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

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

“100% according investment had gone started a while back and those are fully into place we have our coding agent in fact we're kind of stages into two parts of it there is the idea to design part and then there's the you know let's call it the code to launch part the code to launch part has gotten a lot of attention and we're making some big inroads there everything from the coding agent to what we call the maintenance agent when you have you know a failed build It will do it for you. In fact, I think we're close to 50% of all those builds being done by the maintenance agent in a QA agent.”
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
“Ultimately, they will do an orchestrator. We're going to leave the orchestrator across, but we did want to be able to rate and grade those agents really well on how they're doing. And I think there is a level of expertise now. We're kind of building this as a way where you'll be able to mask a lot of those. You might have, we call this internally the product jammer agent that basically does your product jam, which is a process we do internally. You might just use the product jam engine and that product jam engine will work with all the other agents. But now we're starting with that building blocks until we build our orchestrating layer across.”
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've kind of experimented with Figma and Subframe and Magic Patterns and so on. And we saw people gravitating depending on the function, their level of visibility, their know-how of the tool before, they're gravitating to different tools. And ultimately, I don't want to have eight design agents in the company. So we have to converge into at least a few. And I think it's similar across many areas because the appeal of those A lot of those agents are trying to solve similar end goal, but they're doing it very differently. And what you'll see that ultimately, I don't think there's going to be a winner takes all because the starting point of the customer or the user will dictate a lot how simple they are for that use case.”
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 that's like something we'll have to resolve and think about how we do this really well because ultimately we were trying to kind of simplify the process as much as possible. But that's like a that was a big learning for us and which tools we use and how we basically integrate them 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
“Quick goal. So, I think we've been experimenting with a lot of tools, and I would say for a lot of those kind of knowledge corpus agents, we're using everything from co-pilot enterprise to chat GPT enterprise, by far though the most important part was basically our own customization of it. That's been where we saw the biggest gain, even like building the orchestrator across those because you don't want to use, you want the agents to start falling to each other. The trust agent should kind of work with the ROF agent and go out do a back and forth versus doing it more sequentially. So we've done a lot of work internally to make it happen. This is why I think it does require that level of investment. And then in some cases, let's talk about the design agent that we're working with. We're working with multiple companies to try and understand which product works best for us. And interestingly enough, and this is another learning, different teams gravitated to different products”
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 pretty good at understanding that persona at LinkedIn. So, one example we had is a team came out with a spec, they weren't aware we had a research entity. I asked the research agent for a small business owner, what did you think about the marketing spec we had? And it critiqued it extremely well. Actually, in many ways, shifted the direction of the team to focus on other integration tools we can focus on. But it's very hard to have that visibility all to all that corpus of knowledge inside of the company. That's another example. We have an analyst agent trained on all like how you basically Instead of relying on your SQL queries or data science teams, you can use the analyst agent. All of those, I would say, I would call them still MVP+, the goal for us in the next couple of months to basically roll them out externally.”
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
“One thing which is using it right now, which is almost thinking about at the beginning, but our UXR team, like the user research team, is using that growth agent to understand out of all the things they're basically surfacing for members, which one has the biggest growth opportunity to have the biggest impact. That was not in the cards when we thought about that idea, but teams are basically funneling those ideas into this one. An example is a research agent. So research agent basically is trained on the personas of our members. You can think about like a small business owner, a job seeker, and so on. And it's using not just world knowledge, it's using all the research we've done in the past, all the support tickets coming 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
“To scams than other folks, so being able to think about how do we prevent all of those ahead of time. So we walk that spec from a couple of years ago through the Chasta agent. Not only was it able to find all the stuff we initiated at the beginning, but all the holes that we did not catch until later. So that's like a great example of something that actually worked really well. That's one. The other one is a growth agent as an example. Again, LinkedIn has a very unique, actually one of our We have an incredible growth team, growth process. We've kind of funneled all of our unique loops, our funnels, our tests of the past, everything into this growth agent. And now you can basically rock your spec fruit, your idea for it, and it will not just allow you to do it better, it will actually critique how good is your idea. This is something we cannot bring off the shelf. It's very unique to LinkedIn. So we had to invest dramatically in it.”
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 actually, it's a great signal. I've seen some great success from it. People are helping each other, the community really thrives around, helping each other. But at the same time, it introduces a trust vector for bad actors because they're open to work. People are looking for a job are potentially more vulnerable.”
