“PMs who use AI will replace those who don’t”: Google’s AI product lead on the new PM toolkit | Marily Nika

0:00When all these tools we use every day started coming up, I started figuring out how can I be an AI enhanced PM? So how can I be better at my job, have more impact, be more productive? So what you're going to walk us through is this has inspired some ideas of, wow, if I had a fridge and a video and data, what product could I build that would be useful to me as a consumer? Where would you start as a PM who is working on a smart fridge? within minutes, I can literally see what the entirety of the world is thinking about. We have opinions in our hands and we can split and filter out these opinions based on people that want this versus people that don't want this.

0:39And we can actually read and have them debate with each other so that we know what it would take to find product market fit. Okay, you did your market research in three minutes and your PRD generation in 90 seconds. Now, my job is not done as a PM. The next step is to actually create a prototype so that the people that I will present this idea to will see my vision having flesh.

1:09Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Marilee Nika, a AI product lead at Google and AI educator who's thinking a lot about how AI is changing the art of product management. She's going to speed run us through using some of her favorite tools to do market research, build out requirements documents, prototype complicated things, and a few tricks on how to use AI video gen to influence your stakeholders and sell your vision. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS.

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3:14So let's dive in and talk to us about what's been on your mind in terms of products. Yeah, it sounds good. And thank you so much for having me. Yeah, what I like to say is that I was in AI before it was cool. And I was a pure AI PM, meaning I was working with scientists and training models for speech recognition. And it was great. But since 2017, when all these you know, tools we use every day started coming up. I started figuring out, you know, how can I be an AI enhanced PM? So how can I be better at my job, have more impact, be more productive, and I'd be happy to walk you through a couple of my, you know, how I AI.

3:54So I'm just so excited to be here. Great. And so what fun product are we going to talk about? As an example, I know that you have a lot that, you know, we were just talking before the show, you have lots of jobs. I think this is a little bit of a hypothetical that we're going to work through, but I think it does show off some of the techniques that you've learned in the course of the last couple of years in your career. So what are we talking about here? All right. So when I was trying to come up with a cool use case when I was planning the podcast, I thought about what happened last Sunday. And last Sunday, I was literally walking out from my house with my kids and I look at the fridge and I post that image that the fridge had on LinkedIn.

4:42And as you can see, that image went viral. So it said these items are expiring soon. And it says my Coca-Cola apparently was 80 days old. First of all, I didn't know Coca-Cola expires. second of all I did not know my fridge could do that okay I know there is an inwards facing camera but I saw this and again I put my PM hat on what an interesting insight and as you can see it says you know you can dismiss it you can snooze it does say search for recipes you know which is not great but when I posted this there were 700 likes 100 comments of PMs commenting what they could do by having this information and 13 reposts.

5:26So I'd love to unpack this as a use case and see how we can leverage this suite of amazing AI tools we have and just, you know, see in action what it'd be like to be a PM for a smart fridge. This is totally product thinking because you have a device or something in your house and you get surprised by a user experience. And I too did not realize Coca-Cola expired. I thought you could use it till the end of time. and so what you're going to walk us through is this has inspired some ideas of wow if I had a fridge and a video and data what products could I build that would be useful to me as a consumer and you're going to use that as an example to walk us through some of the really useful AI powered PM techniques you found over the past couple couple months so where would you start as a PM who is working on a smart fridge for busy families who clearly have 80-day-old items in their fridge?

6:28Well, we have this magic in our hands. And the very first thing we do as PMs, right, is talk to users and listen to what users want, user research. Now, traditionally, you know, you would either leverage the UXR department of your company, or you would hire an external research agency. But with AI, within minutes, I can literally see what the entirety of the world is thinking about. So I open up perplexity. And something that not a lot of people know about is that there is this magic filter here. You can obviously search the web if you want, or academic papers, or, you know, SEC filings on finance, but you can only search through discussions and opinions so this searches through reddit so here's what i'm gonna do okay um would families be interested in a smart fridge so if i ask something like this it's like i get the entirety of reddit and people's opinions just mined at once and i can see references i can see all the threads and i can jump into them to actually see the discussion and I see you know use cases that are kind of positive family use cases common concerns adoption barriers um you know some sentiment and all these things now this alone is pure gold and a treasure however what I love doing is taking things one step further so here bear with me here's what I'm gonna do.

