{"id":56542,"date":"2025-08-10T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T07:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/56542\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T07:00:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T07:00:12","slug":"the-future-of-product-management-is-ai-native-oreilly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/56542\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Product Management Is AI-Native \u2013 O\u2019Reilly"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my recent Live with Tim O\u2019Reilly interview, I spoke with Marily Nika, author of Building AI-Powered Products<\/a> and one of the most thoughtful voices at the intersection of AI and product management. We talked about what it means to build products in the age of AI\u2014and how the role of product manager is being redefined in real time. This is a subject that\u2019s near and dear to me as I work with the O\u2019Reilly team to take the bitter lesson<\/a> to heart and rethink all of our processes and products in light of the new capabilities of AI. (For additional perspective, see also Drew Breunig\u2019s critique<\/a> of the bitter lesson as applied to corporate AI strategy.)<\/p>\n

Marily started in AI product management at Google back in 2013, before most of us even called it that. Today, she argues, this is no longer a niche skill set. It\u2019s becoming THE job. \u201cAll product managers will be AI product managers,\u201d she said. But she also warned against what she called the \u201cshiny object trap\u201d\u2014using AI just to keep up with the hype. Good PMs must stay grounded in user pain points and product strategy. AI should be used only when it\u2019s the best possible solution. \u201cUse cases haven\u2019t changed,\u201d Marily noted. \u201cPeople still want the same things. What\u2019s changed is how we can solve for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marily\u2019s Rapid Prototyping Workflow<\/p>\n

One of the most exciting parts of our conversation was hearing about Marily\u2019s rapid prototyping workflow using Perplexity for user research, custom GPTs for spec generation in her own voice, and v0 for UI mockups. With these tools, she can go from idea to functional prototype in hours, not weeks. \u201cEvery week I block time on my calendar just for AI experimentation. It\u2019s made me a much better PM,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t thought about limiting a search to Reddit to mine for user pain points. That\u2019s brilliant.<\/p>\n

One of our live attendees asked a thoughtful question: Is there such a thing as \u201cvibe PMing\u201d? Here\u2019s Marily\u2019s answer:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

We also discussed when to prioritize polish over speed\u2014and whether AI can help us do both. \u201cAI is a slider, not a switch. You have to decide how much to use it at each stage,\u201d she noted.<\/p>\n

Marily also laid out three emerging product manager archetypes:<\/p>\n

AI builder PMs, who work on the models themselvesAI experience PMs, who craft novel UX with those modelsAI-enhanced PMs, who use AI to amplify traditional product work<\/p>\n

That\u2019s real food for thought, and something that we\u2019ll have to dig deeper into as we continue to develop our O\u2019Reilly live training curriculum for AI-centered product management.<\/p>\n

Strategy Meets Implementation<\/p>\n

We talked about a theme close to my heart: the PM as translator between strategy and implementation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very influenced by my wife Jen Pahlka\u2019s work on government transformation, as described in her book Recoding America<\/a>. In her telling, product management is the skill of shaping not just what to do when developing a product but also what not to do. Government is in many ways an extreme case, with mandates developed by nontechnical members of Congress and their staff, or by administrative agencies, with little attention given to the details of how those mandates will be implemented, whether the implied implementation will work, or even if the specifications are implementable! But those lessons are also often surprisingly relevant for those of us in the corporate world.<\/p>\n

Two stories stick in my mind. The first is about a PM at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services who was faced with a spec that she thought was unimplementable. Conflicting mandates from Congress meant that doctors would be required to sign up for a program three months before they\u2019d receive the information they needed to make that decision. Changing the spec would have been next to impossible. So she made the bold decision to override it, reasoning that Congress had specified quarterly reporting because they didn\u2019t understand that it would be possible to create an API to provide real-time updates. The second is about a project leader who recognized that the project as specified wouldn\u2019t work but said, \u201cIf they tell us to build a concrete boat, we\u2019ll build a concrete boat.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her response to my extended tirade, Marily emphasized that while PMs don\u2019t run day-to-day delivery, they must understand the trade-offs between latency, cost, UX, privacy, and feasibility\u2014especially in AI development. You don\u2019t need to build a concrete boat just because someone told you to.<\/p>\n

Shared Tools and Team AI Adoption<\/p>\n

One of the best attendee questions of the hour\u2014one that was so good that I am using it as part of the framing of a longer post I\u2019m working on about AI for groups\u2014was \u201cWhat are some tips on dealing with the fact that we are currently working in teams, but in silos of individual AI assistants?\u201d (This question was from someone identified only as DP. For some reason, many of our corporate customers don\u2019t want their employees to be identified by name or affiliation in the chat for our live events, which is too bad. DP, if you happen to read this post, please reach out. I\u2019d love to chat with you more about this idea. If you know my name, you know my email.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As you can see from the video excerpt, Marily completely agreed that this is a problem. AI use is still often siloed and secretive in teams\u2014people afraid they\u2019re \u201ccheating\u201d by using it, she noted. She called for teams to be open and collaborative about their AI workflows: create shared prompt libraries, use group tools like NotebookLM<\/a>, and normalize AI use with shared agents and systems.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me based on her response that NotebookLM may have a good start as a platform for shared AI work by nondevelopers, because it inherits many of the collaboration features from Google Drive and the associated family of Google productivity apps. In a similar way, AI for developers relies on GitHub for most of its \u201cgroupware\u201d capabilities.<\/p>\n

But that highlights just how LLMs themselves are really weak in this area. Leaning on external infrastructure is not a substitute for native features. For example, how might an LLM instance have a group memory, not just user memory? How might it include version control? How might we share an AI workflow versus just sending around links to outputs, much as we used to send around Word and Excel files before 2005, when Google Docs taught us there was a better way.<\/p>\n

The Rise of AI-Native PMs<\/p>\n

In response to another audience question, we talked about Andreessen Horowitz\u2019s claim that the world\u2019s largest company might well be an AI healthtech company. How might someone in healthcare get into AI product management? Marily gave a powerful reminder: You don\u2019t need to be an AI expert to get started. Now is the time. No matter what your job is today, you can learn, experiment, and build with AI. Lean into your healthcare expertise. She told a story from one of her product management live courses on the O\u2019Reilly platform<\/a> that illustrated how one user had made the transition from a small hardware company into an AI healthtech opportunity at Apple.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

We both agreed: We\u2019re still early. Despite all the hype about the current market leaders, today\u2019s AI is barely scratching the surface. Some of today\u2019s dominant players may not survive. So many killer AI-native applications haven\u2019t been invented yet. The future of AI is still up for grabs, and it\u2019s up to us to build it.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Marily for sharing her expertise with us, and to all of the O\u2019Reilly customers whose questions are such an important part of our live events, including this one.<\/p>\n

AI tools are quickly moving beyond chat UX to sophisticated agent interactions. Our upcoming AI Codecon event,\u00a0Coding for the Future Agentic World, will highlight how developers are already using agents to build innovative and effective AI-powered experiences. We hope you\u2019ll join us on September 9 to explore the tools, workflows, and architectures defining the next era of programming. It\u2019s free to attend.<\/p>\n

Register now to save your seat<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In my recent Live with Tim O\u2019Reilly interview, I spoke with Marily Nika, author of Building AI-Powered Products…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-56542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}