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Suhas Manangi

AMA: Airbnb Group Product Manager, Suhas Manangi on AI Product Management

June 7, 2022 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first Product Manager at a company establishing the function?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    First PM in a company! I have not done it, nor have anyone in close network to have a good understanding. My guess is that they have to establish right roles/responsibilities on what to carve out from the CEO. Perhaps focused on scaling up product for next million users (or take on next set of enteprise clients), or execution focsed. Do take this with a grain of salt as I am guessing based on when should a CEO hire their first PM.

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  2. What were your biggest challenges on transitioning from Product Manager to Group Product Manager?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    Being a good PM helps becoming a good manager of PMs, but is not a sufficient condition. I have seen below 3 as top challenges/opportunities unique to GPMs: Deligating, and trusting your direct report PMs to care about Customers as much as you do, if not more. Providing saftey net for PMs to fail fast, learn, and iterate, but as well the essential framework on lowering the cost of failure to ensure contribution to business impact. Knowing that PM skills are not hard to aquire, but takes time. Co ...Read More

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  3. Hard to notice that Product Management interviews require a ton of practice! Any resources for budding/ aspiring Product Managers ? Alternatively, any platforms that you are aware of, where folks can get Prod Mgmt experience by enrolling in projects?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    Product School, Try Exponent, and Product Allinace are good resources for PM interviews prep. 

    Later is a good question. Interesting idea. I don't know of any, but it so interesting that someone should be offering it. Perhaps they might have rolled into certification or cohort courses with live projects!

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  4. What are the key skills one should target to learn to grow in Trust & Risk , as a Product Manager ?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    Trust & Risk is a specific domain, so generalist PM would need to pivot to become a domain PM. This will require launching solutions across multiple years. Fraud evolves every year, but over 90% still remains the same decade long type. Payment Risk is a good stepping stone. Balacing security with usability (frictions to stop bad actors) which translates to doing a trade off between fraud loss and revenue loss is a new skill PMs have to develop. 

    2,371 Views
    1 request

  5. What are the key traits you look for in hiring AI Product Managers?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    Top 3 traits that makes a Good PM a Good AI PM: Understand foundational ML tech concepts and having used them to make product decisions. For eg: Statistical Regression, Causation vs Corelation, AUC, P/R, Features vs Labels, Feature distribution, Model Training, Model drift and auto training, etc Aware of potential bias and fiarness need in ML solutions they have launched in the past. Having used model observability and interpretability to explain the model output for their product corner cases. ...Read More

    3,644 Views
    6 requests

  6. Who is better suited for an AI product management role compared to a traditional pm role?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    5 years from now, likely there is going to be no difference between a Traditional PM and AI PM. AI is going to be used/present in all products. I see "Traditional PM role" as a foundational one to have, upon which one can grow to become a good AI PM. Good Traditional PM with aptitude for tech and data science is likely to do well as a good AI PM. Taking a Udemy course on basics of AI/ML, and applying to every day PM job will be a great start.

    2,751 Views
    4 requests

  7. What are the different types of AI Product Managers. Are we going to see a role that's similar to a Technical Product Manager focused towards the data science team?

    My question is more to understand if a PM needs to understand the AI concepts to be a successful AI PM?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    PMs are generally categorised into B2C (Consumer), B2B (Enterprise), Platform, and Product. PMs role is generally 2 of these 4 things. Within this one can also be generalist PM vs domain PM vs growth PM vs scale PM etc. AI PM is the same. One additional categorey can be about building ML Ops platform but I am not convinced one needs a PM for it, or can't be fit into one of the 4 categories described above.

    PMs working on Alexa can be AI PMs, but not necessarily TPMs.

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  8. What metrics do ML product teams look at to define success? Which do you find to be the most important?

    Suhas Manangi
    Suhas Manangi

    Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • 4y

    In addition to core business metrics that are improtant for a product success, below are the additional ones AI PMs obsess over to ensure the success upon launch doesn't regress over time.

    1. Precision and Recall
    2. False Positive
    3. Model quality monitoring metrics based on where is the risk to business (feature quality, score shift, re-training frequency, etc)
    1,631 Views
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