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
“When you build a spec, you build an idea, you walk through the trust agent, it'll basically tell you what are your vulnerabilities, harm vectors potentially you're introducing or will be introduced as a result of that. And I had our head of trust build it. So the head of craft for every area is building their own agent. As an example, we took, you know, we have one of our features for job seekers is called Open to Work. If you're looking for a job, you can put an open to 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
“And then you have tools. So, tools is where you really build the agents. I mentioned I want to automate everything outside of those five traits that we talked about, and then we're building the tools for that. And then for that, actually, very similarly, I can't just bring a tool from the outside and work. So I'll give you an example. We're building one of our biggest things is building a trust agent. Trust is really important for us at LinkedIn. There's a lot of unique vectors which trust plays at LinkedIn doesn't place anywhere else. So we need to bring all of that know-how and context and information base into that agent. So we ended up building our own trust agent at LinkedIn.”
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
“They first need to know how to work with our design systems, which is something there, you know, in many ways a lot of those companies are working on. Same with coding. It doesn't work that you just bring it in and it just reasons over your code base really well. We tried. We are building that layer that basically allows it to do so, whether it's co-pilot or cursor or Windsorf and so on.”
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 haven't seen anybody be able to work off the shelf immediately on our code base design systems and unique context we have.”
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 like, or Figma on design, or you can think about the design system is another example of that. But you have to have that back and forth because they're not.”
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, working with those companies to adjust something in their stack to work with our stack as well. When you say those companies.”
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
“AI can reason over it. So we're building kind of this composable UI components with server side that we actually build. We're basically building for AI to be ready to bring it in. So you can't just go and bring a third party tool and have it work on the LinkedIn stack. In fact, that's one of our biggest learnings. It never works. Never works. You have to bring it in and customize a lot of it, working almost in alpha mode with those companies to make it work internally.”
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 I think just to kind of break it to pieces, and I think this is, you know, if you were a startup right now, in many ways you can start this way, right? There's no legacy code, there's no legacy structure, you run and in fact a lot of the startups I talk to that are build AI natively, they are just working at full stack builders. That's the way they start. If you're at a company at a scale of ours and many others in the market, you're like, this is almost like a new production function and mindset that you have to do. And there's really three components that we're working on. One is platform. The second one is the tools and the agents. And lastly is the culture. The platform one, this is the kind of level of investment you have to do before this actually starts. You start to see all the benefits accrue. But the platform for us as an example is re-architecting all of our core platforms.”
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. Yeah. And I would put a lot of the focus on the latter. I think the kind of, if you ask me at the end of the day, what's the kind of most important trait? I would say it's that judgment test making ability.”
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, it's not that you have to break the model. I think the model is broken. It's just this pace of change is helping us realize it.”
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
“Smaller teams and much more focus on the problem, the mission per se versus actually one of the things we've done as an example, we kind of started to do the idea of pods. We're no longer large teams. We assemble a team ideally a full stack builder is coming together. And it's less about kind of have an engineer design PM working together and trying to combine this trio, looking at folks who can flex across. And then they tackle something for a quarter or so. And then we kind of reassemble those to different pods. That's like one example of a manifestation where”
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
“Having more shots of the goal, which I think will go like, oh, the duration speed is going to be very high. Yes, but what you're really doing to an organization at the scale of at-scale organizations is they're a lot more nimble, a lot more adaptive, a lot more resilient. They can navigate the future. They can actually match the pace of change to the pace of response. And an analogy I have in mind is kind of Navy SEALs. You come to training. They're all kind of learning. They're cross-trained across multiple areas. What they specialize in is the mission. And they operate in small pods, and they're very nimble, and you can assemble them very quickly. And I think that's going to be the organization that will win in the future.”
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
“The future empathy super critical, right? Having a profound understanding of an unmet need. Communication is critical. And we see this a lot in job descriptions right now for almost every role, but ability for you to align and rally others around an idea. Creativity, which for me is about coming up with possibilities beyond the obvious. For example, I don't think AI yet is great at creativity. I think it's kind of in many ways brings back the things you might not know about, but it's not the kind of next level creativity which I think still humans are much better at. And then ultimately what I think is the most important trait for builder is judgment. Some people call it test making, but it's making high quality decisions in what is complex, ambiguous situations. Everything else, I'm working really hard to automate. Really, really hard. And then when you think about the outcome, it's not just about...”
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 call it the full stack builder model. And the goal always started with the goal. The goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market regardless of their role in the stack and specifically which team they're on. And the kind of idea ultimately is to be able for that builder is to develop experiences end-to-end to combine skills and expertise of what across what was traditionally distinct domains to bring it all together. And it's not a sequence of steps. It's really a fluid interaction between human and machine. That's how the way I see it. And then when you look back at that product development lifecycle from the idea, the insight all the way to launch, the key trait that I'm emphasizing for builders is where I want them to spend their time is where I think great builders should shine in. So the idea of vision, coming up with a compelling stance about...”
