AI and product management | Marily Nika (Meta, Google)

**Marily Nika** (0:00)
There is something called the Shining Object Trap, and I'm always telling people, hey, don't do AI for the sake of doing AI.
Make sure there is a problem there. Make sure there is a pain point that needs to be solved in a smart way. Once you have identified what that problem is and what that very, very high-level solution is, then reach out and try to figure out how to actually implement it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:27)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Marily Nika. Marily teaches the most popular course on Maven, on AI and product management. She's currently product lead at Meta, focusing on metaverse, avatars and identity. Prior to Meta, she was at Google for over eight years, working on Google Glass, computer vision and machine learning around speech recognition. In our conversation, we touch on what PMs should be paying attention to when it comes to what's happening in AI. We talk about a bunch of resources that will help you get started in the world of AI. How AI tools available today can already help you do your job better as a PM. We also get relatively technical into what exactly is a model, how our model is trained, all kinds of fun stuff like that. Enjoy this conversation with Marily Nika after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Marily, welcome to the podcast.
Hello.

**Marily Nika** (3:09)
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:11)
It's very much my pleasure.
We've interacted a little bit on Twitter. We've never actually talked before just right now. I've seen your course just kind of all over the place, your course on AI and PM. And so I just thought it'd be really fun to have you on and help us all understand what the hell is happening in AI and especially AI on product. So thanks again for being here.

**Marily Nika** (3:33)
Yes, thank you. I'm really excited.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:36)
I would love your help as a former full-time PM slash everyone listening that is a current PM to help us understand what is going on with AI and product. Tech in general and tools in general move really fast. If you're trying to pay attention to what's happening, it's really hard to stay up to date on where things are going. And it feels especially hard in AI. It feels like there's just something coming out every day.
And so I have a bunch of questions along these lines. The first is just like what media do you pay attention to to stay on top of what's happening and what's new and what's interesting in the world of AI and machine learning?

**Marily Nika** (4:11)
As you know very well, subscribing to newsletters is something that's really, really impactful. And of course, I subscribe to your newsletter. But I am a big, big, big fan of the download by MIT Ecology Review or TLDR.
And they're not necessarily AI-centric, but what I'm advocating for and what I'm telling people is that in the future everything will be AI by default. So even if you have something that's technology-focused, you will see a lot of AI starting to get sprinkled in there.