since the days that he was a VP at TripAdvisor. Then he went on to be a director at Facebook, then chief product officer at Tinder, and recently he's been entrepreneur in residence at Reforge.

Ravi is also very well known, respected. thought leader and he's written on product strategy, leadership, product careers. And look, even in our program, uh, intentional job search, we often refer people to some of Ravi's thought leadership articles on product management careers, defining your shape and whatnot.

We'll get into all of that, but Ravi, welcome to our podcast  and really great to have you here. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited for the conversation. So Ravi, I told the audience a bit about you, but I would love to hear your product journey. How did you get into product management?  Uh, I'll ask you a bunch of questions, but let's, let's get started there.

Yeah, it's an interesting story. I actually got into product management by happy accident. So, um, I've loved technology almost my whole life. Um, My dad in the early days of personal computers, uh, was working with Apple, um, on some things for, uh, for his work, uh, and decided to bring home an Apple 2C computer, which is this little tiny computer, almost look like a, look like a laptop.

Um, and I just was fascinated by it. Um, I started to play around with it, started to learn to code and I kicked off a lifelong passion for technology. I went to undergraduate for, um, computer engineering. I dropped out for a little bit to run a game company full time. Then I went back and finished up my degree and I was like, I should probably get a real job.

And so  she graduated and not to date myself, but, uh, at a really fortunate time, it was the middle of the web 1. 0 bubble. And so there were lots of engineering opportunities. And so I talked to a bunch of companies. I'm like, I should probably get a real job. I should get something, you know, B2B or something like, like that.

And one of the interviews I had was with Microsoft. And at the time Microsoft said, we're making a really big investment in games. We like the fact that you, um, came from a game company. And so there's sort of an interesting overlap with things that I had already done before. And so I went into interview at Microsoft, um, and I found the interviews very different than all the other engineering interviews that I had been in.

Um, it was a lot more about users and specs and requirements and strategy. Um, not getting up on the whiteboard and coding, which was what I was expecting. And then about halfway through the day, the recruiter came in and said, yeah, I'm really sorry, but we put you in the wrong track. We actually put you in product management interviews or at Microsoft there's no program management rather than engineering interviews.

Would you like to finish the day, um, in the, the program management track, or would you like to come back tomorrow for engineering interviews? And at this point, I already had a couple offers. I thought this was really interesting. It was fascinating. It was a whole set of things that I hadn't really been thinking about, but had been doing sort of hands on as running a game company.

And so I just decided to finish the day out with program management interviews. And eventually got an offer to join Microsoft and decided out of all my opportunities, that was the one that I wanted to pursue. And I haven't looked back ever since I spent a little bit of time outside of. Product management, um, when I went to business school, I did a summer internship in management consulting. 

I just always come back to, I love program management and product management. I love, um, you know, working with customers, working with teams to build products and so over and over throughout my career, I've come, come back to it. And it's been a passion of mine. Almost everyone tells me that I got into product management by accident. 

There's no defined path. But this was probably the wildest story I've ever heard. It's like being in the wrong track and still landing that, that job you were after. Literally, literally an accident. And it was, it was really fortunate. Because at the time, like, there wasn't a lot of people talking about product management.

Microsoft had a growing product management discipline. A couple of other of the larger companies did. Um, but this kind of triad of PMs, engineers, designers working closely together was really in its infancy. Very cool. So tell me more, what happened to you? I assume this Microsoft program manager that was pre MBA?

Um, so I went right out of undergrad into, into Microsoft. Um,  I went into the games group, but shortly after I joined, um, the Xbox initiative got funded. Um, and there's a whole story behind, uh, you know, Valentine's day dinner, uh, interrupting it, um, with Bill Gates and his wife, um, to get approval for the Xbox.

Um, and yeah, ultimately Microsoft approved, I think it was one or 2 billion at the time, a massive investment, um, to, uh,  Basically take Microsoft success in the desktop and move it into the living room. And so as that team formed, I got to be one of the first 20 or so people on the Xbox team initially working on Xbox live.

So thinking about it in terms of what are the platform capabilities that we want. Um, and then over my time at Microsoft, I spent time on the platform side, but most of my time was on the product and game side where we were thinking about. How to build massively multiplayer games. Um, the idea being that Microsoft sort of critical advantage in the console wars, which had been traditionally dominated by companies like Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft's advantage was to come in with a really deep understanding of the internet and how networked multiplayer gaming was going to change.

Um, how people buy and how people play games. And so I got to work on that problem for about six years at Microsoft on both the content side and on the platform side. After about six years, I really felt like, you know, I had gotten into product management by accident. There were a whole set of things that I didn't feel like I had a deep enough foundation in around strategy and finance and, um, and marketing and all the different pieces that go into.