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, it was no. So, yes, so this is the fastest growing job on the list for not there a year ago. And then many of them not even exist a decade or two ago. Actually, some pretty amazing stats across the board”
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, to be fair, there was always a change, right? So it was never about just skip the skills you have today, but we've never seen such a dramatic part of your world today. So where do you are a marketer right now or a seller or a recruiter, an engineer? Engineering is where a lot of the investment is going in right now in terms of agents, those jobs will change dramatically. I remember I said my role my life as an engineer and even then it changed material after 10 years and then the change we're seeing right now, just thinking about in four years, what did it take to actually engineer really, really well would be dramatically different or to build software, to build an artifact of some sort. But it's true for almost every function. It's not equal some job like nurses will see less impact, but some jobs will see 90, 95% impact.”
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 now we have this real opportunity to collapse the Stack Back app, go back to craftsmanship, rethink the product development lifecycle, which is where the full stack builder model comes to life.”
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 then you actually led to micro specialization. All those subsets are dying by somebody specific. So from one builder, we have multiple functions. Obviously, we have engineering, product, and design. And you can start questioning those lines. At least I am internally. And from there, we have a lot of sub-specialties. It happens in every one of those functions, but imagine design, we have interaction design, animation design, content design, research. There's so many aspects to that. They're all valid, but they all have people, and that entire process basically means a lot of, it's basically bloating its complexity. And then without noticing, you end up with this massively complex. You actually have this diagram that basically shows the process complexity, organizational complexity together. And usually people are like mind-blowing because they're working on one thing very specific. But when you zoom out, you have this overwhelming experience you're kind of thinking about.”
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 each one of those sub steps actually has a valid reason to exist. But when you add the whole thing together, you're like, oh my God, this is why it takes to build a small feature, multiple teams, multiple code bases, multiple sprints just to get it out to launch and not talk about iterating, which is actually where you seek success. You never see success in the launch itself. So really the work itself is not complex, but the process we made very complex. When I was digging in, I found it doesn't end there because somebody has to do all those sub-steps. So what happened is you actually move from process complexity to organizational complexity 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
“Many other companies over time that process became very complex very quickly. So what happened? We took every step and we expanded it to a lot of sub steps, researching the problem, became looking at for us 10 to 15 sources of information, obviously talking to customers, but doing data pools, looking at feedback tickets in multiple sources, social media interactions with customers. We probably have 10 to 15 sources of information we go through before we kind of feel like we have research department really, really well. Think about reviews for product.”
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 then we look at organizationally, the fastest growing jobs right now, the most in demand jobs in the market, are growing by north of 70% from last year's fastest growing job. So there's a new kind of iteration of what you need as an organization to thrive. And then you apply that to building products. And you realize that in order to stay competitive, you actually have to go back to some first principles, go back to the drawing board and reimagine what it means to be building. And what I love about this is when you think about the role of a builder, which the builders are the heart of company, the goal is actually quite simple. The builder takes an idea and she brings it to life. That's really the process, right? And we all build those, let's call them like best practices. You research the problem really well. You spec it out, you design it, you code it, you launch it, and you iterate. That's basically it. But what happens at many at-scale companies, LinkedIn included 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
“By 2030, which is literally four years from now, sounds a long time, but 40 years, four years from now, it will change by 70%. So whether or not you're looking to change your job, your job is changing. The only question is, do you keep it”
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 starts with kind of the basics for me technology has always been about empowerment, it's not about what it does for us, it's about what enables us to do. And now we have this amazing opportunity in my mind to make it about meritocracy. And I think it's an opportunity, but it's also a necessity right now. And I want to put this in context where we're entering this phase where the time constant of change is far greater than the time constant of response basically means that change is happening faster than we're able to respond to it. Now, LinkedIn has this unique view of the world of work. So we actually have some pretty, in my mind, mind-blowing stats to kind of put this in perspective. When we look at like the skills required to do your job.”
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
“Top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft. The key trait that I'm emphasizing for builders is”
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
“Change management here is going to be a critical part, but it's not enough to give them the tools. You have to build the incentives programs, the motivation, the examples to how you do it. I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt. It hasn't worked this way.”
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 call it the full stack builder model. The goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market regardless of their role and the stack and which team they're on. It's really a fluid interaction between human and machine.”
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
“When we look at the skills required to do your job, by 2030, they will change by 70%. So whether or not you're looking to change your job, your job is changing. In order to stay competitive, you actually have to go back to some first principles, go back to the drawing board and reimagine what it means to be building.”
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