8:01Now, create two agents, one that is pro Smart Fridge and one that is against Smart Fridge. Use everything you read and have these two agents debate at least, I don't know, like 20 times about it and give me the minimum set of features I would need in order to convince the against agent. Now, we're diving into Reddit where we have opinions in our hands and we can split and filter out these opinions based on people that want this versus people that don't want this and we can actually read and have them debate with each other so that we know what it would take to find product market fit. And we did that in seconds and it's just such an incredible, incredible tool to have.

9:01All right. So here we have the pro agents arguments and then we have the against agents arguments. And you can see the discussion is based on actual references from from the actual discussion. And then there's a 20 round debate of pros and cons and all these things. And the best part is the ending where Propexity told me, okay, here's what you need to do in order to build a fridge that is going to resonate with family, which is your target group. I can't even begin to describe how much time this has saved and how much more likely I am to find product market to fit by leveraging this technology.

9:42So now naturally the next step, there's something I do called tool hopping. So we're going to hop on to our next tool, but I'd love to see if there is any comments or any questions here. One comment I do have on this is so often we hear about AI that it really wants to tell you your ideas are great. And so I think if you just said, do families want a smart fridge without any additional prompting, it would probably bias towards telling you that families do want a smart fridge, maybe with some caveats, but it tends to be pretty agreeable when it comes to interacting on ideas. And so I love this idea that I want to make sure people don't miss, which is actually prompting the AI to create two different personas in its analysis.

10:32Create a persona that's very for your idea or implementation or design or code. Create an agent that's very against your idea. Again, it doesn't have to be an idea. It could be, are you against the implementation of this code? Again, a really good use case. have them do a hypothetical or artificial debate on the topic, and then deconstruct that debate in a way that allows you to identify what would be the convincing arguments, capabilities, or implementation that might work. And so I think this is just a really great little hack on getting higher quality, more critical thinking out of these LLMs that might be biased a little to agree with your ideas and tell you they're good.

11:17Yeah, I completely agree. And the most important part is I told it what format I need this response in. And the format I need it in is features because I'm a PM. And because features is the input I need for the next tool I will demo. So now what I'm going to do is I am going to copy the minimum set of features that perplexed the things I need. and then I'm going to go to chatgbt in order to create a PRD. Now, I have created an AI product, GPT, as I like to call it, that has a template of my favorite PRD. And essentially, I prompt it with specific features and it outputs a PRD in the style that I speak in my own voice.

12:07So the next step is I come here and it says ask anything and I say generate a PRD. about a smart fridge that has these features. And essentially I am pasting the output from the complexity. And now there we go. Immediately it just generates and say, okay, well the PRD is in the AI enhanced smart fridge with local first intelligence. This is what it includes. Here's the problem statement, what users, you know, white privacy comes to these consumers, DIY open source enthusiasts, summary and feature analysis of architecture, key features. Of course, it does prioritization and all these good things at the same time.

12:53Now, this is not going to be perfect immediately. However, it gives me an incredible head start in order to just have my strategic thinking in my head and spend way less time in making a copy of the PRD and changing the title. So now I'm an AI-enhanced PM. The other thing I want to call out for folks that are looking at this is this is a GPT specifically to create PRDs around AI-powered products, I noticed, or at least that's what it looks like. And so I do think that you can create sort of general purpose document generators, But the more you can do a combination of structure and content in terms of your prompting, I think the higher quality results you're going to get.

13:43And so, okay, you did your market research in three minutes and your PRD generation in 90 seconds. But, you know, it's a long way to the factory floor and actually building this thing. And so, you know, once you have this, how do you like to think about designing great products with AI or what's the next step for you? Yes. It's really interesting how this flow has changed, right? It used to be, hey, I'm a PM. I come up with an idea. I'd create a PRD. I debate with a PRD and collaborate with my scientists and my engineers until we're done. And then we create all MVP. Now, my job is not done as a PM.

14:26Now that I have my PRD, the next step is I need to build. So I'm putting my AI builder hat, as I like to say it. And the next step is to actually create a prototype so that the people that I will present this idea to will see my vision having flesh. So the next step is to build, to prototype. There is obviously many tools that we can use. One of my favorite tools is, of course, V0, Lavable. Google AI Studio has prototyping as well now. I will use V0. It's one of the tools that I have had the best kind of outputs with. And what I did is I copied the output from my custom JVT and then I'm about to paste it here.

15:14So the prompt I will use here will be create the UI of a smart fridge, even this PRD as an input. And I will just paste the whole thing. Because it's a very long document, it takes it in as a note. And I just do this. And do you feel like these PRDs, obviously I do, you know, we have an integration with with vZero and all these vibe coding tools, because we really believe that a PRD is a higher quality input to this. You know, have you tried this, you know, prompting directly versus just pasting in the PRD and feel like that extra step really does help with the prototyping quality? I do a lot of experimentation and I experimented because I wanted to move fast at some point.

