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Aman Khan

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69
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2024-11-14
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2024-11-14
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  1. “Movies, podcasts, or like videos that impacted you in some way. And I'll do the same for you. And so I actually did that, emailed him, and got back his top three as well. So I want to kind of carry that forward. And would love to hear from folks, send me your top three whatever pieces of content they might be, and I'll do the same for you.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “LinkedIn is probably the best way. I'm not super active on X, though I might spend a little bit more time there, but LinkedIn easily. And then to that note, how can listeners be helpful? I think my goal was to try to be as helpful for folks that are trying to figure out how to get to this next part of their career, whether it's involving AI or they want to pivot into it or they want to thrive as an AI product manager. So love to hear stories of people that are interested in this part of their career or this career path. And I think the thought I'll leave people with is I'll respond to anyone that messages me. But I do have one condition there, which is like if you're cold emailing, cold messaging, kind of coming back to like how to stand out. I think there was this note from John Dury spoke at the college I went to and he put his email up on the board and his like note was I'll email anyone who emailed me as long as you send me your three top three favorite books”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Totally, right? Or, you know, maybe another way to look at it is like if I, if we still keep using search engines, and it's funny because my partner works at Google, the future might look like what if we're using LLMs more? It kind of gives me a second shot here to be part of the training data set in a way. So, yeah.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Is going to sound crazy, but I was like thinking, literally, I was thinking about this yesterday. It's going to sound crazy because I was like, like the immediate thought that came to mind was my parents really didn't optimize my name for SEO. And the only thing I'm going to do now and I think about when I have kids, like they're going to have some unique names because they get so much harder. Like you have to type in like Ahmad cod San Francisco or Berkeley or something to like get that to pop up. So yeah, so it does bother.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What other people's projections of that life are. And so that quote in particular has always been something I've come back to, which is like, what sort of life do you want to live? And thinking about that really deeply and making decisions along the way based on that.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “There is specifically one that I ended this essay that I wrote a while back with called I read a bunch of self help books you don't have to and I like share it with my friends. It's literally just called that are not sure what to do when they're in that next phase of their career as well. And the quote is from Steve Jobs, which is your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life. And I thought that was so powerful because When you think about it, like there's always this, I feel like there's a lot of like career pressure for some people to like get that next job or start a company or like do something super crazy. And at the same time, I think what's been really powerful for me has been to reassess what my goals are and what life I want to live and not feel the sort of feeling of”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But it created this interesting feedback loop where I just really love using the notebook because when I open it, I like have this like positive experience immediately, this like sensory experience immediately that it's like, oh, just smells so great. And then you like want to keep using it. And coming back to it. So I thought that was really interesting to create this feedback move in my head of like, I enjoy using that notebook now. I'm not sure what that means when I run out of papers in this one, if I'm going to buy another. But that was really funny. I didn't expect it like that as much.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So I thought I was like super, I've just been obsessed with it lately just to like push the boundaries of what's possible. I also do have another product as well. Initially when I thought about this question, I was like, what's like the product I've been using the most lately? And this one's going to sound kind of weird. But I'm a little bit old school and I actually like, like you, I like to write notes and like physical notebooks. And so I was, you know, like I'm always looking for like, oh, what's like a fun, you know, like a really practical notebook to use? And this was really weird. But I was recently given a notebook from actually like an AI meetup here. And I opened it and it's made from recycled apples. And when you open the notebook, it smells like apples, which is really interesting because I didn't think that that would like impact me as much as a day.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I think we talked a little bit about AI products that help you prototype. Replit is incredible. It's so easy to use. V0, and these are all really, I think they create really polished products at the end of the day. But the product that really that I've been using and having a ton of fun with is Websim, I think it creates this almost playful version of the prototype in the first place. You might be trying to build or just something so crazy and wacky and zany that you're not even sure is possible. And it's so hard to describe. I remember even, you know, I used to show a presentation from some of the founders at WebSim at an AI meetup here. And even they, when they were like showing how to use the product, they literally just went on Reddit and they were just looking at the WebSim subreddit that has like so many posts on it. The presentation was just them looking at the top like three or four and trying to describe what they saw.