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Unleashing the AI Native Powerhouse: Building the Future of Product Teams 🚀
Hello, tech enthusiasts and product pioneers! It’s fantastic to be back at Product School New York, a place that feels like home after hosting our first conference here seven years ago. The journey has been incredible, and we’re just getting started! Today, I’m beyond excited to share some monumental news: the launch of Product Partners, our new AI consulting firm dedicated to empowering product teams to drive successful AI transformation.
From Training to Transformation: The Evolution of Product School 💡
Many of you might have noticed the distinct logos of Product School and Product Partners. Let me clarify this natural evolution. I founded Product School 12 years ago in Silicon Valley, and it has since become the undisputed global leader in AI training for builders. While Product School continues to empower individuals with cutting-edge AI education, Product Partners is our dedicated arm for assisting entire product teams within large enterprises. We’re bridging the gap between strategy and tangible implementation, all while upholding our shared mission: to help companies build better products. And yes, I’ll be leading both companies as CEO. Rest assured, we’ll continue hosting Product School conferences three times a year in New York, San Francisco, and London, fostering this vibrant product leadership community.
Why Product Partners? Rethinking AI Transformation 🛠️
Product Partners isn’t your average consulting firm. I felt compelled to launch this venture because the traditional consulting model, especially for AI transformation, is fundamentally flawed. Many firms deliver beautiful strategy decks and implementation plans that rarely see the light of day beyond a PowerPoint presentation. They often depart before the real work begins.
Here’s how we’re different:
- We’re Builders, Not Just Strategists: We embed our AI product leaders and forward-deployed engineers directly alongside your team to actually build. Our deliverable isn’t just a deck; it’s a working AI operating model and a team equipped to harness it.
- Exclusive Focus on Product Teams: We concentrate on product managers, designers, and engineers, understanding the unique nuances of these roles. This specialized approach sets us apart from more generalist consulting firms.
- Unrivaled Product Expertise: With over 12 years of experience, we’ve upskilled more than 1,400 product teams globally and cultivated the largest community for product professionals, boasting over 2 million members.
The AI Native Advantage: What the Top 1% Are Doing Right 🎯
Today, we’re diving deep into what makes the top AI-native product teams thrive. What does “AI native” truly mean? It’s a team that defaults to AI as the primary way to get work done. This doesn’t mean AI operates in a vacuum; it means AI is the starting point, with humans stepping in for judgment, creativity, accountability, or when AI reaches its limits. This leads to dramatically more efficient teams, freeing up humans for high-leverage work.
The winners in this space include executives from industry giants like Figma, Slack, Shopify, Robinhood, Rippling, and Vercel. It’s crucial to note that these companies weren’t born AI-native; they transformed rapidly and at scale. We’ve been fortunate to learn from these leaders through their contributions to Product School, and we bring that invaluable access to our clients.
Navigating the “Messy Middle” of AI Transformation 🚧
The path to becoming AI-native isn’t a straight exponential curve. There’s a significant, often daunting, “messy middle.” While the top 1% are thriving, over 80% of product teams are still stuck in Level 1. They have CEO buy-in and some AI tools, perhaps even seeing individual productivity gains. However, these gains often don’t translate into meaningful business outcomes.
This “messy middle” can feel like a false summit. Individual productivity with AI can feel empowering, but this often declines when scaling to team collaboration. The longer teams remain on this false summit, the greater the opportunity cost.
The AI Operating Model: The Engine of Transformation ⚙️
So, how do those top 1% navigate the messy middle? They build a robust AI operating model. This is the engine that executes their AI strategy, bridging the gap between strategy and tangible execution, and ultimately driving ROI.
An AI operating model comprises two core components:
- The System: This is your shared workspace, preloaded with the right agents, tool integrations, company data, relevant content, guardrails, and workflows. It allows anyone to start building immediately without complex individual setups.
- People: This encompasses your org design, training, and change management. It’s about how your team is structured, the skills they need, their alignment, and their incentives, all working in tandem to drive successful change.
You need both the system as the engine and the people as the driver to work in perfect harmony.
Key Initiatives for AI-Native Teams: People and Systems 🌱
Let’s explore specific initiatives that AI-native companies execute:
People-Centric Initiatives 👨💻
- Product Managers as Builders: The term “builder” is becoming prevalent, signifying individuals capable of multiple roles. Embrace this evolution to stay ahead!
- From Two-Pizza to Two-Slice Pods: The ideal team size is shrinking. With AI agents, smaller, highly focused pods can achieve greater impact.
- People Managers as Player-Coaches: Managers are increasingly expected to build alongside their teams. A successful player-coach balances production, domain expertise, leadership, and management.
- AI Training: This is paramount! We focus on crucial AI skills like AI product strategy, prompt coding, agent orchestration, AI evals, product sense, and context engineering. Our own company updates content every few months to stay agile.
System-Centric Initiatives 🌐
- Cross-Functional AI Teams: A small, dedicated AI transformation team, partnering with “functional champions” (early AI believers), drives implementation, enablement, and change management across the organization.
- SaaS Consolidation: Companies can consolidate up to 66% of their tools. This involves identifying underused tools, replacing them with AI-native solutions with broader scope and better integrations, or building in-house solutions where feasible. The goal is tighter integration between tools like Jira, Linear, Slack, and Salesforce.
- Agents with Team-Level Visibility: Agents integrated into shared workspaces (like Slack) allow entire teams to interact seamlessly, pre-configured with tools, data, and workflows. This democratizes AI access and boosts adoption.
- Shipping Democratization: The traditional PDLC and SDLC are converging. With AI, product managers and designers can interact with requirements and wireframes, with agents drafting pull requests, collapsing development cycles and empowering everyone to be a builder. Human oversight remains critical for code review and security.
Measuring Real Business Outcomes ✨
While AI adoption and token usage can be misleading metrics, the true measure of success lies in classic business outcomes:
- Shipping Velocity: Up to 5x increase in development speed.
- Customer Satisfaction: 40% higher feature adoption and customer retention for AI features.
- Lower Cost: Optimized OPEX with smaller, high-impact teams.
Product School has a proven track record of upskilling thousands of product teams. Now, with Product Partners, we offer an end-to-end solution including implementation services. We partner with leading AI tools like Repl-it, OpenAI, Lovable, Gamma, Bolt, Linear, and Granola. We are tool-agnostic, meaning we can work with your existing stack, including Microsoft Copilot. Our goal is to help you build the right AI operating model, not to push specific tools.
Your AI Transformation Starts Now: Free AI Assessment 🎁
To celebrate the launch of Product Partners, we’re offering a free AI assessment for qualifying companies. This comprehensive assessment, valued at over $20,000, is the first step in any AI transformation. In just two weeks, we’ll provide a clear picture of your highest-value AI opportunities and a realistic, actionable plan to build your next-generation AI operating model.
Visit productpartners.com/ai and mention “Product Con New York” to apply.
Let’s build the future of product teams, together!