16:05And I realized that the number of tweaks I had to do later on really got me overwhelmed and tired versus me starting spending some more time in order to make sure the input is very, very good. It really pays off. Yep. And, you know, how do you think about where this might fit in the product development workflow? It seems like for you, a prototype is really a communication tool. so it's a tool by which you know if somebody read the purity you're like yeah yeah it's a like a locally intelligent smart fridge sure whatever but once you can see touch feel it it becomes much more compelling and so you know i'm curious do you think this is a influence tactic that pms are are underestimating is it really to design the right thing where do you think pms can use this kind of prototype the perfect place to use this is at the product review so i find that a lot of product reviews happen more often now with ai because things move fast because some people are really not convinced with ai yet so if you enter a product review that's just about hey here's what i want to do are you ignoring your ad here's where you need to invest your resources in and they can get a link and on their laptop actually touch it feel it see it move around you communicate your vision and your passion more effectively versus here's a prd that i turned into a deck for you so that i can walk you through it it's just so much more it adds credibility it adds value it's just so so so much more effective amazing okay and now we have an open fridge dashboard.

17:52I have to call out for people who are not watching on YouTube and are listening. My favorite part of this UI is the door status widget that tells you if the door is open or closed. It's amazing. My kids go to the freezer and get ice cream and they don't close it. Mine too. Mine too. It beeps. You and I have the same life. They close it, but it's this much, this much open yeah yeah yeah exactly and the light is on and they're in such a rush to eat the ice cream that they don't get um okay so yeah we can see here fridge temperatures door status um power usage was a good one you know the temperature that you can change recent activity oh what time it opened and closed that's also good to call them out and say did you have an ice cream um temperature completed safety monitoring it's all these controls and you can see that this tool took the PRD as an input and it added features on top of it.

18:52It guessed what the UI needs to look like. So imagine your leadership or even your cross-functional partners to be able to experience your product idea. Imagine just how much more effective the meeting would be. Yeah, one thing I have to have to call out is because you said that privacy and local intelligence was so important in your PRD based on your research. And I think that's a lot of people saying, I don't want my smart fridge monitoring me. I don't want a cloud connected smart fridge. I don't want advertising. I don't want monitoring. If you go up to, I think, hardware, I'm pretty sure, or diagnostics, I'm pretty sure your smart fridge is shipping with the gpu which i find very very funny yeah yeah you know maybe you can also run your coding models locally through through your fridge you know exactly i love it a little storage as well yeah this is this is great um but again this is a wonderful 100 % lot of processing look at this it has a little badge that shows you so you can feel safe yeah this is great i would buy it i I think this is really phenomenal.

20:07This is very much like a Silicon Valley fridge right here. It's in dark mode. It's got system diagnostics. As long as you can like root into your fridge, people are going to be really happy. You've seen the doom and gloom headlines. AI is coming for your job. But the reality is a little bit brighter. In Miro's latest survey, 76 % of people say AI can boost their work. It's just that 54 % still don't know when to use it. As a product leader and a solo founder, I live or die by how fast I can turn fuzzy ideas into crisp value propositions, roadmaps, and launch plans. That's why I love Miro's innovation workspace.

20:52It drops an AI co-pilot inside the canvas, so stickies, screenshots, and brainstorm bullets can become usable diagrams, product briefs, and even prototypes in minutes. Your team can dive in, riff, and iterate. And because the board feels like a digital playground, everyone has fun while you cut cycle time by a third. Miro lets humans and AI play to their strengths so that great ideas ship faster and happier. Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com. So we have this and it's great. it's an amazing first iteration obviously for a real thing um i would ask at least five to ten follow-ups usually i add some images of it as well maybe i add an animation and at that point things are great but this is not enough um i add one more step to my workflow which is people really want to experience what this would look like from the user perspective and nowadays we have all these wonderful tools that go from text to video.