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I don't usually binge watch TV, I gotta be honest. I'm not a binge watcher, but it's been a little rainy in New York lately. So we've had a little bit more time inside on weekends. And I've been obsessed with the Tour de France documentary on Netflix. I don't know if you've seen that. I don't even know if it gets pushed up that highly in the Netflix algos. But I think that's super cool. One, I love cycling. So for me, it's like you really realize that competitive level of cycling is just such another level. And I even realized or gave credit to. And then two, kind of coming back to like the characters and the story, I think they're all just so interesting to hear like what motivates them to be at this extremely high level. It's actually the same producers as drive to survive, which I know people really got into as well around like F1. But yeah, highly recommend it. And it's intense. I'm going to kind of start there. Like I didn't realize what I was going to get to, but it just ramped up in more and more intensity.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Was basically in like the first or second chapter, I think you write out one page on the meaning of work to you and like what does work? And I think that exercise is so clarifying. And I recommend it to anyone when they feel like stuck in their career because it can at least kind of coming back to like the energy point can give you like a direction to go even if you're not sure how to get there just yet. And so I love both of those books because they're really like shifting and from a perspective standpoint.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To one, listen, to read more about. The scale of the universe and how long we've been here. And I think it just puts a lot of things into perspective of like our time here, how we spend it, and even the age we're living in now with AI, it's such a blip in the cosmic scale. And then you also get this really fun anecdotes from scientists along the way. So that one I recommend to almost everyone because it's pretty easy to read as well. I think another one, which is maybe like a little bit more in the like career lens is this book called Designing Your Life, which is written by these actually, you know, one of the founders of IDO and these folks are Stanford professors in the design lab. And what's really powerful about this for me is it's actually pretty practical. So it comes with exercises that I remember I did myself as well when I wasn't sure which direction to go in my career that helped me really figure out the most powerful exercise and like take away from this book for me.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I really love short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. I don't know if that's a, you know, that book to me is so interesting because I'm a bit of a nerd around like science. I used to read a lot of fiction growing up too. And I think weirdly enough, Bill kind of tells this story of the history of science, really, and how we know the things that we know. And he kind of tells it from the perspective of learning about the scientists that discovered these things. So for instance, you learned that like Newton was kind of an asshole to like the coworkers he had or like Darwin, was it maybe perceived as such an amazing scientist at the time? And so a lot of, and a lot of these scientists, like their discoveries don't become famous, it's almost like being an artist where you realize the relevance of a scientist's discovery years later at times. And people don't get credit for things they discovered. So to me, it was really interesting.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Management can kind of feel pretty serious to like there are some big decisions that sort of weigh on your shoulder, but I honestly remember having this discussion with one of our board members actually, and who's a serial entrepreneur, staying companies public. And I was like, what advice do you have for me as like a PM, you know, early in this company? And I was so surprised by the feedback he had, which was just have fun. And I think if you let that drive you and you keep learning and you're kind of keeping this curiosity and building products for customers that you care about, it's just going to help you go so much further. And I just think it's just more fun to have, you know, to be like high energy. It's just more fun to really care about the thing that you're working on. And I think if you're constantly learning and having fun, you're going to iterate so much faster too. So that's really my note is just have fun along the way. It really is about that journey. And yeah, sometimes you're wondering.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Kind of gives you an ability to almost have like a superpower because you can be in so many places at once and kind of use technology to your advantage to get that signal back. So I would really try to find ways to scale yourself up with AI and come back with that signal.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, and I think that's like that amplifying the signal with through the noise with AI, like the signal can be super sparse you get back at times too. And then what you can do is there's really powerful tools like we use gong, for instance, to like understand what are maybe prospects or really engineers to me, it's like potential customers, what are they talking about? What is their pain point? And I can't go be in like 100 meetings, right? Like every single week. But what I can do is take those transcripts and we literally did this. We fed them into some of these large language models that have super long context windows now. And what you can do is actually pull out what's the most common problems that come up, ask having a conversation around that can be really powerful too. Now you can do it with voice too. So you can like pull all of that in. Maybe you want to turn it into a notebook LM episode. But what you can do is actually just find ways to find signal through the noise.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We were like confused. We were not, we were really unsure about what to do. And I think it can be hard to be that wanderer. It felt really tough to be like out there in the unknown, just trying to find any sort of signal that we could bring back and say, okay, here's where we need to go and take the next features and next part of the company. And that part was really tough, but I actually think that's where kind of to an earlier kind of like part of the discussion where an AI PM can really stand out.