How AI is reshaping the product role | Oji and Ezinne Udezue

**Ezinne Udezue** (0:00)
It really irked me when in 2024, most people were saying AI is here, and now the PM job is gone. There were others who were saying AI is here, so now we can do the things we don't like to do with AI.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:10)
What do you find is most common across the companies that are succeeding?

**Ezinne Udezue** (0:14)
Companies that recognize that AI is not this magic thing that you're going to slather on to your product. The problems are still the problem.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
Something else that I think is also really important is getting super hands-on with the tech.

**Oji Udezue** (0:27)
I've written more code in the last one year than I have in the last 10 years because code is now essentially architecture and English. I'll pick a project that touches a lot of the things that I need to learn. One of the passion points I have is to automate my house. The idea is that I give the house eyes and ears. The coolest thing is I've specced out a super sensor. It will see people, hear them. It will sense humidity and temperature. And I'm building the hardware myself.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
Today, my guests are Oji and Ezine Udezue. They are married, both longtime product leaders with over 50 years of combined product experience. They're also the authors of a new book that I love called Building Rocketships, Product Management for High Growth Companies, which is a synthesis of their biggest product lessons over the course of their entire career. Oji was Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform and led product teams at Twitter, Atlassian and Microsoft. Ezinne was CPO at WP Engine and VPR Product at Procore. We chat about what is changing in the role of product management. Also, what is staying the same. We also get into the shift of PM to end ratios that AI is introducing, the five skills becoming most important in being a successful PM over the coming years, and the single biggest lesson that each of them have learned over the course of their careers. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including lovable, replet, bolt, N8N, linear, superhuman, dscript, whisperflow, gamma, perplexity, warp, granola, magic patterns, raycast, chap, PRD and mobbin. Head over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Oji and Ezinne Udezue. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years, and honestly, I can't imagine banking any other way at this point. I switched from Chase and holy moly, what a difference. Sending wires, tracking spend, giving people on my team access to move money around, so freaking easy. Where most traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use, Mercury is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience. And Mercury brings all the ways that you use money into a single product, including credit cards, invoicing, bill pay, reimbursements for your teammates, and capital. Whether you're a funded tech startup looking for ways to pay contractors and earn yield on your idle cash, or an agency that needs to invoice customers and keep them current, or an ecommerce brand that needs to stay on top of cash flow and access capital, Mercury can be tailored to help your business perform at its highest level. See what over 200,000 entrepreneurs love about Mercury. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a fintech, not a bank, banking services provided through Mercury's FDIC-insured partner banks. For more details, check out the show notes. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2 That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise-managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny.
Oji and Ezinne, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Ezinne Udezue** (4:22)
Thank you for having us Lenny.