Being a really good business thinker. So I decided to go to business school. Um, I did my MBA at MIT, um, and they cut me out of MIT rather than go to the track of management consulting, which is something that I experimented with over the summer, um, I joined an early stage startup as basically founder, uh, and employee number one, and since then I've had, and happen to talk more about this.

Uh, roles at all sorts of stages for companies, anywhere from big tech, like metal, all the way down to just a handful of people working in a room on a really tough problem. And, uh, the common thread throughout my career has been one, a love of building products and then two, um, almost everything that I've worked on has been consumer oriented and almost everything has had a social element to it.

So ultimately the thing that really drives me is how do you. Um, use technology to put people together in a way that creates value for them. The value could be utility, um, like being able to find the right hotel to stay at in on vacation. Um, or it could be, uh, entertainment and that's something that I worked on at, um, uh, Meta, for example. 

Love it. I also did management consulting in my summer and I unfortunately gave in to the peer pressure and went into it later.  And a lot of people do that after the MBA. So let's go now and explore a future in your career. So you were a trip advisor.  Then at Meta and then Tinder, I would love to know a bit more about the day to day and the core challenges you were tackling.

Maybe the core skill sets that you were building in all these different roles. Now, these might seem very similar, but I'm sure there's massive differences in how each company works and the skill sets you need to succeed. So I would love it if you could talk through that. Really different. And I think, you know, as I look back at my career, The five years that I spent at TripAdvisor were the most formative.

They really pushed me on some of the hardest challenges and help me, uh, refine my take on how to approach product management and product leadership.  I joined TripAdvisor in 2012. Um, I'd been at a startup. It was a company started by Brian Balfour. He's now the CEO of Reforge. Uh, the company was called Viximo and we were building out a platform for people to be able to, um, add microtransactions and virtual goods, um, to their products.

This was in the very early days of in app purchases. And so we were creating a platform that enabled people to add in app purchases really quickly and easily. We sold that company to, uh, Tapjoy, which is a mobile advertising company. And I was looking out for what was next. And I had been a fan of TripAdvisor for a long time.

It's one that we use every time we traveled. Um, and you know, it will never steer us wrong. We went to hotels that were well rated on TripAdvisor. We felt like we would always have a great time. Um, and so it just so happened that TripAdvisor was looking to build out a product organization, part because the company had just been rolled out from Expedia.

The TripAdvisor is an interesting story where, um, it started as a startup. Um, got product market fit pretty early on, um, and was really optimized for, uh, the growing distribution channel of SEO. Um, so if you think about it, search engine optimization is hungry for unique and valuable content and TripAdvisor was one of the first user generated content companies.

And so it was able to just get this great match between what users want and a fast growing distribution channel. And so shortly after it was founded, it got acquired by Expedia and then was part of Expedia for many years. Um, but what the leadership of Expedia realized is that TripAdvisor and Expedia are solving different things.

And then actually the enterprise value of the company separately could be much greater than the enterprise value of them combined. And so they decided to IPO TripAdvisor out of Expedia and I joined right around that time. And so that meant strategically, we could start to do. A number of things that just didn't make sense as part of Expedia.

So, um, one was adding the ability to book directly on TripAdvisor,  which would have cannibalized Expedia's business, but made total sense now that TripAdvisor was independent. And so I started working on a small team. Uh, it was called the core product team at TripAdvisor, um, with a really ambitious goal to make it easier for people to price shop for people to be able to book.

On trip advisor on hotels, as well as start to book other types of, um, categories on trip advisor, like restaurants and attractions. And so over the time that I was there, my team, uh, grew considerably, the company grew, uh, considerably. And that was a moment in my career where I felt like I had a lot of opportunity.

And we'll talk a little bit more about this. Uh, and later in the conversation, it was a moment where I felt like I had a lot of opportunity that was sort of disproportionate to my experience. Um, and I had to grow really, really quickly. Um, but by taking that, um, opportunity and really taking advantage of it, uh, was able to learn a lot.

Um, hopefully create a lot of value along the way. And it set me up for, um, what I would do later at Meta and at Tinder. Um, you know, leading product teams in different product area. I want to just double click into one of the things you said,  disproportionate to your experience. Yeah, I think there's two things to look for.

One of which is immediately obvious. The second is something that people don't talk enough about. Um, so the first one is you want to look at a company that's growing quickly. Um, if you're on a rocket ship, your career is going to go up with the rocket ship or the other cliches, you know, a rising tide raises all boats.