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Trying to figure out where should they, where should we go, where should we take the team. And to me, I actually think the role of a PM is to be that wanderer. And I have this story of like, there was this moment in the company's history where I was like grabbing a beer with one of our engineering managers. And he was like, look, man, I kind of show up and I'm like maybe I wasn't bringing 100% of my energy at this end of the workday. And I was like, just I'm just not sure where to take things and like what we're doing right now. And it was so interesting to hear his perspective of in his world, everything was actually going pretty reasonably well. It was like we kind of knew like he had his roadmap. He knew what to go build. He had the next feature, you know, the next like three weeks of sprints planned out or something like this. And he was like, oh, the team's actually doing really great. The morale is really high. And yet on the product side, we were.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “This inclination towards executives and companies, especially broader companies, to sort of do what's been working so far. And that can often mean that let's just wait and see. And I think that's super interesting from the concept of AI, right? There was this feeling of should we wait and see where things go or do we go and try and figure out what direction to move our team? And most companies will maybe might lean towards waiting to see how things pan out. And we're seeing that even with AI. They're like, oh, we'll just wait for the next open AI model to come. And then we'll go like build a product around that. Like this one, I keep hearing that there's like this rumor of like some other model or we're going to wait and see. But I think at the end of the day, there's times when waiting might make sense to see what technologies get built initially. But then there's also this component of wandering and”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I actually think this one is so powerful, which is the concept of waiting versus wandering and like to me this is super relatable again from the standpoint of trying to figure out what to go do next. So we kind of talked about energy, bringing energy, but that still doesn't actually solve the problem of where should we go. That's just the latent energy you're going to bring to solving a problem. But at the end of the day, you as the product manager have to figure out where do things go what's the problem to be solved and how do we solve it really for a customer. And I like there's this like thought exercise, like zoom out of it, it kind of feels a little bit like, you know, if you're all kind of like at a camp where you're trying to figure out, okay, where do we go send the scouts to go take the rest of the camp and like move things along? And like there's definitely”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, and I'll like even just a riff on that second point, I think that there's this component of when you are doing the thing with someone and you pair with them on a problem, you have a lot more empathy for what they do as well. Because they'll describe to you like what's challenging or what's hard about that job. And I think that there's this feeling that at least at, you know, teams, I've been a part of where like there is no job that isn't important, right? And so you kind of, you know, as a PM, I think if you're like spending that time with someone, that also, that means that you're learning something from them and you're learning empathy for what they might be doing day in and day out, but you're also pushing back and contributing and trying to make the whole team kind of push along better as well.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “For making a decision or solving a problem, even if it's a tough one to make. But you get to kind of drive the energy that you're bringing to that.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I remember this early lift anecdote. I have some friends from the earlier days at Lyft, and I think this may have been in my self-driving car division, but like they would literally, I'm not even kidding, this was like their ritual where they would actually end the meetings with like the phrase make it happen. And I thought that was so powerful because it's so simple, but it's like, all right, we're going to do this. It was like one of their values and we're going to, you know, we walk away from a decision and we're going to make it happen. And I think even just as something as small as that could be like a contribution back to the culture for your team. And maybe there's like a point there of like building culture too. Like you get to determine the culture of the people around you. You get to build a culture of the team and that can really work its way out. There's top down culture. There's values, but you get to kind of drive what people in the room are feeling. And I think that's really, really powerful, especially in the role of a PM where everyone kind of looks to the PM.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I actually think this depends a lot on the person. Like, I think that's actually a personal thing. So, what I mean by that is for me, that might mean like I'm showing up, I'm super enthused, I'm really like, you know, I'm bringing my version of energy. But to other people, that might mean, you know, smaller things like just asking how someone is doing, trying to kind of keep the tone of a meeting more like positive, I think to some degree. to different people that might resemble different things but I actually think this comes back a little bit to an earlier point of humans are really good at picking up on these like subtle signals with other people and you kind of want to just be putting out this like subtle like energy where people feel like you are engaged you're in it you know 100 so i think that's part of it i think it's like the the ideas you know for other people to feel like you know you're bringing the energy”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Think that really comes from leadership, from our CEO as well. He'll be tired. I can tell, but it's just when he shows up to a meeting, like he just doesn't show it. You just have to kind of bring that energy.