AMA: GitLab VP, Product, Mike Flouton on AI Product Management

First and foremost, there are certain traits I value in any PM and I'd say these are the basic non-negotiables. Intelligence. You can't coach height in basketball and you can't coach raw smarts in PM Curiosity. Great PMs ask a lot of questions. Strong customer focus. You love talking to customers and learning. No jerks. I want humble, low ego people who enjoy finding out they're wrong because it means they learned something new. For an AI hire, I touched on this in a few other questions but I wa ...Read More

I've often said that PM is misunderstood as a relatively junior and technical job. It's actually best when it's treated as a strategic function, and being technical is a bonus but not necessarily the be all end all. I do think AI PM might be a bit of an exception to the last piece. You need to understand the enabling technology a bit better as an AI PM than as a PM in other domains. So I'd say you need to have the desire an ability to get into the weeds a bit. To be clear, the intent here is in ...Read More

I think this is hard to say, but if I had to guess I think this does evolve into a specialized function. At Barracuda we had a platform PM function and I was lucky enough to work with a phenomenal PM who owned threat detection efficacy. He interfaced with our data scientists and ML engineers on a daily basis, and had to be very comfortable with concepts like precision and recall, model retraining, model ops, etc. That said, the LLM cloud providers have made it so easy to consume third party mode ...Read More

Let me preface this by defining a product team as PM, UX and Engineering. I'd suggest there are at least two sets of metrics you should be looking at. First and foremost, don't forget you're here to solve a customer problem. Judge success according in how the capability is driving that specific outcome just like you would any other product. That could be the time it takes a customer to do a task, number of phishing attacks detected, sales volume of your sellers on a marketplace or rides taken by ...Read More

For sure. There are certain things AI does really well, and others that humans or traditional deterministic algorithms do better. That sounds obvious, but there's some nuance here that users often miss. At Barracuda, we were the first major email security vendor to market with an AI based approach to stopping phishing and impersonation attacks. We invested a tremendous amount of time training the models to spot attacks that traditional solutions missed. We didn't train those models to catch run ...Read More