And so really important to identify fast growing companies, especially if you're at a point in your career where you want to accelerate, um, your career past the pace of, um, what you've been going through and past the pace of. Um, sort of the average, the average pace of growth for a product career.  The second thing that people don't talk about is you want to look for a company that doesn't have a deep bench.

Um, essentially want to look for a shallow bench. If you are at a fast growing company and there is not a deep bench of talent as opportunities come up. You're going to be, um, plucked for it. There's opportunities and you're going to get the opportunity to grow. And so at TripAdvisor, I got that cause the company had just been rolled out from Expedia.

It was growing quickly. The team was really small. Um, it was just like part of the team that got, got rolled out. We knew we wanted to grow really quickly. And so I had this nice combination of fast growing opportunities, shallow Bench got a lot of opportunity along the way to grow disproportionately quickly.

And I think if you look at every very successful product leader or product executive, you will see that there was a time in their career where both of these things were very true. They were in a fast growing organization. There wasn't a deep bench around them. They took advantage of all of the opportunities that were created.

Um, and they use that to propel their career forward. You're exactly right. Not enough people talk about the second point of deep career bench, the, and not actually having that and leveraging that as an opportunity. And I think what's interesting is if you look at big tech, right, you kind of,  especially as these companies start to saturate in their growth. 

You have a company which isn't growing as quickly that has been recruiting really high powered talent. And so you have an incredibly deep bench and a shrinking slate of opportunities. And then it becomes much harder to grow your career. Your career is going to grow along a very predefined path of a couple of years between every single run in the ladder versus yeah, the alternative context.

Being in a company that's growing fast, being in a place that doesn't have that deep talent bench yet, um, you're going to be able to grow much faster. So, you know, the road from senior PM to director might be three years or five years at a bigger company. It might be 12 months. It might be six months, depending on the company that you're at.

Um, if it's a smaller company, it's growing quickly.  Perfect. So, um, you know, let's move forward to meta. First of all, how did you think about the decision to leave TripAdvisor and go to meta? Yeah. So I think, uh, so I'd been working on TripAdvisor for about five years. Um, we had shipped a number of really important initiatives.

I'd gotten pretty deep in the travel space, but I was also feeling like there was something happening around. The internet that I didn't fully appreciate. This was in the early days of the shift towards, uh, visual video oriented content. So Instagram was growing really quickly around this time. Snap was growing quickly at this time.

Um, there was a lot more focus on social media and I felt like at TripAdvisor, I was really focused on SEO and really focused on the travel use case, but I wanted to understand more deeply what's happening with. Younger users, what's happening really on the front lines of where we're going, um, in terms of how people connect online.

And so I had an opportunity to go to Meta, uh, to join a team focused on Gen Z. We're specifically trying to understand how does Gen Z engage. Um, with entertainment on the internet. And so I was looking at that both from a product strategy standpoint, as well as a, um, corporate development standpoint, um, we ship a couple of initiatives.

Um, I also led the acquisition of TB, uh, TBH, Nikita's company.  Um, and so basically we're looking at how can we build up the talent base of people that understand Gen Z at Facebook. Um, and how can we make sure that we have a clear understanding of what those needs are and figure out what's important for Facebook to build and what are okay things to yield to.

Um, Instagram or others, we also did a lot of work around, um, short format video. And what was on, what was happening with, uh, what would eventually become Tik TOK in the U S at the time, um, there was a lot of growth around musically. And so that was a period of my career where I had a much smaller team and it was really about getting familiar with a new, um, area that I just didn't have a lot of experience and.

And I think that highlights a thing that's important for people to think about from a career standpoint,  career ladders are not necessarily linear. Several times in my career, I've gone from one title, like a VP to a lower title, like director several times. I've had a bigger team and I've gone to a smaller team.

And the important thing is not to optimize for the number or the shiny object, but really optimize for the learning that you're, that you're getting along the way. And I don't feel like I'd have. as deep an understanding of consumer social, of entertainment, of where consumer is going. Overall, we're not for that time, um, at Meta as well as at Tinder. 

Now you made that decision and you were like, what specific thing you were looking to learn more about? You know, were you looking to learn about the space or, or something else? I was really looking to learn at the time about  Um, where consumer was going generally and where consumer social was going, because my entire career had been about consumer TripAdvisor is a consumer, consumer company, but the type of work that we were doing day to day was really focused on the user generated content model, which had been incredibly successful for TripAdvisor, but was more tech space was more web 2.