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Things. One, you know, I did kind of learn a little bit of what goes into this role in terms of how to message our problem and product more in a way that actually got people engaged. But two, it also demonstrated to the team that I was like willing to get into the details with them. I was willing to spend time, even when I was like trying to push on our day job of building a product and keeping it growing. And I think that counts for a lot when the team is already feeling like they're not sure which direction to take something. And so just being that like player coach and just having that mentality of showing up, bringing the energy can move the bar so much higher for the whole team to operate. So that's kind of the example I give of like, you know, you're kind of like being LeBron James. Like you're telling you coaching people, you're kind of like drawing up the play, but you're also just trying to be, you know, like as involved in all of the tough stuff as well. And I see that happen.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “We have this moment a little over a year ago where we were not sure which direction to take a product feature. And we were kind of faced with this decision that felt pretty existential, which is like, how much do we want to invest in LLMs and like the sort of new wave of large language model tech versus what our existing customer base was? And it wasn't immediately clear what the decision should be. And so the energy I kind of just brought was, you know, I'm just going to be our like outbound salesperson and just start writing LinkedIn messages to people that have the title AI in their LinkedIn profile. So I just went on LinkedIn and literally just started like finding ways to get them on a phone call. So I'd like, you know, write some copy and iterate on it. And I had to like sit with our sales team to like understand how do you do this? I maxed out my like five LinkedIn messages a day. Like, what do you try to do here? And I think what that really accomplished was sort of two.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think to me, there's this concept of when you're, you might still be faced with this challenge of, I'm not sure what the right decision is and I'm struggling to really kind of do this analysis and really get something going. And I think that accepting that that happens to everyone, it sort of feels like a product block as opposed to like a writer's block, if that makes sense. We're like, you know, as a writer, you might be trying to get to that next paragraph. And as a product manager, you're really trying to get to that next idea or that next milestone. So I can give you an example, like an example there as well, which is”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, so maybe to even just kick off like energy can, I really think about this. Like this was maybe one of the most important things I realized, like working from our CEO a little bit over a year ago, which was energy can count a lot when you're not sure which direction to go. If you kind of show up to a meeting and you bring a little bit more of that energy, you'll find that like a lot of friction tends to go away versus if you show up and you're a little bit down or a little bit not as enthused about an idea. Like people pick up on that and we're still dealing with people today. And I think that even if you just change that mindset a little bit of bringing a little bit of that extra energy, you'll find that that can actually break down barriers and people like the conversation feels like it's like flowing, feels like a dinner table conversation versus a hard conversation, even if it might be something about something tough.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And by the way, that's always going to compete with your being able to jump on a quick call last minute or try to unblock someone or have some internal stakeholder discussion to figure out what to go do next. And so I think the challenge is you have a really hard job. There's constant signal. Things are constantly changing. How do you really power through that? So I think that there's really three things I think about there which are energy waiting versus wandering and then amplifying the signal to make a decision.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I think about my own career journey here, so much of that comes down to what drives you personally. And I'm just obsessed with solving that customer's problems. And so to do that, that might mean I have to spend a lot more time trying to get into the weeds and get into the details. So I think that there's kind of really three areas, kind of like three things that come back to me of like what the hard part about being an ICPM is and how you can kind of break through that. So I first want to like set the tone a little bit, which is being an ICPM is really hard. I made a point earlier of like it's become easier to break into product management to some degree if you can use these tools. And now you have all these tools at your disposal to go build a nice prototype. But I think the bar just got higher for product managers within a company and what the impact needs to be.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Your organization might want to do something and you're trying to get them to do something else. And that's really the challenge in this type of role is there is so much buzz, there is so much excitement around AI that knowing what the right thing to build is really what this job needs to kind of convey. So I think when you take all of that signal and try and put it together and solve that customer problem, that's really what being a successful AIPM is at the end of the day. That's really, I think that's the hard part about the job, but also maybe the most important impactful part of it.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, I don't know why that is the like that's the expression, but it's always read to describe something hard that you realize like You can do more than one thing”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “A bad product experience. It's like, I think you had a point earlier as well, which was to be a really great chef, you have to have a lot occasionally going to have a bad meal. I think that's going to have to be the same thing here with your AI product diet. You're going to try some bad experiences. You're going to have some failures. But the goal is to keep iterating. And that's how AI gets better. I think that's how companies can deploy AI better too. So don't give up on the North Star. Just find ways to make space to have AI sort of propagate with you.