The Skip Podcast

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Find The Skip

• Website

• Substack

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• Google's Associate Product Manager (APM) Program

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Don't forget to subscribe to The Skip to hear me coach you through timely career lessons. Access exclusive sessions from 100+ top product leaders at skip.coach. If you're interested in joining me on a future call, send me a note on LinkedIn, Threads, or Twitter. You can also email me at nikhyl@skip.community

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

Inside Gemini: How Google Runs Product for Its Model Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Tulsee Doshi, who leads product for Google's Gemini models, joins me for the fourth conversation in the "Inside PM" series. Tulsee has spent eleven years at Google, moving through Search and YouTube before taking on product for the Gemini family and Google's video, image, and audio models. We get into how her team avoids building a boring product, why their blend of platform work and lab work feels like a new kind of product management, and what she looks for in the PMs she thinks will thrive in that environment.

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Key topics:

• Why customer requests get weighed against research the customers can't see

• Why stack-ranking every request would leave you with a boring product

• The 20 prompts trick for turning a vague ask into a great eval

• How to know a model is ready to ship without waiting a year

• Reading a model's "vibes," and why Simon Tokumine's gut check carries real weight

• Prototyping features that don't work yet on purpose

• Why "technical" on her team means thorough, not a computer science degree

• The Nano Banana moment that "fuels all of the other chaos"

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

03:28 Welcoming Tulsee Doshi to break down how Google builds Gemini

04:10 Eleven years at Google, from Search and YouTube to leading Gemini

06:20 Why the model team works like an engine maker for a garage of cars

08:40 Why stack-ranking every request would produce "a boring product"

11:25 "Nothing can replace a great eval": evals as the new PRD

14:36 The "20 prompts" trick for turning a vague ask into a great eval

18:44 How to know a model is ready to ship without waiting a year

22:40 "Vibes": why Simon Tokumine's gut check on a model carries real weight

27:20 Why speed beats trying to build the perfect product today

29:35 Prototyping features that "don't quite work yet," on purpose

31:05 The 60/20/20 rule for building against a model that keeps improving

33:58 The five traits she looks for in a research PM

40:35 Why "technical" on her team means thorough, not a CS degree

44:25 How AI tools are changing what Google's PMs do all day

48:30 Why Google's I/O still matters as a forcing function

52:50 The vibe inside Gemini right now: hype and chaos at once

55:20 What she'd change running product outside a model lab

57:15 The Nano Banana moment that "fuels all of the other chaos"

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Brought to you by:

• Chargebee—Billing and monetization infrastructure for the AI era

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Referenced:

• Antigravity

• Gemini

• Gemini Deep Research

• Gemini Notebook

• Gmail

• Google

• Google Cloud

• Inside PM at Meta

• Inside PM at Meta 2

• Inside PM at Stripe

• Inside PM at Waymo

• Nano Banana

• Simon Tokumine

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Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Tulsee:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Join The Skip:

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Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

• How Meta Is Reinventing Product Management

–

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

What the Past Year Taught Meta Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Jagjit Chawla, the VP who runs Facebook's Feed and Reels, returns to see how his predictions from our June conversation have landed. Back in the spring, he described Meta as a company racing to turn PMs into builders. Since then, Meta has become a smaller, flatter company. We get into how that version of Meta, with fewer PMs and layers, pulled in record revenues with its smallest team in years.

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Key topics:

• A smaller, flatter Meta building more, not less

• Why "the glory days of being a PM in big tech are still ahead of us"

• Pointing AI agents at Meta's old codebase to scaffold a new app in weeks

• The new IC9 and IC10 ladder

• Why design and data science aren't shrinking

• Why Jagjit reversed his opinion on PMs shipping production code

• Explaining AI evals using bath towels

• The interview question that screens for "AI PM" judgment

• Why he isn't worried about the industry's next hiring swing

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

02:02 A return visit to see how Meta's AI predictions landed

03:28 Facebook's super-app problem

07:58 Pointing AI agents at Meta's old codebase to scaffold a new app in weeks

11:15 Where Bolt, Lovable, and Replit still can't compete

13:59 Why the new apps aren't cannibalizing Facebook

18:01 Why PMs get the first mile and designers get the last

23:07 Why Jagjit reversed his opinion on PMs shipping production code

24:37 How homegrown AI habits became company-wide baseline tools

29:06 Why "the glory days of being a PM in big tech are still ahead of us"

31:38 "Facebook is like the world's largest Jenga tower"

37:52 The test for converting a manager back into an IC

39:48 The new IC9 and IC10 ladder 42:35 Explaining AI evals using bath towels

46:26 How to coach someone into becoming an "AI PM"

49:37 Should you do a tour of duty at big tech?