22:05And so the next step I would like to do is actually go to Flow. Flow is this app by Google labs. And then if you click on create with flow, you can type new project. And then here, you can literally just go back to perplexity if you want, or get your PRD and say, create a promotional clip for two, for a couple using a smart fridge that has these features. And I can paste. And then you can choose what model you want to have. So for example, what aspect ratio is, whether it's going to be fast, if it's going to have audio. I think I'm going to go with high quality just to see what can come out of it and then hit this and then we with movie magic we can make people wait a little less uh as this generates but i love veo it's such a great model that's an amazing model i've been using sora too at the same time i have the the app on my phone and obviously you know that generates in seconds which is amazing and you can do cameos and all that stuff but they they roll it out as part of a social network i don't know if you've tried it no abuse it it's interesting it's creepy at the same time but mostly interesting but yeah i had my airpods and i took a photo of it and i told sora i said hey tag merrily using these and make that an advert and it's so thin and it opens it up on the sky and hunts me saying a nice girl amazing times amazing times absolutely yeah my my kids find it very funny when i make um sora cameos of myself being like a like doing kung fu fighting or doing something really funny so it's quite it's quite entertaining i'm you know i think the social network aspect of it is a distribution method for the underlying API models.

24:19So I think it just shows sort of how our users what's possible with it. And probably then people get excited about commercial applications. But I think it's pretty, pretty cool. Look at this door ajar. They're really worried about that door being open. Also, the screen is inside the refrigerator. in one of these. What is going on? Okay. Yeah, let's play. I hope the video, I hope the audio is going to go through. Okay, let's see. Number one. Get instant local notifications, like when the door is ajar, ensuring your food stays fresh and secure. Get instant. Number one. So number one, again, for people who are not on YouTube and enjoying this high quality AI generated video there is a screen on the refrigerator this very attractive well-dressed couple opens up the refrigerator and there's another screen inside amazing all right number two let's see okay two screens again that's uh interesting that's interesting um there's no voice this one this one yeah cool music this one there is a screen inside basically the only thing you can see inside the refrigerator is a screen that says the door's open and then when you close the door the screen shows a big hit let's get fingers crossed for number three being the winner

25:56Marily Nika:hi let's see it says we have enough for the lasagna recipe right here perfect and i love that it's all stored locally no cloud needed it says we have enough i think we have a winner claire i i think so except if you watch it again i think the man has disappeared and it's replaced by a lady watch watch this

26:20perfect and i love that it's all stored locally no cloud needed

26:29well we don't need anymore we're good you know what but it is vision setting that's interesting um you know what i may do i may actually generate myself um a sora opening and Sora I think that would be a very interesting thing. I think we should do okay so we're going to contrast and compare how would I improve this I think you know my feedback on prompting here is it's really over indexed on this door is open use case so I would probably pull that from the prompt and I would also maybe as a good product manager one of my favorite parts to put in a PRD, this is in our default chat PRD. PRD is actually what's called a narrative, which is a story about an end user getting value from the product or being successful with the product.

27:19And I like to write those stories as part of PRDs because I think it forces you to take a very user-centric lens on a list of features. And so I might generate a narrative here and pick a hero story from the narrative as opposed to over-indexing so much on the features um but the quality is amazing the quality is amazing and this took what 30 minutes if we didn't comment and laugh it would have been like a 20 minute workflow so it's just yeah yeah exactly okay so what we're doing now just for folks that um again are just listening and not on video we are pulling up Sora you have created a cameo of yourself which is basically like an AI avatar of your face.

28:06Warning to people who are using Soras to create cameos, they really force you to continue to dress how you're dressed in your cameo. So I was wearing like very printed shirt when I did my cameo first cameo recording and now all my clothes in every cameo are crazy. But you're generating OpenAI Sora video. Did you use the exact same prompt or did you change it a little bit? very similar prompt but i decided to add someone else in my cameo and i looked at who enables who can do that and i'm adding mark cubain to our perfect i think we're gonna get i think we're gonna get a cost plus drugs advertisement because also i don't know if you know this uh folks that are listening about sora when you create your cameo you can ship it with custom instructions so you can say never generate this or always generate that i say always make me look good girl oh my god and i'm pretty sure mark cuban put in his like in every video make sure to put a cost plus drugs ad in it so i think we're gonna get a smart smart fridge video with a embedded advertisement for that mark you know i had added um make me have a pet pegasus with me at all times everything i do there is like a pet of pegasus with me um yeah let's see let's see how it goes um all right my cameo is ready first time i'm watching it it's me and mark cuban opening a smart fridge um all right let's see let's see how it goes i know what we're about to see.

29:50So this is the smart fridge you told me about. Yeah. Watch what happens when I wake it up. It looks like a normal fridge. Until it starts thinking. Oh, it already knows what's inside. Mediterranean quinoa bowl, Greek salad, pasta primavera. I mean, first of all, Greek salad. That was interesting. I'm Greek. I think it's... I know. You must have known.

