YouSaid · the spoken record

Aatish Nayak

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-04-11
most recent: 2025-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. So, okay, I will say I do think perplexity is honestly just killing it. Like, I have a lot of respect for that team and the speed that they're moving. Like, sure, you can say, oh, they're doing a lot of things now, but I think the focus on the core experience of making an answer really, really, really fast. And everything else out of the way, as I think to none. And this is actually one where product is the king. I mean, sure, they have distribution and stuff, but people adopted it against consumer, but people adopted it because the product is just so good. And I think they're starting to now focus on certain verticals, like shopping, like travel, like finance, where you need a lot of internet knowledge. And I think that strategy is really smart.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open AI and Anthropic. I think I would have said Open AI maybe six months ago, but I think Anthropic is really starting to appeal to a lot more people.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think Churn is very real. I think the talent quote unquote war is, I think, very real. I mean, this is not just in AI. Like some of the best executives in the world live in this tiny, slim peninsula in the Bay Area. And especially if your growth stage companies where you need to bring and experience people, experience executives, they're all concert in there, have families, they have, you know, all these people who just want to stay there. And so sure, you can have a lot of the early stage talent in other places.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go on podcasts. No, I'm already doing that. I think. I would like to work on, so does Harvey, like the productivity suite that we have today, which is the core product, and then there's Harvey that does a lot of the end-to-end work in collaboration with law firms and enterprises. And that is stuff like that enterprises pay millions of dollars to do. I want to just tackle that work. That is way out. You need your research. You need UX experimentation. So we'll get to that. But right now we have to focus on Harvey, the productivity suite, the software that lawyers use and not the Harvey that does the work end-to-end.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unit testing, I think, can be way more automated with AI. I think, I mean, individual engineers still use AI somewhat for writing their own unit tests, but that whole layer of unit testing should just be all A”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it goes back to what I said in the beginning focus on the skill sets that you want to learn. I think I still get this where a lot of engineers like, I want to be a product manager. And it's like One of the most valuable things you have is your ability to code if you're an engineer, let's say. And I wish I stuck to it more. But I think it's super important to stick to that at least because it's much better with live coding or whatever now. And then don't be afraid to try a lot of things. I think people expect that they have to figure everything out in the early 20s that just not the case, especially now with AI. You don't know what's going to be valuable when you're 26 when you're 22. I think try a bunch of things, experiment, see what you like, see what you don't like.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a few things in different parts of my life. Maybe in college, I willingly took probably like one of the hardest courses at Cornell Bell in operating systems. You have to build operating systems from scratch. And I didn't have to take that. I could go to my degree without it. I just heard a lot of crazy things of people staying up two nights in a row doing it. And I was just like, let's do it. Why not? Another thing is, you know, out of college, like a lot of CMU graduates were offered jobs at the big companies, Microsoft, Valentier, Stripe, whatever. I decided to not do that, move to LA, join my friend's company, which ended up failing in a year. But just something off the beaten path. And when else would I live in LA? And so I ended up doing that. And then meandered my way through startup.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think. Generally, welcome stability, but I think To truly be happy, to truly be fulfilled, I think you need to embrace chaos. You need to embrace instability because that makes life much more interesting. I think there's always the, I'm going to settle down and be fine and retire and be chill. You could do that, but I think the road to getting there, you should actively embrace conflict. You should actively embrace uncomfortability because you'll be much more resilient to whatever life throws at you over time.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because whenever I have an opinion, I write it down and then my recall memory in my brain is not great. So I just need to write everything down.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And again, the other thing is if you're booking a flight, sure, let the agent do it. It's easy, or you're ordering dinner or whatever. If you're doing something much more complicated, like an architecture drawing, like legal work, tax work, the agent is going to need a lot of human context to actually make that work, whether that's from the consumer, whether that's from the producer. And so it's going to have to ask you a bunch of questions, even more complex knowledge work that enterprises do. I think people just have this assumption that agents will just do everything automated and black box and it'll be fine. But people don't trust black boxes. There are unique human elements like context, like emotions that you need to factor in. And so I'm thinking beyond just like the booking flight agents. I'm thinking way more like doing very complex work agents.