53:44 Why Jagjit isn't worried about the industry's next hiring swing

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Brought to you by:

• Jira—Do the right work with Jira

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Referenced:

• Bolt

• Facebook

• Facebook Creator Studio

• Forum, a Facebook app

• Google

• Instagram

• Instagram Edits

• Lovable

• Messenger

• Meta

• Meta's Rotational Programs

• Replit

• Seller, a Facebook app

• Threads

• TikTok

• WhatsApp

• YouTube

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Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Jagjit:

• LinkedIn

–

Join The Skip:

–

Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Edwin Markham's poem on preparedness

–

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

To Invent Waymo, They Had to Reinvent PM Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo's CPO, joins me for the third conversation in the "Inside PM" series. Saswat joined Waymo in 2016, back when it was still Google's self-driving car project and the entire product team was fewer than five people, and has spent all ten years since on the same product. In this episode, we discuss how his product org had to invent its own way of measuring good when there was no dashboard to check, why he hires and promotes for competence, courage, and compassion, and what it takes to be an executive builder at Waymo.

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Key topics:

• Cutting severe injuries "sixteen-fold"

• Why measuring good driving became its own product, staffed by dedicated eval PMs

• Why specifying what good looks like is AI's hardest problem

• Injecting rain and fog into simulated scenes instead of waiting a decade for the real thing

• The living room pitch to Waymo's first driverless riders

• Avoiding "Brownian motion": channeling vision into tracks a team can actually execute

• Spotting curiosity and grit in candidates in the age of AI

• Training to the point of failure

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

03:25 Joining Google's self-driving car project before it was Waymo

07:15 Why "feeling the pain" of failures builds real product leadership

08:56 Motivating a team a decade away from a real product

14:38 Was there ever a moment you thought this wouldn't work

16:15 Why measuring "good" driving became its own product, staffed by dedicated eval PMs

18:55 The living room pitch to Waymo's first driverless riders

21:11 Confronting the 40,000 deaths US roads accept every year

23:46 Cutting severe injuries "sixteen-fold"

27:59 Training to the point of failure

33:27 Spotting curiosity and grit in candidates in the age of AI

37:14 Integrity, and sleeping at night over what you approved

41:02 A tree of metrics, not a union list of 37 dashboards

47:14 Competence, courage, and compassion: what builds followership

53:53 What AI has democratized for product discovery and research

57:41 Why specifying "what good looks like" is AI's hardest problem

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Brought to you by:

• Firecrawl—the web data API for AI agents. Use code THESKIP for 10K free credits

• Jira—Do the right work with Jira

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Referenced:

• AMD

• Google X

• Inside PM at Meta

• Inside PM at Stripe

• MMLU

• NASA

• Piccadilly Circus

• Transformers

• Waymo

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Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Saswat:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Join The Skip:

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Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

Lessons From Three Product Leaders Living in the Future Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

This is the next episode in a series on what product management becomes when the AI hype meets real constraints. I sat down with three CPOs living about a year ahead of the rest of us: Sharmeen Chapp, Midjourney's first-ever product hire; Jiaona Zhang (JZ), CPO at Laurel; and Henrik Berggren, who runs product and design at Mutiny. Their teams are tiny on purpose, yet these are companies with years of history, paying customers, and enterprise contracts—not the frictionless blank slates that "AI-native" suggests. We get into who should actually be building, how customer signal should move through a company, and how each of them installed an AI-first operating system without tipping into theater.

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Key topics:

• What never changes in PM

• Laurel's "captain" model: everyone is a builder

• Zoning the codebase like a garden so everyone can build safely

• Making the whole company understand the customer

• The AI Operations team: pairing hackers with leaders

• Treating the AI transformation as a product, with employees as the users

• Moving at "Cheetah speed": sprint when the tools jump, then rest

• Current PMs are managing a fleet, not an empire

• Why the strongest leaders are going hands-on now

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:30) Meet the three CPOs: Midjourney, Laurel, Mutiny

(08:45) Laurel's "captain" model: everyone is a builder

(13:03) Zoning the codebase like a garden

(17:19) Governing change when anyone can ship to production

(18:23) Sharmeen at Midjourney: installing product judgment

(21:53) Henrik on finding the line by stepping over it

(24:57) A Slack channel that pings on every meaningful action

(26:59) Running AI in public so skeptics convert

(29:29) The AI Operations team: pairing hackers with leaders

(32:15) Incentives, public systems, and evergreen context

(36:46) Managing context overload with distributed PM

(39:45) A user interview to shareable clips in 45 minutes

(45:16) First-party vs. third-party: what to build, what to buy

(47:34) The token-maximization "blip" and raising the floor

(49:31) Managing a fleet, not an empire

(53:40) "Cheetah speed": sprint when the tools jump, then rest

(56:37) Why the strongest leaders are going hands-on now

(57:29) Does the pendulum swing back to old-school PM?

