Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada

I have a cheesy Chrome extension. Literally, whenever I open a new tab, it just says, "How can you use AI to do what you're going to do right now?"

How do you see the future of product development being different?

If you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. It becomes even more important to have the territorial and taste-making at the heart of it, because otherwise you just have a Frankenstein product.

There's this acronym that you taught me, NLX. What is that?

Natural language interface. NLX is the new UX. Often I hear, uh, product builders say, "Oh, yeah, with AI, like, the model leads the products." That doesn't mean it's not designed. You and I are having a conversation. It's a podcast. I'll have another conversation, uh, at Microsoft and that's a meeting. Conversations also have grammars, they have structures, they have UI elements. They're invisible. What are the new principles, new constructs in natural language as a interface?

I just saw that Cursor hit 300 million ARR in two years. Interestingly, you guys were very well positioned to do really well in this AI coding tool space. You guys had Copilot, the first tool in the world at this stuff. So ahead of everyone. What happened?

I would say-

Today, my guest is Aparna Shenapragada. Aparna is chief product officer at Microsoft, where she oversees AI product strategy for their productivity tools and their work on agents. Previously, she was chief product officer at Robinhood; vice president at Google, where she worked on Google Lens, Search, Shopping, augmented reality, AI Assistant; and a lot more. She was also a longtime engineering leader at Akamai, and on the board of eBay and Capital One. In our conversation, we chat about how working in B2B is like being Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits across two moving trucks, how she's operationalizing her team living in the future so that they're building towards where things are going, why people still need to learn to code, why the PM role isn't going anywhere, why NLX is the new UX, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of products, including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, and Granola. Check it out at lemmysnewsletter.com and click BUNDLE. With that, I bring you Aparna Shenapragada. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Institute, the trusted leader in product expertise. Pragmatic Institute helps product professionals turn ideas into impact through proven courses, workshops, and certifications designed for real world success. For over 30 years, they've trained more than 250,000 product leaders at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, equipping them with practical strategies to build and scale market winning products. Pragmatic's full-time instructors each bring over 25 years of hands-on leadership experience, teaching strategies proven to deliver real world results. And it's not just about what you learn, it's also about who you learn it with. Completing a course connects you to an active community of over 40,000 product professionals. You'll engage in meaningful conversations, collaborate with peers and mentors, and gain direct instructor access to refine your strategies and stay ahead of trends. Get 20% off with code LENNY20 at pragmaticinstitute.com/lenny. Aparna, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.