Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada

A cheesy Chrome extension literally whenever I open a new tab, it just says, How can you use AI to do what you're going to do right now? How do you see the future of product development being different? If you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. It becomes even more important to have that editorial and taste making at the heart of it because otherwise you just have uh Frankenstein product. There's this acronym that you taught me, N L X. What is that? Natural language interface and LX is the new UX. Often I hear uh product builders say, Oh yeah, with AI, like the model eats the product. That doesn't mean it's not designed. You and I are having a conversation, it's a podcast. I'll have another conversation at Microsoft, and that's a meeting. Conversations also have grammars, they have structures. They have UI elements. They're invisible. What are the new principles, new constructs in natural language as a interface? I just saw that Cursor hit 300 million ARR in two years. Interestingly, you guys were very well positioned to do really well in this AI coding tool space, you guys said. Copilot, the first tool in the world at this stuff. So ahead of everyone, what happened?

Today my guest is Aparna Shine Pragada. Aparna is Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, where she oversees AI product strategy for their productivity tools and their work on agents. Previously she was Chief Product Officer at Robin Hood, Vice President at Google, where she worked on Google Lens, search, shopping, augmented reality, AI assistant, and a lot more. She was also a longtime engineering leader at Akamai and on the board of eBay and Capital One. In our conversation, we chat about how working in B2B is like being Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits across two moving trucks, how she's operationalizing her team living in the future so that they're building towards where things are going, why people still need to learn to code, why the PM roll isn't going anywhere, why NLX is the new UX, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of products, including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, and Granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that I bring you a parta Shatapragada. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation A B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments.

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