YouSaid · the spoken record

Tomer Cohen

lines on the record: 86
first: 2025-12-04
most recent: 2025-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You build something for such a long time, and I think you and I talked about it at one point, that I think one of the best traits for a builder is to become very passionate with what they're building. Really care. Not about the job. It's really care about the product when you feel the pain, when somebody complains, and you kind of have this continuous discontent. And it's like, for me, it's the notion of like, you know, raising a baby. So yeah, it's hard. It would be hard. I will always think of LinkedIn as one of the babies I helped grow.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I share this with a company recently. I was starting to take learnings from my experiences here. A lot of it was from tough situations. We had a lot of tough situations at LinkedIn and hard calls and late nights, but you learned so much from those. And just incredibly grateful. And I'm excited. I'm excited. I have a bias for change. I have a bias for kind of positioning myself in a place where I can learn the most and learn a lot. It's an incredible time to build. So I'm just excited to be thinking of new problem sets and new areas where I can go deep on and invest in the next decade in.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I feel proud. It's been an incredible ride at LinkedIn. The way I've got to know about LinkedIn deeply the very first time was when I moved to the Valley and I went to a lecture at Stanford about social networks in 2008. And Reid was there and he talked about the power of being a professional community is online. And I was very nerdy about it and thought it was an incredible vision, had no plans to join and actually started my own company after, but as LAC would have it found myself joining a few years after and just thought the mission was incredible. So in many ways it aligned with my purpose and just was an incredible ride to be here. And I also feel very grateful.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Negativity of it, or there's no sense of FOMO there, it's just a continuous thing. If I look back a year from now and I look back, how much did I grow? Like how much do I know? What skills to do that again? Where did I becoming better? Like how much, like, how do I feel like version? Tomer version 2026 versus 2025. What's the delta there? And I kind of love that as a way of thinking.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last time I talked about it, I most associated here with, I might be wrong, but I'm not confused, although I don't say it as much anymore. But I've been the one I love, you know, growth mindset is like a second religious for us at home. And one thing I love about, there's like a phrase there that is becoming is better than being Which I think ties into the FSB mode a little bit, which is you're always in progress mode iteration mode. It's not about reaching a state. It's about the journey, the process. That's what you should fall in love with. It's about continuously growing and evolving without.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ChatGPT, and then we just have a conversation. And that's just friction. I would love to have on my steering wheel a button that invokes my AI friend that can sit next to me in the passenger seat. And I just think that would be such a, I actually think it would transform rights for people. Just that movement, that's just like elimination of friction will transform the experience for me.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in my car right now, there is Alexa built in, which is great because the kids can ask for songs all day long and it's a whole show inside of the car. But one of my favorite things to do, this has been doing, I've been doing it for well over two years, is I go in and I go into voice mode.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a podcast in, it's in Hebrew. It's called One Song, and it takes a song that generally is ideally popular and then goes really deep on the origin and the history of the song. And I love it. I love music and just a sex songs so well. It does a great job also in kind of bringing to life the story behind it. So for me, it just goes back to like you fought the song was about something, but then it goes really deep into the actors behind the song. And sometimes it's the words chosen or it's how the lyrics match the music itself. And I just really enjoyed that one.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then lastly, it's a book that also came out many years ago, but it's called The Beginning of Infinity. Which I really like by Deutsche, and it wasn't an easy read for me, but I love the idea. In fact, especially in products, I love the idea of cause and effect, like really finding great explanations for how things happen and then building on top of that, your next iterations. And this book really pushes on the idea of explanations that only once we have a clear understanding of what things happen, then we can have breakthroughs on top of that. But until we get to a point of clear scientific breakthroughs, we are not going to make significant progress. But when you do that, it's really almost like infinite progress you can make on top of that.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really successful as well. Second book Called Outlive. It's really about kind of the idea, it's kind of like the offer Peter Talks about the idea of Medicine 3.0, which is really the notion of like building personalized medicine, which I think in the world of AI will become incredible in the future. But it's all those, it's called as categories that you should think about for your life so you can just optimize your health as much as possible and goes for everything through fitness to diet to kind of the biggest health factors you should think about. But it's a great long book.