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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. “Yeah, I totally believe that. I think that there's a sort of like feeling that executives might have or like VPs that companies might have of like, we need to get into AI. But the challenge is that there's this inclination towards doing the same thing that's working so far. And so I think the role of an AI PM in this type of organization is really to be the representative of how can we use these tools to their highest leverage. And so if you kind of combine the earlier notes of like you know what this technology is capable of, you know the customer problems deeply. You're the representative of the customer at the company. You're really in the best position to get the point across of what should go and get built. And I think that's a really powerful position to be in at a company. And then I'll kind of actually build on like one of the core product skill sets that people, you mentioned on your podcast too, which is influence.”

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

  2. “Things you want to do to keep iterating on it. So they kind of prompted again I'll make it look a little bit nicer, use these colors. And within five minutes, I had a working prototype for a signup page that I built on my phone. That would not have been possible even a year ago. And I think the way that the technology is trending is things will keep getting easier. And as a product manager, your curiosity is going to keep pushing you forward so that you can be the person out there saying, hey, did you see this cool thing that I tried that I just pulled up? And you're really the one that's almost the expert on what's the cool new thing that you can go and apply to your company. So I think that's really part of the role too is like being interested, genuinely curious of the space too.”

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

  3. “Pioneered some of this format of he'll show up and just like, here's how I built a product within like 45 minutes and kind of how you use the same tools we just described. And I kind of have this like tongue-in-cheek example a little bit too. That's pretty relevant, which was I was trying to describe Replit to someone to a friend of mine who actually was basically saying like I don't really have time to learn another tool right now. It feels like there's so much in the space. And I think there's really nothing better than just showing someone what's possible. So I opened up my phone and Replit, you can just go to as a URL on your phone. And what you can do is type in a prompt to their replt agent and it will literally build a website for you and host it within a matter of seconds. And what's really funny is I just kind of built this like example of like, build me a signup page for this newsletter. And it did it actually pretty reasonable job on first pass.”

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

  4. “I actually think it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before. So let me kind of hit on that point a little bit more, which is before you actually probably needed to have more of a foundation and background in machine learning to get a shot at one of these companies building AI products. They required a depth of knowledge in machine learning and types of models. And you were probably more deeply involved in like what should the training data look like and the split of the data and how do I launch this thing and all of this infrastructure. But really now an AI product manager is someone who's building experiences around or for other AI product people. And so I'll kind of, you know, an example there would be there are these incredible videos that are being put out right now on YouTube on how to build an app in like an hour. And I kind of Greg Eisenberg, he's really kind of like.”

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

  5. “So, you're kind of shortcutting the process by showing them how you think and how you like to spend time and what your interests are and hobbies are. And then all you have to do is really nail that phone interview. And as long as you're kind of matched the culture of the company, I think you've actually shortcuted part one and part two, which is what most interview processes are designed to do, which is why they're like this sort of, you know, you have to go talk to like three different people to see, can you do marketing? Can you do engineering? Can you do core product management? And so that's really my advice is really you can start with building your skilled stack and starting with the foundation up, let your curiosity drive you and then turn that into a portfolio that you can use as an applicant to stand out.”

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

  6. “Have a almost like a portfolio of products that you've tried to build, and maybe they're just prototypes, but they really help you stand out to a hiring manager that might be deciding who's the person I want to bring on board. And maybe to zoom out for a sec, as someone who's been a part of the hiring process for AI PMs before, I think the hiring process is really designed to understand sort of three things about a person. And that's, can this person do the job I'm hiring them to do? Are they excited to do the work that we do here? And do I like to work with them? And so I think by having this portfolio where you've, you know, if you have that foundation of AI and ML, of at least being able to describe what the technology can do, and then you have this portfolio of products who actually answering both of those questions for the hiring manager even before they talk to them.”

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

  7. “The idea is that you can really understand the technology in terms of how it works and what the boundaries are. And then I think that the other dimension is just trying to use the tools to figure out yourself, how can I push the boundaries of what's possible. So I think the combination of those two things are really what drive the skill level here. Maybe to bring this back to an earlier point, there is no program, there's no college degree on product management. So there definitely isn't a college degree on AI product management. And so I think the way that you stand out is through showing interest in the space and building your own skill set and skilled stack around what is the foundation of AI and how do I apply it to the industry I'm interested in. And that's actually related to the second point of how do I stand out as an applicant? And it kind of feels like this moment where you can actually go”

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

  8. “That curiosity. So start, you could start with your fundamentals of looking at videos on YouTube of Andre Carpathi talking about the foundation of LLNs. It's this great, amazing resource. He put out this video a little while ago. It's about an hour long. But if you put it into Notebook LM, maybe get like a more succinct version.”

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

  9. “I think you're hitting on something on a point that's super relevant to today, which is it almost feels really competitive now to be in tech and to be a product manager. And the struggle is really, to your point, what are the skills I should have to really kind of even apply for this role in the first place? And then how do I stand out as an applicant? I kind of feel like these are maybe two distinct things. You kind of want to start with a foundation of what is machine learning, what is AI, what's the knowledge that has really powered this evolution in technology. And you kind of want to keep driving in that direction with what are your interests. So if there's really two dimensions, you're trying to understand, okay, what are the things I need to know? And then how can I use that in the problems I'm trying to solve or the industries that interest me? So I think there's like this propensity of you want to be driven by.”