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's just one interesting thing about Gen AI where who is the consumer of the product or service or the work that's being created and who is the producer of it? You know, examples here are in architecture, it's the client versus the architect creating the design. Or there's the marketer versus the brand person for content. Or it's like the client versus the lawyer. And do you end up like what model do you end up taking? Do you help the producer 10x their output and make them more productive or go direct to the consumer? And a lot of people have thought they can go directly to the consumer and say, here's a bunch of leads or here, but here's a bunch of legal work, whatever. But ultimately, I think the humans don't just always trust AI. They trust other humans using AI. I think, again, depending on the domain, the right thing is more likely that the agent partners with the producer of the work to deliver for the consumer.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you should. So that's another one where it's like, I think everyone should have AI therapists. That should probably happen at some point. And there's actually a study done recently where someone did a study where they had a bunch of participants talk to like a bot that was based off of OpenAI or something for advice. And I think like 60 to 70% of them reported higher sentiment and more happiness after doing that for like four or five months compared to the control group who mostly talk to humans. And it's because people don't want to be judged by other humans, even if you do have a therapist that is in a safe space or something.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claude does, ChatGT doesn't. It's not as empathetic. That's really interesting. Grock does too, actually. Grock does really good advice.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who is responsible? I think on the culture side, it's like, what are the last domains where humans actually want AI involved? So as an example, in Silicon Valley, I and many of my friends actually talk to like Claude or ChatGPT for kind of therapy or like emotional advice of like, I'm thinking through this problem. It's really hard.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everyone in Silicon Valley thinks that AGI will just hop in, you'll see a lot of GDP growth, and everyone will live happily ever after, UBI, whatever. I think realistically you will run into cultural, legal, and kind of like regulatory barriers to actually wide-scale adoption of AI, like kind of breaking each one down. If you end up, again, AGI, you assume it can do really high level tasks like advising on a merger or advising as a board member, being a CEO, what are the governance frameworks for regulating an AGI that is running a company? Like no one knows yet. And that's going to take time to happen. I'm sitting on legal just because I actually have asked this question a lot to our partners and our customers on what happens. And everyone's like, we're going to need some indemnification liability of like all these different things that if AI autonomy starts to take actions in the world, what happens?”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a world where prototyping and the actual execution of ideas is much cheaper, the ideas will matter a lot more and how you incorporate unique knowledge will matter more, like domain expertise. Maybe the future is lawyers, doctors, domain experts are driving more of the product decisions because you need to bridge the gap between what the model and the UX is to how you actually apply it to a certain profession. Those ideas, domain experts will matter a lot more than they even do right now. Like I think we've seen the benefit of having lawyers in-house literally sitting next to engineers.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do, they do. And Silicon Valley everyone talks, and so a lot of the cursor folks are good friends and networks of a lot of our team. And so they tend to prefer cursor, but again, I think time will tell.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I currently use actually Claude for prototyping because I actually don't want to deal too much with the very nuanced stuff that Windsurfer cursor has. And so I end up using Claude. And then I've actually been using also Replit agent mode. The reason being is because Replit takes care of deployment for you. Like I don't want to mess with deployment front end, back end servers, all that. And it really has a nice interface because you can give it some task of give me a legal chatbot app or something. And it'll say, here's my plan, here's the additional features I think that would be useful. And then you can check, check, check, and it starts building it. And then you can see as it's building it, and then you can see the code, of course, and modify it. And so things like, again, for my target audience, things like agent replate agent mode, lovable, bolt are a little more attractive than some of the IDs.