0 than it was thinking about. Um, you know, where things are going. And so the video sharing, the visual sharing that was happening on Instagram and snap, I always thought would be interesting to bring to, um, you know, to the travel space, whether it was TripAdvisor or other, other places. But I just didn't feel like I understood it well enough and going to meta and being part of that team, um, was a great way to get immersed in that and come to a better understanding of where things are going.

And that really dovetailed nicely with, with Tinder. So Tinder was pulling on basically two threads. The scale of team that I had led at TripAdvisor plus, uh, some of the Gen Z specific work that I had done at Meta, uh, came in with both of those things being a key part of, um, what I, uh, was building at, at Tinder.

And a lot of my work at Tinder was focused on essentially Tinder 2. 0, how to think about where dating and social discovery are going for Gen Z moving forward, because. Tinder as a company had, had found product market state very early on and had stayed really largely committed to that early product vision.

Um, and yet. The users were changing, their needs were changing, um, and Tinder needed to change with it. And so a lot of the work that I did there was around  not only sort of enhancing the product market fit that was already there and improving monetization, but also around thinking about where the next sources of product markets that would be. 

These three roles that you mentioned, how did the challenges you faced and the skillsets you needed to tackle those changes,  change as you went from TripAdvisor to Meta to Tinder? At TripAdvisor, the thing that, um,  The  skills that I needed were one to move quickly. So TripAdvisor is a company where the motto is speed wins, and it was very much geared towards how do you figure out the shortest path forward and make sure that we're not building Rome before we figured out whether or not that's really the thing to build.

So how to move quickly and how to do that at scale, both scale in terms of the product reach. There are hundreds of millions of people using TripAdvisor every month, as well as scale in terms of the team. Like, how do you organize? A team of product and engineering folks such that, um, they can work quickly towards objectives that are really clear and iterative, but also strategic.

Um, and so at peak, my team at TripAdvisor was about 70 people, um, which across the different design engineering encompass product development resources or product development headcount of several hundred. Um, and so we were working at scale across a large scope of responsibility. And it was really, and we were working with the goal of being really fast.

And so it was important how to understand. How to set strategy, how to define goals, how to coach, um, great product managers, how to hire great product managers and do that all at scale. I love it. And now, how did that change at Meta? At Meta, it was much, my team was much smaller and it was really about understanding the problem, getting to the root cause of why is Gen Z moving away from Facebook because Facebook, it's hard to remember now, but it used to be the cool place to be.

It started on college campuses. And every high schooler wanted a, wanted a Facebook account. Um, and that was changing pretty rapidly in 2017, 2018 timeframe. Um, and so we wanted to understand why that was. The case, and then based on that understanding, we wanted to be able to clearly articulate it and then figure out strategically what to do about it.

So it was much more user research work, um, corporate development and strategy work than it was, um, you know, the, the team leadership, but I miss the team leadership and that was one of the things that brought me to Tinder where I got to combine the two, the strategic thinking about where the products could go.

Plus, um, the large team, um, that could have, you know, a large scope of responsibility, um, and move quickly across against those goals.  That's awesome.  Great to see how the senior roles, the skill sets you need are very situational dependent. The challenges the company is going through at that point, you need to tackle those.

Absolutely. Now, since then you've written a lot and you've especially. Uh, the thing that we refer to often is your thoughts on product management careers.  When you think of today's market, where you see a fair number of layoffs and it's a tight markets, employer favored market,  um,  companies are hiring, but maybe they want something more specific.

What are your observations of product managers who succeed in this market? Both in the search, but also as importantly in their career.  Yeah. So post Tinder, I made a decision to. Um, to go earlier stage, um, and to be closer to the building. And I wanted to do that for a few reasons. One of the key ones I think is that product management as a discipline, um, especially now, I think this is accelerating with, with AI, um, is one where, you know, you can have PMs that are really focused on the stuff around the building of the product, but every great product leader that I've  Um, doesn't, you know, go too high level or too abstract.

They know that details matter and they understand that as you get more and more senior, it's about having a dynamic range to both, um, you know, be thoughtful, um, and opinionated about the details as well as to. Um, think in a grand, um, and aspirational way about the strategy. And so for me, I want to get closer to the building and work earlier stage as a, as a result.

And I think now in the job market, that's what we're seeing. Um, you know, the last couple of years have been really challenging in terms of companies realizing that they had layers of, of people, layers of management that they didn't necessarily need and that they could, um,  you know, remove those, those layers.

And not lose anything in terms of their pace of, of execution, not lose anything in terms of their speed. Um, that doesn't mean I think, and unfortunately I think PMs have been, uh, sort of, uh, part of this and maybe in the crosshairs of this, it doesn't mean that the product management job is important if we think about product management, really from a first principle standpoint, it's about.

