AI has made the coding of the part easy. The difficult part is now product management, said Andrew NG.
Stanford Professor and former scientist of Google’s brain said in an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published Thursday that the AI coding had compressed the start -up loop.
Things that took six engineers for three months to build, “my friends and I are just going to build a weekend,” said NG.
“The bottleneck decides what we really want to build,” he added.
In the past, a prototype could take three weeks to develop, so waiting for another week for user comments was not a big problem. But today, when a prototype can be built in a single day, “if you have to wait a week for user comments, it’s really painful,” said NG.
This discrepancy obliges teams to make faster product decisions – and NG has declared that its teams “count more and more on the intestine”.
The best product managers bring “great customer empathy,” he said. It is not enough to bite data on user behavior. They must form a mental model of the ideal customer.
This is the possibility of “synthesizing a lot of signals to really put you in the place of the other person to quickly make product decisions,” he added.
NG did not respond to a request for comments from Business Insider.
The great debate of the product manager
NG’s comments arise as the debate continues in the world of startups to the role of product managers.
Product managers have been mentioned – both affectionately and critical – as “mini -CEOs” of the products they supervise. They act as a bridge between engineers, sales teams, customer service and other departments, ensuring that products align with user needs.
Some technology chiefs have said that product managers are essential in the AI era.
Microsoft’s technology director Kevin Scott said that in an episode of the twenty -minute “VC VC” podcast published in March that product managers play a crucial role in the creation of “feedback loops” to improve AI agents.
But others argue that product managers add little value.
Edwin Chen, CEO of Surge AI, said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published last month that product managers did not make sense at the start of the first company.
Microsoft wants to increase the number of engineers compared to product managers or programs, Ashley Stewart from Business Insider reported in March.
The call to managers to follow the “founding mode” – a concept invented by the co -founder of the combiner y Paul Graham and praised by the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky – has certain leaders wondering if they should delegate product decisions to product manager.
In 2023, Chesky merged product management with marketing, and Snap told information the same year that she dismissed 20 product manager to help accelerate the company’s decision -making.
