Lenny's Podcast: Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan

☑ Get hands-on with AI tools
▪️ Tools like Cursor, Replit, and v0 allow PMs to go beyond ideas by creating real mock-ups and functional prototypes.
▪️ Simple, AI-generated visuals or prototypes help PMs bring actionable ideas straight to design or engineering teams.
▪️ Even without a deep technical background, new AI platforms empower PMs to iterate quickly and drive better discussions.

☑ Understand the different AI PM roles
▪️ Infrastructure AI PMs build the tools for developers working on AI.
▪️ Experience AI PMs create products with AI as the core, e.g., chatbot interfaces.
▪️ AI-powered PMs use AI to enhance their productivity, whether through data analysis or process automation.

☑ Shift from following trends to solving real problems
▪️ The best AI PMs avoid hype and focus on tools that genuinely benefit their users.
▪️ While building a chatbot may seem appealing, top AI PMs ask, “What’s the best way to solve our users’ needs?” It might look very different from the latest trends.

☑ Be open to ‘wandering’—don’t expect a clear path
▪️ AI product managers often face ambiguity, with no obvious roadmap or answer. The top 5% embrace this, exploring, testing, and iterating to find the direction.
▪️ AI can help you cut through the noise: using AI for customer insights or product ideas, you can detect patterns or pain points even when they aren’t immediately clear.

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?

It's almost counterintuitive, but I actually think it's probably easier now to break into AI product management than it was before

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

So product manager is responsible for bringing together design, engineering, the biz dev people, operations, sales... and going and shipping impact

The role of an AI PM in this type of organization is really to be the representative of how can we use these tools to their highest leverage

You are really driven by your own curiosity, and your curiosity can push you in a lot of different directions in terms of the types of tools you might want to pick up for yourself or even implement in your own product

What these tools really allow you to do is up-level, like max out that influence...you can now communicate ideas to design, engineering, and the higher-ups around what should go and get built

If you're constantly learning and having fun, you're going to iterate so much faster

If you think about it, what are these AI tools amazing at? They're amazing at building things. The hardest part becomes knowing what to build, finding opportunities, and articulating it very clearly

To really stand out as an AI PM, you have to accept this technology is changing really fast. You might think it's going to do something great...but the goal is to keep iterating

Just because it feels intuitive to go and replicate this interface that feels really great and everyone's bought in because they're familiar with it, you really have to think, is this the thing our business needs right now?

I think there's this propensity to let your curiosity drive you and try to find the tools that really help make that experience possible

There is no job that isn't important. If you're spending time with someone, you're learning something from them and having empathy for what they do as well

I know that you said that... if you're in love with the problem, you are trying to push the boundaries of what's possible with technology to solve that problem

The bar just got higher for product managers within a company and what the impact needs to be

Product management can feel pretty serious, but honestly...just have fun along the way, it really is about that journey. And sometimes you're wandering, but have fun with that too