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like UX is super important. I've heard some engineers say they like cursors agent mode much better than Winsurf. Some people have said the opposite. So it's like, what is the most delightful UX? And sure, maybe you can copy UX, but I think it's a little more nuanced. And then it's like data and governance, particularly in the enterprise. The models are only as good as the context you give it. And so any of these products, can you actually tap into knowledge that the enterprise has about its code, its products, its architecture, and use that in more helpful ways to tailor the outputs that neutral engineers write? And I know Codium has focused a lot on getting a lot of the enterprise data, the enterprise understanding of existing code bases and making sure that knowledge architecture is really good.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think more of these labs should start to think about what is that end product you want to deliver and the cloud companies, they're going to run the best software. They're going to drive margins to the ground. And so competing on inference with cloud companies is really hard over time. And so if all your revenue comes from inference and developers, it's not an ideal place to be. And instead, you want to work, you want to build products, maybe work with some particular application layer companies like Harvey to deliver your products end-to-end.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single model release that's come out from OpenAI, from the other competitors, we've benchmarked for since the beginning of time at Harvey. And 3.7 is really where we're starting to see some of the performance better than OpenAI.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claude, so we did this, we did these evals recently. Claude 3 7 in particular for legal reasoning. It's better at long form legal reasoning and drafting long form outputs. So a whole section of a merger agreement, for example, and making it super consistent, it's really good for. And then things like extraction, where extracting some terms from SPA, like a share purchase agreement, is very nuanced because the answer isn't a verbatim text in the agreement. It's like this is getting a little in the weeds on legal, but if you're getting the in-depth indemnification cap on a share purchase agreement, you have to reason over four or five different clauses because that cap is not a name thing in the deal. You have to like reason over the dependencies of four different clauses in that agreement and then extract that out. For some of those types of extractions, Claude is 370 in particular starting to get better.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, they've been investors in us from the beginning. We've gotten our early access to OpenAI models for a long time. We've built some custom solutions with them. For the most part, that's still the case. We are seeing some capabilities now with Claude, with other models that are better for some tasks. And so now we're exploring. Where is Claude?”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically, we have like hundreds of different tasks, and each task has a rubric now. And the benefit that we have, and we kind of architected from the beginning, is we have a lot of lawyers that we have brought from Big Law to work with our AI team, with our engineering product team, who sit side by side with them and say, here's how legal work actually happens. Because I'm not a lawyer. I come from AI. I don't know what good often looks like. It's really hard to do product management for sometimes, for something you don't know what good looks like. So it's really important to rely on that domain expertise. And then another thing is our models of choice are Open AI right now.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so our evals are very different. A lot of public legal benchmarks, and then even things like scales, humanities last exam, they're all multiple choice. I would love if legal work was multiple choice, but any lawyer will tell you there are like a million options of what you could do. And so one, it's like multiple choices is not the right thing. And so we created this benchmark called Big Law Bench consists of tasks that are real billable work tasks that lawyers do on a daily basis at our biggest customers and big law firms. The nature of these tasks are very much open-ended. The problem with open-ended tasks is like, how do you evaluate them consistently across tasks? Like if you're saying Harvey generate a chronology, that is very different than draft me a motion for summary judgment, which is another kind of like litigation task. Then what we had to do is create rubrics for each of those tasks as well. And those got very specific.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On average, humans are lazy and just need to be told what's best for them. The whole model choice, and again, we found this trap. I think that whole paradigm was created for the Silicon Valley or tech audience because everyone loved playing around with like, oh, one versus GP40 versus these models. We hadn't, I mean, we still haven't quite figured out what the models are good at such that you can route appropriately. The biggest problem with these models, and we have this problem, is just like the capabilities are very eval constrained. You don't know exactly which model is better for the job. Sometimes it's user preference. We do a lot of side-by-side testing. Sometimes it's still not super clear. And so I think the whole industry as a whole kind of fell into this trap, put everything in a drop down and give users a bunch of choice.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It better and then should just route you to the best system for the job and not have the user think about what they should do.