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Navigating the AI Tsunami: How Perk’s CPO Nikita Miller is Building for the Future 🚀💡
The tech world often feels like a rollercoaster, especially when a new wave of innovation hits. Right now, AI is that wave, and it’s bringing a mix of panic and unparalleled opportunity. Nikita Miller, CPO at Perk, a leading travel and spend management platform, recently shared her “spicy takes” on how product leaders can not only survive but thrive in this transformative era.
The AI Revolution: A New Dawn for Product Development 🌅
Nikita kicked off by acknowledging the widespread “panic” surrounding new technologies like AI. While “hysteria” might be a stretch, the sentiment is justified. We’re experiencing a shift that impacts what we build, how we build it, what we measure, and how we monetize. For product leaders, the challenge lies in adapting in real-time while growing successful businesses.
But here’s the encouraging news: Nikita believes we already possess many of the tools and leadership skills needed to navigate this transformation with more calm. It’s about leveraging existing strengths and embracing new approaches.
Perk’s Blueprint: Building a Multi-Product Powerhouse with “Builders” 🛠️
Perk, a company with approximately 2,000 people and 450 dedicated “builders” (encompassing product, design, engineering, and data teams), has been around for 10 years. They started in travel and have rapidly expanded, launching a comprehensive spend management platform (cards, expenses, invoices, reconciliation) and an events platform in the last year.
Nikita highlighted a crucial lesson from history: companies that fail to adapt quickly to new technologies often fall behind. At Perk, they are actively ensuring they don’t repeat this pattern, even with a tech stack that might be 7 to 10 years old in some areas.
The Power of Small, Focused Teams 🎯
One significant change at Perk involves adopting smaller, highly focused teams that own specific problem areas. Nikita reflected on a time when the word “rebuild” caused universal panic. Now, with the advent of AI code generation tools, it’s a different story. We can actually start rebuilding components in parallel, a strategy product leaders with strong conviction are already leveraging to get ahead.
Empowering Product Managers in the AI Age ✨
The idea of “rebuilding” can be daunting, especially for those impacted by decisions they didn’t make. Nikita emphasized the multi-fold approach at Perk for their “builder” organization:
- Leader’s Responsibility: Leaders must provide the training, tools, and space for teams to learn and apply these new technologies.
- PM Efficiency: AI tools can significantly boost a PM’s efficiency. For instance, AI can summarize user research, assist with writing PRDs, and accelerate prototyping.
- The Unchanging Core of Product: Despite these powerful tools, the core job of a product manager remains: to lead with a strong point of view, to lead with conviction, and to decide which problems to solve and why it’s important to solve them now. AI accelerates these tasks, but it doesn’t replace the fundamental human insight and leadership required to truly understand and solve user problems.
Nikita pointed to areas like ERP integrations, where AI can build APIs and connectors almost immediately and at a much lower cost, dramatically accelerating development cycles.
What Does “Builder” Really Mean? 👷♀️👷♂️
When asked about the term “builder” at Perk’s scale, Nikita explained it with conviction: “We’re in the business of creating… It’s about having the imagination… to identify a problem, a potential solution, and actually get it into the hands of users.”
In the AI age, product management (and even go-to-market teams) have an incredible opportunity to create value in unprecedented ways. This “builder” mindset, embracing AI-native concepts, means fostering smaller teams with hybrid roles that can ship, design, and do “whatever it takes” to get something done.
Radical Urgency: Speed to Learning and Strategic Trade-offs ⚡
Perk is doing a lot to coordinate these smaller, AI-native teams. Nikita noted that while everyone is still figuring it out, the focus is on enabling teams with the right tools and the license to experiment. Sometimes, this means slowing down a little bit (“slow is smooth, smooth is fast”) to get everyone on board before accelerating. For example, Perk’s events platform was built by a small, tightly focused incubation team in months, a process that traditionally would have taken years.
The Art of Accelerating Deadlines ⏱️
Nikita also discussed “radical urgency,” emphasizing that speed to learning is paramount. This means getting products into users’ hands as quickly as possible to gather feedback. She shared a compelling example: Perk’s new spend product, initially slated for a January launch, was pulled forward to November.
This accelerated timeline required significant trade-offs:
- Scope Reduction: The product launched without every single planned feature.
- Focused Teams: Certain team members were “quarantined” to focus solely on the launch, while others with complementary skills picked up different tasks.
- Company-Wide Conviction: The entire company rallied around the milestone, with leadership, IC engineers, product designers, and product marketing all showing up for the launch day. This collective conviction transformed the organizational sentiment.
From Rebrand to Reculture: Perk’s Multi-Product Evolution 🌐
Nikita joined Perk 7 months ago, after the company had already been around for 10 years. She attributes much of Perk’s successful multi-product transformation to the team’s amazing drive and a foundational decision made before she arrived: a significant rebrand from TravelPerk to simply Perk. This wasn’t just a cosmetic change; it was a strategic move to position the company for a future as an end-to-end multi-product platform encompassing travel, spend, expenses, cards, and events.
This vision was further realized through the acquisition of Yokoy, a spend product. Instead of treating it as a side project, Perk integrated it as a core part of the platform with radical urgency, merging teams from both companies to create cohesive units focused on specific product areas.
This integration extended beyond technology; it was a “reculture” effort. Perk fosters a strong culture of “builders,” emphasizing commitment to customers and building a company designed to last for 100 years. They prioritize career growth, meaningful technology work, and empower even junior team members with significant scope and ownership.
The CPO as a Builder: Nikita’s Personal Prioritization 🧭
As CPO, Nikita’s role is to orchestrate this complex transformation. She dedicates her time to:
- Deep Understanding: Grasping the product and operational nuances.
- Future-Proofing: Strategically evolving the organizational structure, moving towards fewer managers and more IC (Individual Contributor) and coaching leaders who are closer to the problem and the technology.
- Enabling Experimentation: Overcoming resistance to new technologies like AI by creating opportunities for teams to experiment and play, thereby improving skills and building processes.
- Staying Close to Users: This is Nikita’s “not-so-spicy take” but a fundamental truth. The core need to know your users deeply, understand their problems, and constantly engage with them has not changed. New tools simply empower us to know them even better, eliminating “shadow work” and solving real problems to help businesses grow.
Nikita Miller’s insights offer a masterclass on how to embrace the current tech revolution. By fostering a “builder” mindset, empowering teams with new tools, embracing radical urgency, and never losing sight of the customer, companies can not only navigate the AI tsunami but ride its wave to unprecedented success.