How to Break into AI Product Management | Marily Nika (Google)
A crash course on AI algorithms and how to break into and succeed as an AI PM
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Marily Nika.
Marily got her PhD in machine learning and spent 12 years building AI products at Meta and Google. She has also taught 5,000+ students through her highly-rated AI newsletter and course and given talks at TED, Harvard, and more.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Marily and I talked about:
(00:00) How anyone can be an AI PM
(01:51) A crash course on AI algorithms and applications
(06:38) Traits that the best AI PMs have in common
(09:53) How to get leadership buy-in for AI products
(11:37) A day in the life as an AI PM
(14:51) How to break into AI product management
(20:25) How to avoid the retention problem for AI products
Read on for the interview takeaways.
A crash course on AI algorithms
Let's start with a quick explainer of some core AI concepts. What's your definition of AI, and how is it different from machine learning?
AI is about giving a computer intelligence to think and behave like a person.
Here’s a market map that shows all the different types of AI algorithms and applications. Let’s break it down:
Supervised learning
Supervised learning is like teaching an eager student with millions of examples. You show the computer lots of labeled data, and it learns to recognize patterns.
Classification: This is the AI's way of sorting things into discrete categories. Example: Using millions of images to learn to distinguish cats from dogs.
Regression: Predicting continuous values rather than categories given inputs. Example: Predicting a house’s sale price based on square feet, location, and more.
Unsupervised learning
Unsupervised learning is about finding patterns in data without being told what to look for. It's like giving a child a box of LEGOs and seeing what they build.