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love to give trios of books that I really like. So, my current trio is the very diverse in topics. So apologies if it's not falling all into tech. But the first one is called Why Nations Fail. It's a book I read a decade ago, even more. And the offers of it just won the Nobel Prize last year. And it basically talks about why does some nation succeed and some fail? And it's not the usual explanations we go for, which is, oh, it's culture, it's natural resources, it's the kind of religion. It's a lot of those kind of tends to be the kind of immediate excuse that people have. It kind of falls into two camps. Are they extractive or inclusive institutions? Can people participate broadly and opportunity is shared or there are institutions that basically are supposed to be attracting from many and give to some? So it's just an incredible way to just think about how you build a nation and for us at LinkedIn we think a lot about the idea of opportunity. So how you build a product as well. And it's just a good way to kind of move away from easy explanations into what really makes a country.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're starting in pockets, we're starting in posts, we're building the tools, but we're going to, this is the mountain we're going to go after. And in many ways, we're going to make it great. I also announced that this is not just an end state, it's a kind of continuous progress. There's no state we're going to get to as much as continuously just trying to be better. And in many ways, to compete, you just want to be better than others in how you build. Because the version of building will continue to transform itself every few years or so. So do not wait, really focus on the progress you're making. Over communicate with your team, not just the vision, but also the progress you're making, almost like holding yourself responsible. If you're a leader, give yourself KPIs, you share with your own teams or OKRs. And if you're in such an organization, and I would say whether or not your CPO or your CEO is announcing this type of program, go do it or join.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you in an organization? You're waiting for your leader to roll this out, or you're a leader trying to roll this out. I would not wait. The first thing I've done, which I thought in retrospect was really hopeful, is I did not, I did announce this up front. We are going to this mode.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus saying, hey, you know, why am I not seeing us moving into 2x to productivity in a week? That's not going to be this way. You can see it with some people, but starting to collect those examples and starting to really think about the transformation is really key.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, if you start from scratch, it's actually not hard But when you are trying to transform a large organization, you want to have this impatient about the goal and you want to have a high ambition, but being very thoughtful and patient about how you bring it to life and the key things you have to invest in. If you don't invest in your platform, I just don't see how this could be a successful outcome. If you don't invest in customizing the tools for you, then you're just going to get vanilla generic agents from the outside. So being aware of the investment and making sure you actually allocate resource to it. This is kind of the classic, be willing to invest up front so you can reap the benefit after”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say I would start Platform you need to build, the tools you want to bring. And then I would spend a lot of time on the culture. Platform and tools, I think, will be again a prerequisite, but not sufficient. And the cultural aspect is really important. I would think a lot about how you bring people along. So for one learnings we had that probably able to do it differently right now if I were to redo this program was for a while I was working very closely with my core team on it the core kind of full stack building team that were in charge of building all this material but the organization was always asking questions what's going on who is doing it what are the tools and and in retrospect we could have done a lot more in the flow to just show them and get them to already use early tools or be aware of it versus doing a small team on the side so it's okay to start with a small team I think it's really important but at the same time just making sure there's like visibility across the whole thing is really powerful being patient and being willing to invest I always give this example of like you know we always give this example of like oh look at this startup they built this in a week yes you can build a startup in a week”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is probably my biggest advice/motivation I give to the team because what I tell them is ultimately by the way, this is for me as well, like I think about it in the same way. It's the incentives for you are so aligned with the organization of what we're asking for, right? Because we need you to change. We want to be a more agile Adaptive resilient organization that can deal with the pace of change, but you want as wealth for your own career. You want to be at the cutting edge of how you build. So the incentives are really aligned between what you need for your own career and what the organization needs you to do. So that permission to go and do it for me is... Ideally, kind of a tailwind in what they want to do more than anything else.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think designers have a little bit of a leg up in terms of others learning their craft and then the vice versa. But I honestly think it's a mindset. I've seen designers code. I've seen PMs kind of design and do well. And this is why I think like when you kind of step back and you think about people in your organization and who can flex, I think you'll see them show up in many areas. I think you'll find there is they have the agency they're leaning into new things. They have the fluency. Like they're already building new experiences and they have that growth mindset that they just want to get better. So it doesn't matter what they learn at school or what's their what label somebody put in them when they join the company.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a mental model of how you do it. I think, you know, if I were to play, what's the hardest craft to potentially learn? I think design has a lot more work to get the design agents to be really, really good.