    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 can take this thing that kind of feels like it's early, but it could be something here and go take it to my team and say, you know, maybe it's possible for us to use this thing. And so I think that's really what this whole space is about. I want to underscore that it's really, you're really driven by your own curiosity. And your curiosity can push you in a lot of different directions in terms of the types of tools you might want to pick up. Or, you know, for yourself or even implement in your own product. So I think it truly is this opportunity for people to see what drives them and try and find the tools that really help make that experience possible.”

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

  11. “And it doesn't really matter what's in between. You kind of want to reduce the friction of that as much as possible. And so now when you think, okay, let's assume that I'm starting with a phone call. There's a ton of tools that are starting to emerge. And I think a really cutting edge one from the last couple weeks has been open AI releasing a real-time API. And the real-time API is basically a voice API where you can provide some text and almost have this real-time experience with the bot that is actually AI generated. And if you use, and if you're a consumer, you could even try that out in the application yourself. You can open up ChatGPT. And if you're a plus subscriber, you can try this cutting edge sort of voice chatbot experience. And why is this interesting? Because if you're a consumer and you're trying out technology and you're trying out AI technology and trying to push the boundaries of what's possible, I think you can kind of have that like light bulb aha moment of”

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

  12. “You'll kind of find tools along the way to help unbox that really that problem. So I think if we take an example of that, let's imagine that you're working for a company that might be having customers that have customer support problems or people coming in with complaints. And when you think about the surface area of customer support, it's not that great. You usually have to type in some questions with the chat bot that's routing, perhaps incorrectly you to some document to go solve a problem. Or if you're trying to call in, you have to describe your problem, but you're not really sure if you're being heard correctly. It might be super long wait times. And if you're the product manager of that experience, I think an ideal product experience really looks like a customer reaches you with a problem and you're able to really solve that problem for them.”

    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 became kind of obsessed with trying to help really technical users, AI engineers, data scientists, with problems that I thought were not super challenging. Like, how do I build a dashboard to understand how my model is working? That can't be that hard to do, right? And then as you get deeper, the complexity sort of starts to emerge in that part of the stack. And you have to realize you're pushing, you're pushing, you're actually responsible for pushing technology forward in some ways. You're trying to see what's possible and keep pushing the space forward to solve that customer problem. I think the same thing is true for AI product managers, meaning, you know, you're really trying to design the best customer.”

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

  14. “I feel a little bit like an outsider on the space myself. So I studied, you know, I wasn't related at all. The field I studied was mechanical engineering. I didn't really take computer science courses or had to learn a lot of that on my own. And I didn't take like machine learning or AI courses either. I don't have a PhD or master's in the subject. But coming back to both types of product managers you just described there's the AI PM who's building infrastructure for other AI engineers and there's the AI power product manager who's building AI products really. And I think in both cases you care about the end customer. At the end of the day, you really want to be in love with the problem. I know Yuri said that. That was like a great, great, great quote in my mind as well of if you're in love with the problem, you're trying to push the boundaries of what's possible with technology to solve that problem. And for me, I just.”

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

  15. “Think if you're designing interfaces, you might want to use AI for graphic design. Perhaps you're trying to come up with a logo or you're trying to come up with something that resembles almost like the user story you want to tell in some way and make it like a visual user story. I think that becomes so much more approachable with tools like Midjourney or even Dali. And it's really at your fingertips to how well can you prompt this thing to get you the output that you want. So to me, it really depends. I think if you're an experienced company, you might trend a little bit more visual. Tools like image generation might be really powerful too. So that's one example. And then I think even for like 3D modeling, you know, there's some emerging tools there. I'm definitely not the expert on that domain, but there's a lot in terms of, you know, if you're building physical products, that's gotten a lot easier as well.”

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

  16. “I'm obsessed with cursor. I'm obsessed with Replet. These are tools I use all the time to just really build a prototype and try to understand myself what's possible. That kind of is super enabling for a product manager to show up with a functional prototype. It's not going to be the thing you go and ship in production, but at least the buttons work and maybe it's like wired up reasonably correctly to tell a story. A really great tool a lot of folks might be familiar with Vercel if you're trying to create a landing page. So Vercel now has a sort of starting point called V0, which allows you to type in a prompt and get a really beautiful landing page on top of that. And so it doesn't have to be just a landing page. If you prompted correctly and iterate with it, you could actually get a pretty good working UI as well. So I think that kind of gives you a good starting point for some of those initial mockups you might be having with the design team.”

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

  17. “Recommender system or black box you might find in an application. We've slowly been translating and pivoting over into, broadly speaking, any type of AI. These days, it's a lot of large language models. And so I think that with the rise of Of these tools that are being built on top of. Open AI's APIs or anthropic APIs. Basically, any tools on top of the large language model providers It's actually pretty clunky. These interfaces are pretty new. We've only really had people building on top of large language models for a couple of years. And so, the whole”

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

  18. “So, product manager is responsible for bringing together design, engineering, BizDev people operations sales, what have you at the organization and going and shipping impact. So you're responsible for representing the customer. And ultimately, getting to a solution to solve their problem. In addition to that, the AI component is I really break it down into maybe three flavors of AI product management. So, the first is AI platform PMs. And that's kind of where I find myself. These are people who are building tools for AI engineers. So, for context, I work at a company called Arrive. We're an observability and evaluation platform for artificial intelligence. We've been around for a few years. We started with machine learning. And sort of ranking, regression, classification models.”

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

  19. “Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, I think that was like a crazy moment of just seeing how many people piled on to that, to those posts. And then, you know, some of our discussion back and forth on this thread. And I thought it was like super interesting. There was like this combination of Product and AI where I just happens to be, I think where the space is headed or what seems to be catching so much attention. So yeah, I'm super excited to dive into that and try and share a little bit what I've learned along the way 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