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Like we didn't tear down of the notebook LM product just yesterday as part of our company. So we like live streamed it and we're going to do this probably every week or two where we'll take a cutting edge AI product and have a webinar around it and try to break down how it works. And the goals there are to really understand the space better ourselves. But by the way, none of those three things are going to move your KPI or business metric, right? I think I come back to that point of you have to be able to walk and chew gum. You have to continuously deliver customer value while also creating space to iterate and fail and find that the experiment that you tried to launch and people really excited about may not work. But in the process you learn something. And that's, I think, like a really powerful takeaway, which is to really stand out as an AIPM, you have to accept this technology is changing really fast. It's, you know, you might think it's going to do something great or maybe you have.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Actually, I'll kind of steal this one a little bit from our friend Kevin, who I think he had this advice when he was on your pod which really resonated with me, actually, at a personal level, which is you have to be able to walk and chew gum. So as an AIPM, your job is not to go and ship AI products. It's to go solve customers' problems. I think we've come back to that a little bit. But you're constantly going to be pushed by your team and your company to go and solve a business metric, you know, move a business metric in some way. The goal though is to make space for the other things we were kind of talking about, which is prototyping you trying the tools firsthand yourself, making space for your team to have hackathons and try the tools themselves as well, breaking down product experiences that are really great. So as an example,”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah. Actually, if you were mine, I could probe on that. That's a really interesting point with Blue Apron because if you look at that product, what's the problem that they're trying to solve? Are they trying to get people to be fed or eat food? I don't think so, actually. I think if you're really trying to solve that particular problem, you'd probably build something closer like DoorDash, which is just you press a button and food shows up. And Blue Apron, on the other hand, is trying to get people to feel like they're getting closer to cooking or feeling closer to the experience of making something. And I think that's sort of what really amazing AI products do as well. They're making your experience or the product, you know, AI makes your product easier to use and it brings the barrier to creation down. And I think that's really what it's good at, not necessarily just trying to automate the problem away.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “IKEA effect applied to AI. People feel more empowered when they can, when they actually have an impact on the end experience versus everything being taken care of them. So that's just like one insight we realized from looking at successful AI products versus ones that try to automate everything away. And I think if you're like looking at the space, you're going to find so many more examples like that.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “And there's this story of Betty Crocker actually launching this cake mix where all you have to do is mix water. And all you have to do is mix water and you could kind of bake a cake with just one ingredient. All you needed was this cake mix. And it turns out that actually tanked their sales. So all they had to do was basically change the instruction so that all you have to do was add eggs. And that one thing kind of created this effect where their scale, their sale skyrocketed because they realized that the customer actually wants to have a little bit of control over the experience. And you can kind of see that even now if you've like taken, you know, if you've been able to like take a way more or self-driving car, like the car is fully self-driving, but you can still control it air conditioning. You can still control the music. And so you want to kind of leave some knobs and levers for your customer to feel like they're still in control of the experience. And that's kind of like the...”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And a good intuition to build around that is through hackathons, through coming with problems, and then seeing where the ideas actually stick versus where they actually aren't super great. And then I think the last kind of point here is really obsessing about the details of the user experience in the first place. And you were looking for problems to go and be solved with AI, but I think part of that is really looking at like what are successful AI products today. And you can probably try a few, name a few. But a good example of that might be, and really like if I kind of zoom out, like the goal is really to find experiences where AI is actually magical. And what do they get right? So an example of that might be like there's this fun, like funny anecdote of what a lot of people are trying to do with AI is like automate the Java way entirely.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Think that's really actually a great position for an AI PM to be in as well. Oftentimes there's like this aversion sometimes to hackathons because it's like take away from company time. But what you can do is try.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Do I measure? What should I be measuring here? And I think that PMs kind of gravitate towards metrics. And I actually think that every AI PM actually needs a metric. And every PM within a business is tasked with moving some business metric, but there actually isn't one for building prototypes with AI, which is really interesting. I've talked to so many companies and I'm like, how do you measure what the impact is of AI within your business? They're like, oh, well, we're not expecting it to like move a business metric. It's not moving revenue. So then how do you really measure if what you're doing is working? And I think that's where you kind of need a metric of like how many shots are you taking in the first place. And that kind of ties into the next point, which is I think hackathons are great. I think that getting people to be hands-on in the first place, it really removes that feeling that this technology is not approachable. So the goal is really to get everyone in the organization to try to use this thing.