Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise)

(instrumental music) What if the product manager came to the meeting with prototypes? What if you come to the design team and instead of a PRD, you actually already have your mocks? With AI, it's super feasible for a product manager to come to a meeting and say, "Hey, I already have some ideas here. I wanted to mock them up this way." They're probably wrong, but at least the starting point now looks a little bit higher resolution.

For people that want to, say, pivot their career to be an AI PM, what helped you move in that direction?

It's almost counterintuitive, but I actually think it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before. There are these incredible videos that are being put out right now on YouTube on how to build an app in, like, an hour. That would not have been possible even a year ago. 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.

What have you seen separates the typical AI product manager from, say, the top 5%?

Really, the question you have to ask yourself is... (instrumental music)

Today, my guest is Aman Khan. Aman is director of product at Arize.AI. And over the course of his PM career, he's focused on building products in the AI space, including at Spotify on the ML platform team, and roles at Cruise, Zipline, and Apple. He's also very intentionally stayed an individual contributor, which feels like a trend, especially with the rise of AI tooling making PMs much more productive and companies cutting back on management layers. And so in our conversation, we go deep on these two topics, how to get into AI and how to become an AI product manager, what the different types of AI product managers are, how to thrive as an AI PM, and what Aman has learned about how to be successful and continue his career as an individual contributor PM longterm. When I asked people on Twitter and LinkedIn who their favorite individual contributor product manager is, Aman was near the very top of the list. And so I was really excited to get him on the podcast and to learn from his experience. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Aman Khan. (instrumental music) Aman, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Amazing. Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. It is truly an honor to be here.

So let me give a little context on this conversation. I put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn asking people for their favorite IC product managers, and you came up near the top of the list across both Twitter and LinkedIn. So, I knew that I needed to meet you. And you're super interesting in, in a couple ways. One is, if I think about the Venn diagram of some of the most interesting trends in product right now, uh, you're kind of at the center of AI and staying IC, an individual contributor, for a long time. And my sense is a lot of PMs are thinking about, "How do I get into AI and how do I do more AI work?" Two, there's this trend of just, like, ICs, super ICs, less managers, and you've been doing AI for a long time. You've been an IC for basically your whole career very intentionally. So with that, there's a few things I want to spend our time on. One is how to get into AI, how to become an AI PM essentially. Two is how to thrive as an AI PM. And three is how to thrive as an IC outside of AI, but I know AI plays into that. Broadly, how does that sound?