30:09But, I mean, pretty impressive, right? It came out with a little dialogue and it's added to two people. I mean, this is magic. Look, PMs, we've had some giggles here, but let's just take a step back and talk about what we've done in basically 20 minutes. We have done full end-to-end user research using the wealth of information available in Reddit. We've come up with a highly defensible set of features, which we turned into a PRD. We turned that PRD into a prototype that then you could take into a product review and click through. and then just you know we're gonna work on our prompting a little bit and our cameos but just imagine pairing that with some sort of video generated visual or set of visuals that really just hammer home the value proposition of the thing that you're trying to build and that package which we just talked about we just did can actually be built in like 15 to 20 minutes without the chit chat and it's just something that is was never ever ever possible before and And so what I think you're showing is the way we do product has changed.

31:19The way we convince and influence our internal stakeholders has changed. The way we communicate both product value and functionality has changed. And if you use a combination of these tools, even if you hit some silly roadblocks, you've just like totally flipped product management in the process on its head and made it just much more compelling. It's just incredible how the role has changed of being a PM. You've got to be AI enhanced. And it's not like AI is taking over a role. If anything, PMs that use AI are the ones that are going to take over the role of people who don't use AI. So it's just so important to explore and adapt and see which tools fit to your workflow.

32:00Because, you know, my choices might not be the same as other people's choices, right? But I'm excited I get to share them with you. Great. So in addition to this kind of new world AI PM stuff, you have one other kind of power use case of another tool that we've seen occasionally on the show, but not too frequently. And I think your use case is really interesting. So you want to spin that up? Yeah, sounds good. So outside of my day job as an AI PM, I'm an AI educator and the founder of the AI product economy. And I have a bootcamp. It's AI product management bootcamp and certification. and people get to join us for six weeks and build their own product end-to-end.

32:41They actually launch a product by having an engineer attached to them. Now, we have a demo day, and that's the best part of the bootcamp. Everyone comes in, presents, they earn prizes, they pitch to VCs. And I wanted to add AI as a judge. And I thought about how I could do that long and hard. And I ended up using Notebook LM as a judge. And I want to show you what this looks like because it was super cool. It's super interesting. So on June 13, we had a demo day. And what I did is I recorded the audio of every single pitch. And I uploaded these separate files here. So this notebook actually has all these presentations.

33:24And then I went to the audio overview. And I added specific instructions to focus on for these AI hosts. And I said, okay, this is the demo day of Mary Lee's AI product management bootcamp. And I want you to select the top three apps based on these criteria. Number one, you know how innovative it was. Number two, impact. And number three, storytelling. and I want you to announce these three winners and then I click generate and it's phenomenal now it's actually generating the audio overview and you can imagine my boot camp at the end it's like 200 people really waiting to see what AI is going to say and we actually did a test with well we have live judges and then real people and then the ai and ai really chooses the best demos indeed so it does listen to all um the audio and it's just such an amazing use case everyone loves it i love this so much and it just opens my mind to a couple other use cases that um i've seen very commonly so demo days both for courses and for hack days or hack weeks could be really useful.

34:52I have been in so many sales enablement or sales kickoff meetings where AEs do pitch competitions. And what a fun way to add sort of like a third party analysis to pitch competitions and make those kind of fun. And so what I love about Notebook LM is you can do audio and multiple file in and then audio and multiple file out. And I think that's really, really fun. it's great and now you can actually do video overviews as well i haven't tried that for my bootcamp but that could be interesting as well all right so now there is a file that go generated on the right we can either play and hear the whole podcast presenting all the ideas and logging us through them or we can do a super cool thing where you can have this kind of interactive mode which is like an actual live radio podcast where you call in so let's do that because i really like this welcome back to the deep dive okay so you sent over this uh oh our listeners got something to share let's hear it hello we're actually in a rush can you please announce the three winners right now oh absolutely we hear you we could definitely cut to the chase but we do want to give just a little context for it that's fair we were just setting up the criteria for judging these fantastic projects and we are totally ready to announce the three winners the quality was so high across the board.

36:15These projects are tackling some huge problems like health anxiety and life administration. We grouped the pain points into three big areas. Health and wellness pain. The grind, which is time and life admin pain. And the third one is the knowledge and empowerment gap. Things like struggling with learning or bad leadership. We judge them on three things. Hey, yeah, what's up? Just tell me that we're nerds. You're taking too long. Oh, we completely understand the need for speed. We got ahead of ourselves. You are absolutely right. We apologize for the delay in getting to the point. We've got the three winners locked in and ready to go.