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a mix. People listening, I would just think about just go over your org and imagine who can do it, who can right now flex across those functions, whether it's engineering, design, product even BD. And what you'll find is there's already quite a few. Can fix the cross.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that was pretty hard. And then I think in terms of quality, we've just seen better quality, but I think it's because, again, where we are in the stage, it's still the early adopters and they're doing a few iterations in terms of how to do it. But I would say like the tooling adoption is hard. And then I think for some people, this is important for me to kind of state, some people do not want to be full stack builders. And that's completely okay. Some people see themselves in specialization and I think specialization has a place and a role. So I didn't want the message to be across the organization. I expect everybody to be a full stack builder. I do not. I think they're system builders that empower full stack builders. And then you have people who are specialized.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never the case. We had to invest quite a lot. Again, part of it is we just have a lot of legacy information and code-based and knowledge and designs and so on. So if a lot of the companies we work with are seeing this as a great growth opportunity for them as well to invest. But I do think it's a big area of investment as well. We talked about not just giving access to all of your context which we started with. And like we were like, oh, here's access to all the drivable information failed miserably and hallucinates like crazy. People gravitating towards different tools. Like our goal was to converge on tools.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we mentioned a few of them. I was hoping for some tools to work off the shelf really well. It was never the case. We had to invest quite a lot.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can feel overwhelmed by tools right now, by recipes and how to do things, like what's your prompt and what's my prompt. But really, it's finding something that kind of works really well, that can gravitate around and kind of really invest in, that's been those areas. But I think we've had this invitation to go and explore and go and bring in stuff that you think are great. In many ways, bring others along in the journey. One good way to kind of make the influence much bigger than a few folks who are doing really well with this.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the tools we've made, we've been showing them regularly, we've done a few of my all hands have been all about how to use those tools. But then at the same time, we're kind of inviting, have you found a new tool that works really well for you? Like share it, show it, again, it could be Slack, it could be messages, teams, and so on, how you do it. But the idea is really to start getting that investment in how things work. Actually, I think in general.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools or not, go build the tool, like use a tool from the outside, bring it in, show those examples. In many ways, prove that you are a full stack builder in mindset before anything else comes to mind. That just naturally will happen. And that's also where we've seen some of our best talent just goes and leans a lot into.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just being able to show those examples has been a big part of it. The other thing I would say takes time for this program in its formality to roll out across the entire organization. And I was intentionally not trying to be quick at rolling this out to everybody because I think that's a, that just dilutes the value of it really quickly. Because it's not about I could care less about your title. I care about how you work. So calling you a full stack builder is not what I'm looking for. Changing your mindset to a full stack mindset is what I'm looking for. You're thinking you can do the whole thing. You're looking at those tools and looking at how to do it. So one of the things I've said is like if you're looking for a formal reorg or declaration to start building differently, you're waiting too long. My biggest thing is here's a permission for me to just not wait and just go. So whether or not you have the right.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there were two aspects to it. Once I moved kind of my team, my directs, we did 360 for them. So their 360 was, if you came from PM, you had the designers on your team rate you. So that had its own. And then we shared those with them, and that had its own kind of motivation. But then we broadly took it across. So when we hire right now, we look for those. And then this upcoming cycle, we do a biannual, that's going to be part of the performance evaluation piece. And we announced it to everybody. And for what it's where people are excited to show. And they excited to know how they're going to be. It's always about like, I just want to know how I'm being rated or valued.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had an opening for a PM on the growth team, and we kind of, that role was open for a while. And she said, I think I can do it. And she used all these tools. This is a user researcher, becoming a growth PM, not usually the career path you see, but she was excited about the area. She used all those tools. And she's now a Growth PM on the team. And really, you can start thinking about her more as a full stack builder, ultimately. But seeing those openings and then highlighting those to people, actually people are doing this has been a great example of it. And then just making sure that those tools are accessible, people can provide feedback, you share a lot has been an incredible part of this. It's not enough to be top-down directive that this is how we want to work. People want to feel like there are success stories. They feel like it's worth their time.