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rolled it out, and almost everyone was super confused on when to use what. They didn't know when to use assisted draft. I think it's maybe lawyers, maybe something else. They just didn't know, hey, when I am creating a response to a complaint, what should I use, draft or assist? And this is like everyone had this complaint. And then we started solving this by enablement saying this model was good for this reasons and the UX is good for this reasons. And so here's what you should do here. And some of those complaints died down. But it was mostly because people just got tired of complaining in general. And then obviously they started using the product and they said, oh, the draft mode behaves this way and is more legal eased than the assist mode. But that is an example where the right user experience is the AI should just pick for you. The AI should just know what user query and intent is or it should ask you questions to understand.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a few things. I'll pick one of them was the one I kind of just said right now around vault and doing attraction. Another one that we were doing was, again, at Harvey because it's recent, last year in Q4, we were revamping our core assistant product. We introduced basically two modes in assistant. One is kind of assist mode, which is doing Q&A and analysis. And then another one is a draft mode, which helps you draft contracts, draft clauses, emails, whatever lawyers do. And the thinking was you want to give lawyers some choice of like, okay, what am I doing? And pick the right user interface and the model for the job because those are two different models and user interfaces. Okay. And this is the joys of user testing. We didn't user test this that much. We should have done it a little more. We were just trying to move fast and get something out. As we built it, we launched it.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just showed it, and they were like, Oh my god, cool! It's a demo, and it's like, you know, interpreting my intent. The thing.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of them is biasing the users for what you want them to think. This is most useful maybe with an example. So we built this product called Vault last June-ish. And the essential thing is it allows you to do large-scale extraction of documents. Like if you have a bunch of lease agreements, credit agreements, and you want 10, 20, 50 deal points out of it, out of each one, it creates a whole grid for you. And the way we went about building that is when you upload a bunch of files, you say, hey, I want these 10 things. And Harvey will decompose your initial prompt and suggest like, okay, here's the 10 things. Am I on the right track and, you know, check, check, check? And then you launch it. It demos really well because it's like takes your prompt and then converts it and shows a little thing. And when we showed to people, people were like, oh my God, wow, that's amazing. And then we didn't really put into the hands of people for Live Matters, live use cases.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's a broader list of beta testers, like beta customers. We give it to them, iterate. And then there's like the whole general public. And so this is probably true for most products and most enterprise teams is you want to make sure you're testing this way much more often with kind of expanding circles.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this something I think a lot about, particularly for our user base? Because law firms don't like to move fast or are averse to change. At least the admin IT teams are averse to change. And so we can have a product launch, and it's not G8 and roll out to 100% of users for a few months because people are just slowly adopting it. So I think you need to let it bake depending on the customer base. The ideal thing, what we do is you branch out user testing to concentric circles and that concentric circles get bigger and bigger. The first thing we do when we build something is we have an extensive set of lawyers internally doing various roles. We give it to those lawyers and they test it and they give feedback and we iterate. And then we have selected design partners that are consistent for most features. Externally, we give it to them. They feel part of the process. It's really good. They give feedback.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oftentimes it is the things that are called out are the things that go wrong. If you say that we're not going to do testing fast enough and then you don't put an owner on this, like an owner to say make sure testing goes faster, then it's going to fail because no one's thinking about that. I don't think there's generally a lot of things that can go wrong that are out of the question. Of course, there's like unknown unknowns. COVID, yeah, or the customer's not going to like the feature, or a new model is going to come out and it's going to wreck all our plans. That happens sometimes”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does success look like and what will prevent us from achieving that and what will go wrong? Give me all your worries. I'm generally a very anxious paranoid person when I'm operating. I assume everything's going to go wrong. And so maybe it's self-therapeutic for me to be like, guys, I think this is going to happen. This is going to happen. It's going to go wrong. But I think, you know, we've done a few of these, and I think it does help with anxiety. It does help with alignment so that people aren't confused on what success looks like.