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Sort of like three things you could do in your company that I think will really, if you try to implement this tomorrow, you'd probably see start seeing those ideas coming back So, the first one is you actually brought up an earlier point.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Layer within their technology. And then your job is to make that experience so amazingly seamless in your existing product that it doesn't even feel like AI in the first place. And I think that's really powerful. That's the area where product managers can truly innovate because let's be honest, you're probably not going to have these cutting edge researchers that can go and design a model from the ground up or maybe design some new technique to build a next agent framework. But what you can do is take that technology and find a way to apply it in your organization. And that's where I think the role of the AIPM really stands out.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I think there's like, so that's almost like a point of like, what do people do for last two years? And now there's this moment of this actually kind of happening again. And this moment is sort of happening around the term of like AI agents. And I think, again, like, you know, I think if you really look at it, I actually bring up Yuri's point again because I was listening to the episode. I thought that was so insightful of he gets so many emails every single day of like were AI for this. We're building an AI agent for that. But again, you're sort of trying to fit this technology to solve a problem that you're not really describing the problem. You're describing the solution, an AI agent to do something. So if you look at it, does it really, I'd really ask yourself, does it make sense to build an AI agent within our company? Or is it just better to allow the foundation model companies to build this agent?”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Research bots. And I think that that's really the question you have to ask yourself what's the right interface when I'm designing a product like this?”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “It feels intuitive to go and like replicate this interface that feels really great and feels everyone's bought in because they're familiar with it. You really have to think, is this the thing our business needs right now? Is this the problem that we need to go and solve? And I think if you look deeper at that, you'll actually find that the interface for AI might look really different. It won't necessarily look like a chatbot. It might look like you're trying to optimize or speed up a part of the process that humans have to do today that you can make their life easier. And for us, that was data analysis. We have to look at a lot of data to make decisions within our own company. And so we decided to try to automate that. We did also ship a small chatbot just to understand how the tech worked. But on top of that, our interface around AI looks so, so different. And I think that a lot of the cutting edge sort of experiences around AI kind of look like that too. They don't really always.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “AI products. It was really interesting to see what happened next. And what I mean by that is, you know, we said in the landscape at a place where we get to see where a lot of other companies are. This really game changing sort of shift in AI. And the first thing that everyone seemed to build was actually another chat GPT, but on top of their own data. And for some reason, everyone gravitates towards this particular use case, because all the AI product managers I knew were like, oh, we're building like an internal chatbot on top of our knowledge base, and it's going to be able to answer questions and it's going to be great. And when you kind of look at the products that were built, how much usage do they really have is pretty, I think, not very well understood. Like, was that the right thing to do? So coming back to your earlier question, like how do you kind of go and thrive as a, you know, be of top five percent AIPM versus, you know, maybe an AIPM that isn't as stellar? I actually think it's kind of coming back to that earlier point of don't do what everyone else is doing. Just because”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Kind of talked about like what are AI product managers, you know, how do you build AI powered products around what the fundamental technology is? I think there was this really interesting moment where, you know, about two years ago, actually almost roughly to this time, ChatGPT launches. And I think everyone who kind of tried it out was pretty impressed by a couple of things. There was the interface super easy to use. It felt really intuitive. The model was pretty capable. It felt almost like human-like. Of course, that was actually an earlier model than what's even available today. And when you look back on it, it's almost like looking at like the old iPhone or something, like you kind of have to like have this moment of, wow, that was really impressive at the time. But now if you try to use it, you're like, this thing sucks. You know, like it's like, it doesn't even do half the stuff. You get kind of conditioned to, you know, technology continuing to get better. But when that moment happened and it did kind of feel like this iPhone moment around”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “What this tools really allow you to do is up level, like max out that influence meaning you can now communicate ideas kind of coming back to the prototype note to design. You can communicate ideas engineering and you can communicate ideas to the higher ups of the company around what should go and get built. So I think when you're able to translate the idea to the person that you're trying to communicate it to, these tools are really incredible at that. And I think it allows an AI product manager to be super high leverage. So to me, it's like, I totally agree, like being an AI product manager feels like the highest leverage position you could be in at the company right now, especially in the age of AI.”

    2024-11-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source