Understanding what a customer needs and then figuring out how to use that understanding to create value to the business that is central to everything that a company does. But the way in which you do that, I think has changed. And so I think the PMs that have been most successful in this new era are the ones that aren't afraid to build.

They're not afraid to get their hands dirty. They're not afraid to talk to customers. They're not afraid to dive into the data, um, or wireframe things out, or even like, you know, prototype type things. Um, because they're honing their builder skills so that there's nothing standing in the way of.  Getting to that really deep understanding and then being able to execute on what that customer customer wants.

And the PMs who are more focused on the, uh,  I say this word not pejoratively, but like the political aspect of product. Yeah. Product is partly managing stakeholders, managing, uh, leading your team. There's nothing wrong with that. Working with people is an incredibly essential part of, um, uh, of working in a company and being a successful product manager.

And I think that the PMs who have the ability to both be hands on and build with the product as well as work with people effectively are the ones that are best prepared to succeed in this new reality where there is less management layers. And as a result, um, PMs need to do more work that they might've thought about as I see work.

Um, but really is, you know, critical to delivering great products. Let's get one level deeper on the hands on work. Do you mean like coding? Do you mean UX design? Tell me more. What are the kinds of hands on work that a product manager should be doing? Yeah, I've been doing everything cause I love this stuff.

So I've been, you know, coding. I've been doing, I've been getting better at Figma. I've been talking to customers. Um, I like, I like the details and I think the details are really important. At the end of the day. You know, the people experience our products through the pixels on the screen. And I think it's important for PMs to have opinions on what those pixels are.

What does the copy say? What does the UX look like? What is the label on the button? All of these might seem like trivial implementation details, but in actuality, they are strategic questions. Um, and often, um, you know, they don't get the attention that, uh, they need. And you could tell the difference between a product that is a result of a craftsperson that really cared about every aspect of this versus a product that was created on an assembly line where, you know, someone wrote a spec without thinking about how it's going to get, um, built, someone else built it, someone else launched it, someone else QA'd it, um, and someone else is doing user research on it.

And, you know, it doesn't mean that every person needs to be good at all of these different things. I'm certainly not good at all of them or very many of them, but the fact that I've been able to get my hands on with these tools and, um, start to really think about products in a more detailed, detailed way has helped me.

You know, figure out what are the best things to do from a product strategy standpoint. And I think this is even more true with AI. Um, you know, right now AI is this kind of grand thing that's impacting, um, products, uh, as a, as a function. And I think the people that are going to be the most successful with it.

Are ones who understand how AI works and think about it, not as I'm going to drop a chat bot into my product, but as a set of really interesting Lego blocks, a set of really interesting machine learning capabilities that you can snap together in different ways to create product experiences that just couldn't exist before.

Um, and one of my favorite examples of this is a product we're using right now, which is, uh, Descript, um, Descript used the. Um, idea of being able to reliably transcribe voice into text to create an entirely new way of editing video. You edit video as it's a script, as if it's a script rather than adding video on a timeline.

Um, and so for 30 years, Adobe Premiere looked the same as it did. Um, because the timeline that they created 30 years ago was the same timeline that we're using today. Um, and Descript used a completely different model. A learning or machine learning oriented model to rethink how videos are edited through a script.

And I think we'll see like, just like, you know, now we can edit a video as if it were still a script. I think in the future with video generation, we're going to be able to edit video as if we were still behind the camera and being able to think about how learning capabilities actually change these fundamental user interactions is going to be a really important part of.

The product manager's job. I loved the script.  We were using it and when I started it I was like that's not gonna work But when I started using it and editing my videos as a document, I was like wow I can do so many things myself. It makes so much so many things easy for Customers, it's truly a wonderful application of ai Into a very real world problem not just ai for ai sake right like, you know, I mentioned People just often throw it in, but this was a true amazing application. 

Now, Ravi, what else is going to change from a perspective of AI? How do you think it's going to affect product management careers? I think in terms of product management careers, there is this existential dread that somehow AI is going to put us out of, out of business. And I don't think that's the case.

Um, so everything is going to move faster. Um, Steve Jobs had this analogy. He said, um, you know, computer is like a bicycle for the mind. And the analogy there is that, you know, through your own energy as a human being, if you just give yourself a bit of machinery and a bit of gearing, you can actually move much faster.

Um, in the same way that, you know, computing is a bicycle for the mind. I think machine learning is a motorcycle for the mind. It's much faster than computers. You can do a lot more with it, but it's also has, um, you know, it's also not as safe, right? There's also risks associated with it. And I think that that fact that this technology feels so fast and so risky is giving people this existential dread, which makes them pull back a little bit on what the capabilities are and how to use it in a really meaningful way. 