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so retros are you want to look back at some period of time and say, here's what we did well, here's what we didn't do well. And retros should be generally more regular, like every month, for example. At the end of the month, you say, what did we accomplish this month? What could have gone better? Here's what we should do for the next month. Postmortems are when there's an incident or issue or we made the wrong decision, you want to evaluate that very specific decision or event that happened. If there is an incident and our app goes down for X amount of minutes, you want to make sure you do a post-mortem and see like, why did that happen? How do we resolve it? How could we have prevented it? And so postmortems are more ad hoc. One thing we're starting to do more of, and this is again me learning as a product leader at Harvey, is that pre-mortems. Pre-mortems are before you start something like a big project or big initiative, you want to sit down with your team and say,”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very crisp about what the outcome looks like. Is it a bunch of tests are written? Is it you're going to spend two weeks in refactoring? You want to time bound it like with any other feature? Because otherwise engineers will love to just forever clean up code. And there's obviously more you can do with the engineers.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're growing really fast, things will break, and engineers have to accept that. The important thing is if something breaks or something goes wrong or something goes slower than necessary because you have to like refactor something and it didn't work in a certain way, it's really important to do a postmortem on that and say, what could we have done to avoid that? And if the answer is like, oh, we could have spent one week in two sprints ago and said, let's clean this up before we do this thing. That's great because then you actually want evidence of technical debt affecting revenue affecting customer outcomes. And you want to compile the evidence because otherwise if you don't have evidence or you just refer to as like technical debt overall, it is this like you can go forever cleaning up technical debt to be quite honest. And so I think it's super important to identify examples of where cleaning something up would have avoided problems later when you say, okay, we're going to work on technical debt because of X, Y, and Z, you have to be very”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, as you can imagine, engineering candidates ask me this all the time because they want to know what the heteroproduct thinks about cleaning up code. So the nice thing I'll say is”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one general thing that, again, this is actually coming from a lot of learnings at scale. One thing you want to avoid is this idea of feature factories. And what that means is imagine a factory, like a conveyor built system. You have, okay, the customer says something and then PM writes to PRD and then designer does the mock and then the mock is handed off to the engineer. Then the engineer hands it off to QA. Then the QA hands it back to PM and then PM goes to enablement and then goes to sales. Like you have this very linear process and that is how you make really bad products that I saw how you demotivate your whole team because no one wants to be just stuck in what they're, you know, this specific section. And so the biggest thing when you've written a PRD is get everyone in a room who's going to get involved in it, who's ever even going to touch it, debate it, discuss it. That's why the questions are so important because you want to say, where am I wrong? What are you worried about? What is going to cause?”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the bottom of the PRD so that when you do the kickoff, you can start to get alignment very early on. And looking ahead, and again, this comes with practice in your organization, looking ahead when you actually start building, when you start rolling out, what are going to be the gotchas? What are going to be the pitfalls and really calling those out at the end of the PRD is super, super important.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. I view PRDs as alignment docs. It is not a Bible for how something should work or something should happen. It is a alignment or kickoff doc. It explains, I think, a really good PRD explains why you're doing certain things, motivation with ideally data or customer quotes or some evidence that why we're doing what we're doing. And then what it does also include is kind of like a straw man user journey of like, here's what the user should do step by step. Here's what it'll work. And ideally including different personas. And then the other big thing that is really important is what are all the hot questions and hot debated questions? Like I think a good PM should have an instinct for looking around the corner. What is engineering going to say? Why is this complicated? Or, you know, what are customers going to say about this little feature? You want to make sure you call out all the elephants in the room and all the”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short answer is no. I don't think you lose the design function or you lose kind of designers. I think you actually get better designs because you can prototype much faster, especially with AI. I actually always say prototype before the PRD. Whenever you have an idea, whether it's engineers, designers, PMs, whatever, you should do the prototype before because you're not going to really know how to build the product, what the exact UX should be, particularly like, again, with AI when these new patterns that we can establish without actually having you play with it, some internal customers play with it, whatever it is. And then when you do the whole formal PRD kind of design process, whatever, you end up writing PRDs and whatnot and doing proper designs. But because you've done all this pre-work and prototyping, you can actually save a lot of cycles and just move faster at the end of the day and then ultimately get a better outcome.