Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada

**Aparna Chennapragada** (0:00)
I have a cheesy Chrome extension, literally whenever I open a new tab, it just says, how can you use AI to do what you're going to do right now?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:06)
How do you see the future of product development being different?

**Aparna Chennapragada** (0:09)
If you're not prototyping and building, to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. It becomes even more important to have that editorial and taste making at the heart of it, because otherwise you just have a Frankenstein product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
There's this acronym that you taught me, NLX. What is that?

**Aparna Chennapragada** (0:26)
Natural Language Interface. NLX is the new UX. Often I hear product builders say, oh yeah, with AI, the model eats the products. That doesn't mean it's not designed. You and I are having a conversation. It's a podcast. I'll have another conversation at Microsoft, and that's a meeting. Conversations also have grammars, they have structures, they have UI elements, they're invisible. What are the new principles, new constructs in natural language as an interface?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
I just saw that Cursor hit 300 million ARR in two years. Interestingly, you guys were very well positioned to do really well in this AI coding tool space. You guys had Copilot, the first tool in the world at this stuff. So, head of everyone, what happened?

**Aparna Chennapragada** (1:06)
I would say...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:08)
Today, my guest is Aparna Chennapragada. Aparna is Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, where she oversees AI product strategy for their productivity tools and their work on agents. Previously, she was Chief Product Officer at Robinhood, Vice President at Google, where she worked on Google Lens, Search, Shopping, Augmented Reality, AI Assistant, and a lot more. She was also a long-time engineering leader at Akamai and on the board of eBay and Capital One. In our conversation, we chat about how working in B2B is like being Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits across two moving trucks, how she's operationalizing her team living in the future so that they're building towards where things are going, why people still need to learn to code, why the PM roll isn't going anywhere, why NLX is the new UX, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of products including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Aparna Chennapragada. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Pragmatic Institute, the trusted leader in product expertise. Pragmatic Institute helps product professionals turn ideas into impact through proven courses, workshops, and certifications designed for real world success. For over 30 years, they've trained more than 250,000 product leaders at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, equipping them with practical strategies to build and scale market-winning products. Pragmatic's full-time instructors each bring over 25 years of hands-on leadership experience, teaching strategies proven to deliver real world results. And it's not just about what you learn, it's also about who you learn it with. Completing a course connects you to an active community of over 40,000 product professionals. You'll engage in meaningful conversations, collaborate with peers and mentors, and gain direct instructor access to refine your strategies and stay ahead of trends. Get 20% off with code LENNY20 at pragmaticinstitute.com/lenny.
Aparna, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.