Roundtable #7: Spotify, Adobe and Linkedin on How AI Changes The Future of Product & Design | E1097

What do the best product leaders think about AI? I talked with the heads of product from Adobe, LinkedIn, and Spotify. And we covered everything from LLM predictions in 2024 to how product teams should adopt AI.

I think it's actually common belief that there are gonna be a few mega models in the future that are gonna do everything for every company in the cloud. What we're saying is, actually, it will probably be the opposite.

When you're thinking in an AI first principle kind of way, you're really unleashing the idea of control. What happens basically in AI is you don't control the experience anymore.

Something that designers need to get good at in this world, they need to understand GPT-4 as well as they understand the user. So an example that I think is a good example is ...

Alrighty. I am so excited for this. I've wanted to do this one for a while. So we're gonna do a couple of intros first so everyone can get familiar with each other's voices. And so we're going to start with you, Scott, then Gustav, and then Tomer. Who are you and what are you most well known for?

I was the founder of a company called Behance back in the day, and, uh, we were acquired by Adobe. Um, for the last, uh, six years or so, I, I served as chief product officer for about five years overseeing the creative cloud business and then, um, and then have, uh, recently taken over strategy corporate development, uh, design and emerging products for the company in this kind of chief strategy emerging products officer type role, uh, over the last year.

(laughs) It's quite an all encompassing role. Um, Gustav, your turn.

So I'm Gustav Sederström and, uh, similar to Scott, I started and sold a few companies and then, um, I worked at Spotify for almost 15 years now as a CPO and then CTO and now recently as, uh, co-president together with, uh, Alex Nordstrom. So we run the company together.

Very exciting transition there. Tomer, your turn.

Hey, everyone. Uh, chief product officer for LinkedIn. Uh, responsible for basically what we build from the company's strategy to overseeing the teams building it. Been at LinkedIn for 12 years now. Joined, uh, right at the cuff of shifting from desktop to mobile as a company, so that was fun. I started my career as an engineer, so I was doing anything from semiconductors, chip on design algorithms, to embedded systems, all the way to the internet right now in AI.

Okay, so now everyone knows individual voices. We're actually also very lucky because there are three very distinct voices (laughs) . I didn't realize quite how, how apt the selection of this roundtable was in that perspective. I want to start with probably kind of the most broad but also kind of important, which is fundamentally we're all told that AI changes everything that we do. When we apply that to product, what do we think are the most significant ways that AI will change the product development process, specifically on the product development side? What will change specifically with AI? And I just want to throw that out there so anyone can jump on it.