Asha Sharma

AI products are shifting from static artifacts to living organisms that evolve through continuous data loops and interaction.

"all of a sudden these are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen. I think this is the new IP of every single company products that think and live and learn."

Successful AI implementation requires a strategic blueprint, rigorous measurement, and treating AI as a core investment rather than a series of experiments.

"I think that where companies fail is that they're doing AI for AI's sake. They have a ton of projects that they're kicking off at the same time without a blueprint to understand how it actually worked..."

Product strategy in AI must account for the rapid rate of technological change rather than just the current state of the art.

"I feel like you have to actually build for the slope instead of the snapshot of where you are."

The industry is shifting focus from massive pre-training to post-training and fine-tuning to achieve domain-specific performance and economic efficiency.

"I believe we will see just as much money spent on post-training as we will on pre-training and in the future, more on post-training... I think that we're going to start to see more and more companies..."

Interfaces are evolving from traditional GUIs to code-native or text-stream interfaces that better align with how LLMs process information.

"I think that a stream of text just connects better with LLMs. And so I think that there's a bunch of trends that are working in the favor for the future of products being about composability and not t..."

Avoid vendor or tool lock-in by investing in an abstraction layer that allows for modularity as the AI stack evolves.

"you really need to bet on a platform or some app server type layer that allows you to swap things in and out and not really be beholden to anything, any one technology or any one tool because the real..."

The success of major platforms (like WhatsApp or Instacart) often depends on 'invisible' infrastructure qualities rather than visible features.

"it wasn't the hundreds of features, it was all in the infrastructure and the platform... performance, reliability, privacy, safety, all of those things."

Leadership's primary role in a high-pressure environment is to generate energy and maintain optimism to sustain the team's commitment.

"I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource... his ability to generate energy and to use his optimism to renew everybody's dedication to the mission is unbelievable and I think it's such an imp..."

The rise of agents will flatten organizations, shifting the focus from hierarchy to task-based throughput.

"when all of that happens, the org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers. I think the whole organizational construct might start to look different in a few years."

The AI era demands 'polymath' builders who operate across traditional functional silos to increase velocity.

"I really believe in the concept of the full stack builder... I think it's all about the loop, not the lane here. And so I think that whatever function you are, you have to be obsessed with trying to u..."

In rapidly changing environments, use 'seasons' to align the team on secular market shifts rather than rigid long-term roadmaps.

"We think about it as what season are we in? Season one might've been prototyping of AI and then it was all around models and reasoning models, and now it's the advent of agents... grounding everybody..."

Effective roadmapping requires intentional 'slack' to adapt to technological breakthroughs and self-disruption.

"I think the other thing is just we try to leave Slack in the system, not just for the unplanned, but for the slope. I think that we have to continuously be thinking about how we're going to disrupt th..."

Use a tiered goal-setting system that combines loose quarterly objectives with tight, short-term execution cycles.

"The second thing that we do is that we have kind of loose quarterly OKR. So like, 'Okay, if we believe that, what do we need to do next quarter to actually put ourselves on a path to that?' And then f..."