(59:48) What never changes: business, customer, orchestration

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Brought to you by:

• Firecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web data

• Use code THESKIP for 10K free credits

–

Referenced:

• Anthropic

• Cursor

• Devin

• Dropbox

• Dust

• GitHub

• Google Drive

• Grain

• Granola

• Laurel

• Meta

• Midjourney

• Mutiny

• Notion

• Procter & Gamble

• Slack

• Stripe

• Twitch

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Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Sharmeen:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find JZ:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Henrik:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Join The Skip:

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Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

Inside PM at Stripe: What Comes After "Become a Builder"? Jul 22, 2026

Show notes

Kevin Yien is the Head of Product for Merchant Experiences at Stripe. Before that he led Product at Mutiny and Square. In this episode, Kevin and I discuss how to keep AI from becoming theater, why a PM shipping to production can be a red flag, and why AI is pulling product management back to its fundamentals of strategy, opinion, and judgment.

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Key topics:

• Why "PM is dead" is the wrong frame, and every function is "shifting left"

• The three PM archetypes, and how zero-to-one changed most

"Killing your darlings" and keeping the blast radius small

• From a personal knowledge corpus to a shared "team brain"

• The "floors and ceilings" of a shared knowledge base

• Why building 10 prototypes no one sees is just theater

• Writing as "clarity at scale," and why LLMs still can't do it

• Why vibe coding is a wasted learning opportunity unless you interrogate it

• The "eight and 80 test" for joy, pace, and hard family seasons

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

03:40 What Kevin owns across Stripe's merchant experiences

05:24 Stop asking which role dies, focus on the outcomes

08:05 The three PM archetypes, and why zero-to-one changed most

10:50 Kill your darlings: keeping the blast radius small

14:30 The PM as the "arbiter of context"

17:55 Floors and ceilings of a shared "team brain"

20:43 "Does this obsolete me?" The PM layoff fear

22:50 Are wikis and knowledge artifacts back?

28:42 How Stripe incentivizes sharing: carrots over sticks

31:35 The pet peeve: 10 prototypes, zero users

35:20 Onboarding as a product: the first 100 days

38:16 Writing as "clarity at scale," and why LLMs still can't do it

45:35 The "piano scales" for a PM: forming an opinion

48:37 Do engineering-background PMs still win?

52:30 Are product, design, and engineering roles merging?

55:30 Joy, pace, and the "eight and 80 test"

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Brought to you by:

• Asana—The operating system for human agent teams

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Referenced:

• Andrej Karpathy

• Block

• Claude Code

• Contentful

• Dovetail

• GitHub

• Kevin on Lenny's Podcast

• Lindy effect

• Lovable

• Obsidian

• Patrick Collison

• Stripe

• v0

• Writer

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Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Kevin:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

• Website

–

Join The Skip:

–

Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

Builder-Executives Are Getting Paid Like Pro Athletes Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

Product pay is detaching from the old bands the way it did for AI researchers. In the past few weeks I've seen three offers go out to product executives at $10 million a year, and while almost nobody gets that number, it pulls the whole field up. The builder-executive who can build with modern tools and operate at scale now commands two to three times what the same profile did a year ago. In this episode, my co-host Carly Malatskey and I walk three real career decisions end to end: a leader worried the AI bubble will pop and playing it too safe, a consultant trying to become a product builder, and an elite executive trying to match joy, purpose, and income in one role. The throughline is the "Skip" question: not how to maximize today's job, but which next move opens the path to elite a few years out.

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Key topics:

• Why builder-executive pay detached from the bands

• The three questions every career-maximizer should ask themselves

• Thinking of constraints as a risk budget

• Why staying current beats the biggest job at the best company

• How to test whether a company is actually "current" from the outside

• Why top-of-market pay comes with strings, and how to sequence what you optimize for

• The mercenary vs. missionary approach

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:39) The 100-day shift: builder execs and $10M offers

(04:04) Case 1, Angie: two safe offers and an AI-bubble fear(05:04) Optimizing to be elite, or just to be prudent?