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the most important skill is communication of your ideas, whether that happens in a written way, whether it happens. Probably people love slides, whether it happens in slides, whether it happens if nowadays you can build prototypes very quickly and communicate your ideas, like PMs on my team create prototypes all the time using cursor or using Claude to show their ideas. And so I think communicating ideas being very crisp about why you want to do certain things and communicating that is super important.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tangibly, what should the UX be, and how much should we invest in technical debt cleanup versus not? Those are kind of two different types of memos and thinking and reasoning. But I think there's like multiple layers and kind of like a fractal nature to this stuff.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the top level is what are we going to focus on as a company? Like, what actually matters? And it's not features. This is like one framework that we have at Harvey is land expand lock-in. What things can we build slash do to help us land new customers? What can we do to help us expand and grow usage? And then third is how do we make ourselves remote and very sticky with customers? That is something that Winston wrote and defined. And that is at the top level. And then how do you go about deciding, okay, let's say we really need to focus on lock-in and how do you go about deciding what to build and then what are the operating cadence should be? It's something that, you know, I write, or engineering leaders write, on, okay, how should you think about making decisions? Why are we making decisions? There's both the meta aspect of process, like move really fast or iterate quickly or prototype quickly and kind of like philosophies attached to that. And then there's things like”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brainstorm discussions, welcoming debate. I think it's super crucial as long as it doesn't slow things down and you debate for seven weeks.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think particularly early on in Harvey, we did the dictatorship. I mean, Winston is just like, we're going to do X, Y, and Z and go, go, go. I think, again, as you hyper grow, you assume everyone has the same context that you do. And that's just not the case. They're not in all the conversations. They're not in all investor meetings. They don't see what the models are going to do six months down the road. And so that caused thrash and the team watching this is probably going to agree with me. And I think it's super important to explain why you're doing certain things, even if at the end of the day you're like, please listen to me and please trust me. Because you need to build mutual respect with your team and with everyone at the company. If you've done the right thing in hiring great people, great people want to be told, here's why we're doing things. And then, you know, 99% of the time, if your reasoning is right, and if it's not, you should debate it. If your reasoning is right, they will agree with you, but just sharing the context, writing memos, having”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I believe in benevolent dictatorships. So, Singapore, as an example, I totally agree. I think it's super important that you have very clear vision and execution from the top, because otherwise you're going to end up a tragedy of commons. And so it is very clarifying to say, hey, we are behind from this competitor, do X, or we need to land these types of customers, do Y. And that direction is extremely helpful from the founders. But I think, especially as you're a hyper growing, you end up with a lot of confusion or maybe the details don't actually end up in the way you want if you don't bring your team along the journey. And I think I've learned a lot of lessons from this being scale, you know, at Harvey, we definitely have not nailed this.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's super important to push back on founders, even for the sake of debate, to be honest, you know, of course, depending on the founder. For early product leaders, it's really important to build a really, really good relationship with founders. Maybe that's obvious, but it is important to say, okay, why did you hire me or why do you want to hire me? Like, what do you actually want me to do? And for product-minded founders, they may say, I just want you to execute. I know the strategy. You should do execution, make sure everything happens. And it's like, that's fine. And you can learn a lot from that. But it's super important to have that conversation on what do you actually want the role to be? Like I've seen product leaders, product managers kind of end up in bad places because they didn't have the conversation and then the founder doesn't want to let go. It becomes really hard.”
2025-04-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source