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even delegate to his team. And their goal is to say, like, hey, I can do it, you can do it as well. Those examples are really, really powerful. We talked about the associate product builder program where we are going to be very focused on training. I think that will send a really strong message across the organization. People will see this talent and what they can do. I think that will create that movement. But celebrating wins in all hands, highlighting people and showing those examples. One example we've seen recently people really looked at it in a surprise lens, but then it kind of, I think, really opened up a lens for them. We had somebody in our user research team”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is piloting success instead of your organization. That's the pod model where you're showing that not only this could work, it's actually having success. So we have even our partnerships team, our beauty team, being able to kind of go instead of like relying on, waiting for an engineer to help build a developer portal and build kind of the connectors there. Literally, one of our head of partnerships just went and did it himself.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. So, everything from how you hire You know, calibration and evaluation. And one thing I want to see there early is this kind of AI agency influencing. Like I mentioned, the tools are there. The question is, would you use them? Because the tools will be good enough, but not great at the beginning, right? That's the classic thing of every good MVP tool. They're good enough, but they're not great. And then you kind of want to build that agency to make the tool better. Like we're in this kind of notion of we're going to make this better for LinkedIn together.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is where I emphasize to people that getting everything done, the platforms, the tools is not going to be sufficient. It's a prerequisite for this to work, but not sufficient for this to work because it really requires you to invest a lot in the cultural aspects of how do you get people to lean into this one. And this one might feel slow at first, but I've seen this before with our transformation of thinking from desktop to mobile. And once it picks up, it actually maintains very high velocity. One, people are really incentivized by how you define expectations for them. So to think about what is the expectation of somebody in the role.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't work this way. Some will adopt. That tends to be kind of your cutting edge 5% of talent that just wants new tools and they have a bias for change. But the vast majority needs to work for change management in how they do it. And that requires being a lot more thoughtful about the cultural aspect of it, which is by far from me the biggest and most important thing to do.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and in many ways it's surprising, it's not surprising. I've seen this also when we were. Surprising because you want everybody else to be part of this and lean in. I think top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft and this innate need to be at the cutting edge of how you build. And I think we're seeing this here as well. This is why I've had this phrase I say with the team that if we build all those tools, will they use it? And I know by now the answer is no. It's not enough to give them the tools to use it. You have to build the incentives programs, the motivation, the examples to how you do it. They need to see other people being successful as well. And I've seen this also when we're shifting LinkedIn from a desktop company to a mobile company. It was a very similar process. It's very hard. Change management here is going to be a critical part. I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say in six months or so, we'll be able to see a lot more of the organization use it, and you'll start seeing kind of those top line numbers.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think the feedback has been the most important part, right? When you kind of, the way to think about this is just like you build a product or we're building this product internally and you want to experiment with some kind of early adopters who will give you feedback. And the feedback has been amazing. In fact, our top talent are the ones who are using this the most at LinkedIn. And the feedback from them has been incredible in terms because they're also willing to spend the time and give the feedback as well. And the response from them has been incredible in terms of the quality of their output, the time they're spending on this to get the value back, their desire to kind of be part of this and actually scale this and make this even better. So that's where a lot of the”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many ways, we've built some pretty amazing. I'm really excited for that group. I wish I could join it. We build amazing training for them. And in many ways, we're going to use that training to think about how we roll at the class organization. We're kind of using the lens of. You have great technical skills, but you're not an engineer at a company yet, or you have great design taste, but you haven't designed a scale in company eight. And we're going to teach you how to do it at LinkedIn. But the training we're going to use a lot to kind of extend across the company as well.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product executive teams basically removed from functional leaders, design, PM, BD, and so on to product areas leaders, and they basically rock across the stack. And they also go for a 360 with all of those functions to see if they're really able to do a full stack building experience. Then we also launching at kind of like the junior side a new program called the Associate Product Builder Program, where we basically, we used to have our APM program, which this is about its ending this year. And then starting January, we're going to start having our APB program. And they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code, design, and PM at LinkedIn. They're going to go through a pretty rigorous training process, and then they're going to join those pods. And gradually, we're going to grow that program to be a material part of LinkedIn as well.