(06:58) Why a failed hot startup can leave you better off

(10:58) Thinking about what your next role sets up, not just the salary

(15:40) Case 2, Gary: Series A vs. Fortune 20

(16:36) Working backward from the PE operating-partner dream

(18:58) The biggest job at the most current company, not the best

(22:40) How to tell if a company is actually "current"

(25:26) Case 3, Monica: elite, comfortable, and chasing joy

(26:57) One more operating role, then founding

(29:33) Choosing mercenary over missionary

(35:26) Would the right company help her find a co-founder

(37:18) The three questions that shape modern career advice

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Brought to you by:

Asana—The operating system for human agent teams

–

Referenced:

• Anthropic

• Meta

• Microsoft

• OpenAI

• Stripe

–

Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

–

Where to find Carly:

• LinkedIn

–

Join The Skip:

–

Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

–

Don't forget to subscribe to The Skip to hear me coach you through timely career lessons. Access exclusive sessions from 100+ top product leaders at skip.coach. If you’re interested in joining me on a future call, send me a note on LinkedIn, Threads, or Twitter. You can also email me at nikhyl@skip.community

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

How Meta Is Reinventing Product Management Jun 24, 2026

Show notes

Meta is one of the biggest dinosaurs in the park, yet in a matter of months it rebuilt PM top to bottom, and almost none of it was bought. My guest is Jagjit Chawla, a VP of Product at Meta who’s running a growing share of the Facebook app: Feed, Reels, and more recently Search. I worked alongside Jagjit for nearly ten years across Google, Credit Karma, and Meta, and almost nothing is as I remember it. These systems were built by the teams themselves, sometimes in a single evening, on tools you already have. Jagjit walks me through how a product org of a few thousand people learned to move like a startup again.

Key topics:

• Inside Meta’s “no-meeting week” that set the org loose on the tools

• The one job AI can't take: influencing other humans

• Why the PMs winning on Jagjit’s team aren't engineers

• What to do when you’re the bottleneck

• How to become an "AI captain"

• Triaging tens of thousands of bug reports with agents that validate and pre-write the fix

• Why letting AI write code made site incidents spike, and how Meta clamped down

• Building a morning brief that flags the decisions only you can make

• Why the management "compression algorithm" is dead and what replaced it

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

05:47 Why the biggest change is pace

07:29 From detailed PRDs to a paragraph, a prototype, and an eval set

09:32 Why the management "compression algorithm" is dead

10:37 Visibility is high, but synthesis is scarce

14:45 "Finding a scissor" when you don't have fancy tools

16:10 A morning brief that flags the decisions only you can make

22:37 When the agent quietly drops your source links

25:53 The one job AI can't take: influencing other humans

30:18 Getting an analyst's answer in five minutes, not 24 hours

33:33 Three ways AI changed the products, not just the process

37:25 Why letting AI write code made site incidents spike

40:39 The no-meeting week and the birth of "AI captains"

44:55 The world's largest Jenga game: why institutional knowledge wins

48:41 Why economics and physics PhDs are "out-PMing" engineers

52:14 Ideas and agency before tools

56:19 "AI lowers the floor and raises the ceiling"

58:40 Closing advice: once you taste it, you can't go back

Brought to you by:

• Glean—Work AI that works

• Framer—Design and build your website effortlessly with Framer Agents

Referenced:

• Claude Code

• Credit Karma

• Facebook

• Ferrari

• Gmail

• Google

• Google Chat

• Google Drive

• Indian Premier League (IPL)

• Instagram

• Meta

• Porsche

• Prince of Persia

• TikTok

• Workplace from Meta

• Zoom

Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

Where to find Jagjit:

• LinkedIn

Join The Skip:

Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theskip.substack.com

5 Career Questions Your Old Playbook Can’t Answer Jun 10, 2026

Show notes

In today's episode, we work through five questions from leaders in the Skip community who are doing well by any measure: a director whose career keeps ending in short stints despite strong performance, a manager whose top performer turned adversarial, an exec fielding multiple outsized offers, a PM who does her best work with a great manager, and a first-time manager whose first report is more experienced than they are. In each case, the old playbook can't answer the real question.

Key topics:

• The "layoff merry-go-round": why short stints compound and what it actually takes to break the cycle

• Why the decision to found should only stay on the table if you're obsessed with a specific problem — not just bullish on AI

• How a sponsor-to-manager dynamic turns adversarial

• "Every superpower comes with a shadow", and what that means for the manager who created the monster

• Why some management relationships reach a graduation, and how to recognize when you're there

• The mercenary vs. missionary question: and why the person asking usually already knows their answer

• Why senior product leaders should remove "great manager" from their job search criteria entirely

• The pretzel framework: how to identify the culture where you have to “bend yourself” the least

• Why being "safe" as a manager matters more than matching your direct report's experience level

Referenced:

• Anthropic

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Copilot

• Facebook

• Google

• Meta

Brought to you by:

• Glean—Work AI that works

• Guru—Trusted knowledge for every AI tool and team

Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

Where to find Carly:

• LinkedIn

Join The Skip:

Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify