AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management, said Andrew Ng.
The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published Thursday that AI-assisted coding has compressed the startup loop.
Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, “my friends and I, we’ll just build on a weekend,” Ng said.
“The bottleneck is deciding what do we actually want to build,” he added.
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.
That mismatch is forcing teams to make faster product decisions — and Ng said his teams are “increasingly relying on gut.”
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.
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.
Ng did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The great product manager debate
Ng’s comments come as the debate continues in the startup world over the role of product managers.
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Product managers have been referred to — both affectionately and critically — 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.
Some tech leaders have said that product managers are key in the age of AI.
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 crucial role in setting up “feedback loops” to make AI agents better.
But others argue that product managers add little value.
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.
Microsoft wants to increase the number of engineers relative to product or program managers, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in March.
The call for executives to go “founder mode” — a concept coined by the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and touted by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky — has some leaders questioning whether they should delegate product decisions to product managers.
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.