I think you would just pull the thread on it. It means that things are going to move faster. Engineers are going to be able to write more code. Designers are going to be able to create faster, um, faster designs. Um, people will be able to write copy faster. You'll be able to write content faster. And moving faster doesn't mean that that work goes away.

It just means you move faster. There's not a single PM in the world that feels like they would run out of good ideas if they could get through the roadmap faster. We all have like an infinite set of things that we want to do better. In fact, Jeff Bezos has this really good quote that he says, you know, the thing that I love about customers is no matter what you do for them, they're always dissatisfied.

And so it's not like we're going to run out of things to do because things are moving faster. We're just going to move faster on them. And I think what that means is actually the PM to engineering ratio is going to change, you know, a PM might've been able to work with 10 engineers effectively before now a PM might only be able to work with five engineers.

Cause those five engineers are moving two X or three X faster. So I actually think it's going to be an advantage to PMs.  The, uh, intuition, the strategic decision making, the alignment, the coordination, all of the things that product managers and product leaders do  are just as important, if not more important in an AI driven world.

And if everyone in the organization is moving faster on the execution, then it puts extra emphasis on the strategic pieces, the alignment, the communication. To move quickly as well. And I think that's job security for PMs rather than a job risk.  I love it. And, uh, Ravi, you said one of those, one of the things that, um, AI is going to enable more PMs and, but the layers might go away, so, or layers might be reduced, so what about the people who write on the cusp of group PM?

sort of levels where they could be individual contributor. They're all, they're partially individual contributor. Partially they are, uh,  more, um, starting to manage people. How should they think about their careers? I  think it largely, this is a really interesting question. I think it largely depends on what's going to make them Fulfilled and where they're going to do their best work.

And so if someone is looking at moving into a director level and the thing that they love is having a large scope of responsibility and working with a team and being able to set strategy across that scope, I think in this AI world, there's going to be more opportunities than ever to do that. Um, and there will be opportunities to grow into them. 

If on the other hand, uh, someone says, I really love to stay close to the product. And I want to be deep in this particular feature area or this particular domain area. I think there's going to be more opportunities to do that. And so over my career, I've sort of had different opinions about whether or not a two track product management model makes sense.

Should you have two tracks in the same way that you have it for engineers, where you have people that are essentially more and more senior individual contributors, and you have other people that become more and more senior in terms of their scope of responsibility in terms of their team. Um, in the past, I felt like that probably doesn't make sense for product, but I think it's going to make more and more sense as AI becomes a bigger part of how we build products, because there will be really deep technical domain oriented things that we need to do to build great products.

Um, where it makes sense to have a very senior principal product manager responsible for them. And there will also be things where there were relatively small number of people. That are moving quickly across a broad scope of initiatives, and you're going to need a great director level or VP level person, um, to help them and support them in terms of, um, you know, creating value for the company as a result of that work.

So I think. Understanding where you want to be in that two track model is really important. Understanding where you do your best work and then plotting out your career with the idea of, um, based on that understanding, where do you want to go? It's really important. I loved when you said that, look, you weren't optimizing for team size.

You went from VP to director, smaller team, but the opportunity was for learning  and deepening your understanding of the sector, trends, Gen Z. And then continuing at, at Tinder. I think that's a very important thing for people to not be obsessed about where, Hey,  I used to manage five product managers. Now I'm a individual contributor.

Is that an emotion? I think people are a little over obsessed with that.  In this new, new AI world, what would you say are some of the skills that product managers should really equip themselves?  Yeah, it's really hard to  say, okay, I've gotten to a particular title and I've worked really hard for that, or, you know, I've grown my team to a certain size and I've worked really hard for that to then feel like you're taking a step backwards by having some of those external aspects of what you do change.

But at the same time, your personal fulfillment, your career growth is going to be directly proportional to the impact that you can make. Um, and if you are, you know, if your career is on the right track and the organization that you're in, and you could see sort of the long term there, then growing in terms of those things, it makes sense, right?

Growing in the context of, I want to go more and more senior. I want to have a larger and larger team. Makes total sense. But if on the other hand, you're finding success in a different way and you want to move quickly, or you want to be on the frontier of tech, or you want to solve, um, tough problems with a small, really smart team, then you're defining success in a different way and it's okay to move in a different direction.