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start doing it, start kind of leaning in. We're seeing designers of that team starting to push kind of PRs, which never happened before. And now other teams that want to do this as well. So it's starting with this kind of grassroot experience. There is, I would say, the places I've been very formal, I would say at the beginning has been the top.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if I think about some of our teams, whether it's actually we just launched Semantic People Search and the Semantic Job Search as well, that team was using part of those tools to actually help build it. So that team actually, this was PMs building their own dashboards. Those tools without waiting for design resources to come in. Then we have design team who is now already, you know, this started really from the manager kind of rolling this out. And in many ways, what I tell this team is don't wait for the official GA.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's very cool. So, basically, we have a team building that's the core team building, kind of the FSB track across all of R&D, FSB full stack builder. And then there are pockets and pods of teams using it. So basically we are looking at specific areas that we're basically giving it to. The condition there is they give feedback as a response for that. They make the tool better. So it's not just access. We want people who will use it. You want your early adopters would be the ones who help you shep the product really well. So we're doing this in a pod model right now.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Picking up bugs directly from juror tickets, pushing them in, something we haven't seen before. And there's just an appetite for everybody to just join. So in fact, the biggest thing right now is anybody wants access. Everybody wants access to the tools to be able to do it together. And we just want to make sure it's good enough to make sure the whole organization can do it really well.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multiplied by quality, how good are those experiments divided by the time it takes to actually pull them out? Idea to launch. So on saving times, we're seeing whether it's PMs, designers, engineers, saving hours of work a week right now, whether it's the analyst agent we talked about or the prototyping really quickly or the product jamming experience has been a big part of that. On the quality side, we're seeing insights, discussions just be much, much better. And by the way, quality in time, sometimes they help each other because it's high quality. You don't have to spend as much time on something. So we are seeing that applied in and the volume, you know, I wouldn't say we had a rate where I'm seeing a high percent of organization doing it yet, but this will come once we haven't GA'd this internally that will come in the next couple of months as we have all the stuff in place. But we're seeing designers PMs.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we are, I wouldn't say we are yet at a very high sample rate where it's kind of a high percentage of the organization, but we have a substantial part of the organization already using it to provide a lot of the feedback. We're seeing a lot of great examples. So the way I think about the benefits is a function of experimentation volume.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It requires work. This is where I would say for many companies who are thinking about this phase, and I do a lot of sessions today with CPOs and COs on this process, you have to put this initial work to get the gains after. I mean, I think, by the way, I think this is a takeaway there in general with AI, even if you're learning it for the first time and so on, whether it's cursor or whether it's design, if it's Figma or other tools or lovable. You should be ready to invest those hours before you start seeing yourself. Will come up, but you have to invest that time.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And then it doesn't always understand ties to original specs to success, right? You have to actually build, this is a really interesting way when you think about how you bring those tools in, you can't just bring them in. You have to know what you feed them with. What you feed them with is not just access. I see a lot of people just focus on the connectivity and integration. And it reminds me of, it's actually more than 10 years ago when I was rebuilding the team, co-rebuilding the feed at LinkedIn. And we started from scratch. And I had to sit down and filter through examples of what is a good professional post on LinkedIn and what is not. And that was, I'm not, this was like weeks of work getting up with that golden sample of examples, but it was the most important part was feeding at the right data, not all the data.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, does a very poor job understanding importance of the past and putting weights on stuff. We actually want to think about specifically what the context when do you want to give it to and what's the knowledge base that you want to have it focused on. So even cleaning up, let's call them gold examples or golden examples to learn from has been one of the biggest learnings. Just reasoning over your entire knowledge base did not work.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I announced this internally end of last year. We really kind of started working, but it was more setting up the teams and the processes internally. We had our first MVPs of those agents. I think like four to five months after it was really trained, I would say, but really the work itself has been kind of a couple of months of dedicated work. A lot of it has been getting all the corpus of data together, cleaning it up. That's actually a good learning as well. It's not great to just give it access to your drive and say reason all over this knowledge base.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we haven't had much investment until we kind of launch this program in the idea to design area. And that's a material part of work. It's also where the quality, a lot of the work comes from, at least before you start to go into the coding phase. The idea is to empower everybody. So if you're an engineer, you can basically use all those tools at the front of the process and be able to be a full stack builder.”
2025-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source