{"id":93219,"date":"2025-08-24T09:22:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93219\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T09:22:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T09:22:14","slug":"andrew-ng-product-management-is-now-the-bottleneck-in-ai-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/93219\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Ng: Product Management Is Now the Bottleneck in AI Startups"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management, said Andrew Ng.<\/p>\n

The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published Thursday that AI-assisted coding<\/a> has compressed the startup loop.<\/p>\n

Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, “my friends and I, we’ll just build on a weekend,” Ng said.<\/p>\n

“The bottleneck is deciding what do we actually want to build,” he added.<\/p>\n

In the past, a prototype might take three weeks to develop, so waiting another week for user feedback wasn’t a big deal. But today, when a prototype can be built in a single day, “if you have to wait a week for user feedback, that’s really painful,” Ng said.<\/p>\n

That mismatch is forcing teams to make faster product decisions \u2014 and Ng said his teams are “increasingly relying on gut.”<\/p>\n

The best product managers bring “deep customer empathy,” he said. It’s not enough to crunch data on user behavior. They need to form a mental model of the ideal customer.<\/p>\n

It’s the ability to “synthesize lots of signals to really put yourself in the other person’s shoes to then very rapidly make product decisions,” he added.<\/p>\n

Ng did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n

The great product manager debate<\/p>\n

Ng’s comments come as the debate continues in the startup world over the role of product managers.<\/p>\n

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Product managers have been referred to \u2014 both affectionately and critically \u2014 as “mini-CEOs” of the products they oversee. They act as a bridge among engineers, sales teams, customer service, and other departments, ensuring that products align with user needs.<\/p>\n

Some tech leaders have said that product managers are key in the age of AI.<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published in March that product managers play<\/a> a crucial role in setting up “feedback loops” to make AI agents better.<\/p>\n

But others argue that product managers add little value<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published last month that product managers don’t make sense early on in a company’s early days.<\/p>\n

Microsoft<\/a> wants to increase the number of engineers relative to product or program managers, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in March.<\/p>\n

The call for executives to go “founder mode<\/a>” \u2014 a concept coined by the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and touted by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky \u2014 has some leaders questioning whether they should delegate product decisions to product managers.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Chesky merged product management with marketing, and Snap told The Information in the same year that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company’s decision-making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management, said Andrew Ng. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,54633,276,277,54636,8623,49,48,8515,2539,53045,15036,54635,54632,63,1404,54634,2341,61,2813],"class_list":["post-93219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-andrew-ng","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-bottleneck","tag-business-insider","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-comment","tag-company","tag-engineer","tag-episode","tag-fast-product-decision","tag-good-product-manager","tag-microsoft","tag-podcast","tag-product-management","tag-team","tag-technology","tag-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}