I think, you know, everyone, I think particularly within PMs, there's this battle between. Um, how we internally define success and how the outside world defines success. And oftentimes we get pulled into defining our own success based on what the outside world expects and wants. But that's a recipe for, um, getting into a position where you may be ostensibly successful, but not feeling fulfilled, um, every day.

And I think the wonderful thing about being in tech, being in product is it's moving so quickly, then if you are growth oriented and you love to learn and you love to focus on new problems. That you can find different pockets to be successful and you don't have to follow any specific path.  So, so, um,  in this new, a new AI world, um, what would you say are the next one to steal  that product by essentially equip themselves to really succeed?

I think the first one is to really familiarize yourself with the technology. So in the past, um, I don't think it's been that necessary to have a really deep technical understanding of all the technical details in terms of how the web works or how, you know, mobile apps work.  I think it helps.  You know, it's a different, different set of skills now with AI.

I think that that has changed. It's going to be hard to know what's possible and how the pieces fit together without becoming somewhat fluent in what the different pieces are. That doesn't need,  that doesn't mean that you need to be able to build a large language model. From scratch, although you can do that if you, if you want, it does mean that you need to know what a large language language model is, you know, what are the mechanics of, um, the architecture that's driving, driving it?

Why is it good at certain things? Why is it bad at other things? You know, when  open AI releases something new, like the strawberry model that just came out, that has advanced reasoning, it's helpful to understand, you know, what is chain of thought prompting and how might that have influenced.  The way in which OpenAI approached that to be able to create an an AI that is starting to look like it can reason.

So I think having that detailed technical understanding is important to know what all the pieces are, know how they fit together, know what the capabilities are, and then when you're creating a product, you can think about, you know, what is the right approach here? Do we need to use a more traditional approach or do we need to use a more.

Machine learning approach. And I think right now we're in kind of like peak hype around AI. So, you know, everyone, uh, is seeing problems as a nail and they've got a hammer. And so they're willing to hit on those problems.  AI is the wrong solution for the majority of product that we need to build. And then majority of features that we need to. 

But it is the very right solution for a small set of very valuable problems. And so being able to understand the difference between traditional computational systems and learning systems and when to use, which I think is a really important core capability that requires some, uh, technical fluency to do well. 

Yeah. Same name, just back to like one of the things we were talking about earlier.  It almost seems like. Um, so the best applications of AI need some sort of a  complete shift in side of time or, or what we used to call at Google, critical insight life. Okay. What if video editing was like editing the Word doc or a script, you know, that, and that goes back to like the exact  product that we both left. 

Absolutely. And, and, you know, before you might've asked that question five years ago and everyone would look at you cross eyed, like that's not possible. But now you can, you can ask that question and those things are possible and reliable,  but they work in very different, different ways. I had a post recently where I talked about the difference between, um, learning systems and computation systems, and pretty much all of the innovation that we've seen over the last 50 years in computing comes out of the idea that, um, you have those.

And input, you have a set of rules and you can very quickly with a microprocessor, create a bunch of outputs. Um, and so that simple rule has scaled to the point where now you can get, you know, video games that run at 60 frames per second, where they're doing trillions and trillions of lighting and shadow and physics and collision, um, and narrative based computations.

To create an experience that feels real. Um, and so those systems are incredibly flexible, incredibly powerful. But the thing that we couldn't do up until recently is be able to solve a problem where we couldn't express the rules. Um, and so if you wanted to say, um, you know, is there a bird or a cat in this photo, you couldn't solve that computationally because the, uh, the rules that we as humans use to figure out what.

Animal is in a photo, um, are not possible for us to express in code in a way that we can do clearly. And so that's where machine learning comes in. Machine learning can actually figure out the rules, um, rather than us having to explicitly state them. And this gives rise to two very different types of systems that act in different ways.

A computational system, the systems that we're used to dealing with are deterministic. They do the same thing every single time versus a learning system, um, is probabilistic. It does a different thing every time. And as a product manager, that difference between determinism and. A system that is more probabilistic is really key to how you create a feature that works or doesn't work for people.

Because the fact that an output is different every time might defy expectations. Um, if you're creating something where you are calculating the solution to a math problem, you don't want the answer to be. different every time or might be a feature if you're creating image generation where you want to create a lot of different variants.

And so the, these like different properties between learning systems and computational systems are important to understand and important to be able to factor into how you approach product development. You know, I did an experiment with not exactly the system, but let's just say, let, let, let, let's test it out.

So there's a few product managers who would. Upload  or sorry,  you know, I did an experiment with a AI system and I was like, let's, let's test it out. So there's a, there's a product called photo. ai where I uploaded a few images and created a virtual model of myself and then have it generate a bunch of images.

And then I had a generator, uh, image of me speaking at a conference and I sent it to my family WhatsApp channel.  And I was like, Hey, this is just from recent conference. Everybody's like, we're proud of you. You know, that's amazing. You're doing so well, all these things. It was full of messages. I woke up in the morning and the messages were there.

And I was like, Oh crap. I told them, look, I've been doing a lot of conferences, podcasts, all these other things, but just so you know. This was completely fake.  Here's a picture of me with three kittens. Here's a picture of me on my jet. People were like, Oh, the only thing, only difference they could really tell was they thought maybe I had gotten Botox on my forehead because it just looked incredibly smooth.

But other than that, they couldn't tell anything. It's amazing what these systems can do right now. It's amazing what these systems are capable of.  Really cool stuff.  Awesome. One last topic. One last main question. When you think of product managers and you're not in this market of 2024. Oh, sorry. You are in this market of 2024, 2025.

You're looking to grow up a level in your career.  Uh, you've thought a lot of, about AI as well. What are the things they, uh, should be doing? Product management. Zero things. What advice would you, would you give them? I think the biggest advice is, um, to assess yourself and kind of understand where you do your best, best work.

Um, product management is an impossibly broad discipline now. It's not unlike engineering in the early days, everyone was a full stack. Engineer, because you could know all of the things about engineering and be able to build workable software today. Specialization is incredibly important in engineering.

You have people that are front end specialists and backend specialists and machine learning specialists and who work on, um, game engines and who work on embedded, embedded systems. There's way too much scope in engineering for any person to know all the things equally well.  The same is true of product.

It's just that, you know, some of the skills are a little bit softer. So it's hard to really wrap your, wrap your hands around that, but it is true. And the degree to which you can pin down, um, on these degrees of freedom and know where you're strong and where you want to focus is really helpful. And then once you have some of those degrees of freedom pinned down, you can then figure out what are the set of opportunities that you want to explore.

Um, I worked with someone at Tinder who is just a fantastic customer service rep. And her dream was to become a product manager, but she only wanted to become a product management manager for the trust and safety team. She had no, um. No, like desire at all to work on user facing features or any other part of the Tinder product.

She wanted to work on trust and safety. And the fact that she had that clarity was great because it was something that really dovetailed nicely with her talent. Um, and the fact that she knew that's where I wanted, she wanted to focus was also great because that was an often overlooked area. So many PMs at Tinder want to work on the front end product, not on the backend systems.

But from a business standpoint, it's actually the backend systems in many cases that are the most important driver of business results and customer. Customer satisfaction. So that focus gave her a leg up. Um, and it's similar to anyone who's thinking about your product management career. If you know where you're strong and where you do your best work and what you want to focus on that can give you an unfair advantage.

Um, when you're looking for your next role, I was saying in our program, um, we refer to it as the angle of mastery and recently just started working with someone who's, you know, discovering this person's standard pitch and they could just be like, Oh, I'm accomplished product leader with so many years of experience across these sectors, like the more we dig in, the more it was like, what you're really good at is you can take products with at least some product market fit.

And you can get them to scale to 10 million, a hundred million users  in the B2C space. You've done it many times. That's your skill set. You love doing it. Let's put that as your core positioning rather than accomplished product leader with so many years of experience. And that's exactly what people should be doing.

Now, that's so different. That's so much, so much more different than another accomplished product leader  with many years of experience. Absolutely. And if you can, if that thing that you're strong at is overlooked in an organization or in the industry, even better because you can come in and create.

Create value. I think, you know, as an industry, we flock to a lot of things a while ago was, um, web three, now it's AI. And so, you know, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, if you can go into a space that's growing quickly, um, where there's not a deep bench, that's a great place to grow. And that doesn't necessarily need to be an entire company.

That could be a subset of a company that is going through some really significant growth and where they just don't have enough people, um, who are really deeply thoughtful working on that particular area.  Where can people find out more and learn from you? Where do you put out your amazing content? Yeah, absolutely.

Um, you can go to ravi meta.com, so it's just ravi meta.com. Um, and I have some, uh, articles there. I also have a sub stack if you want to search out, uh, for that. Um, I'm starting to write more, more frequently. Um, and so would love, uh, for you to, uh, follow that and then, you know, feel free, I'm pretty accessible, so  comment on the post, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Um, as well. So if I can be helpful at all, please reach out.  Please keep writing Ravi because we've always been big fans of it. I really appreciate you coming to the podcast and sharing your thoughts with  my awesome audience. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Hey, be sure to check out our website at intentionalproductmanager. 

com to see how you can level up in your career.