The ONLY Way to Become an AI Product Manager in 2025 Even If You Were Laid Off or Have No Experience

AI part manager is the hardest job right now in this market in general it's get paid 30% higher than traditional part management however even if there are large volume of part manager who want to transition into AI part management but very few of them can make it and was because majority of the AI Prim management job Ming is asking for prior AI or Prim management experience that become a lot of hurle for many Prim manages out there in this episode we a pleasure to invite cine so who success F become a AI Prim manager and

working on very exciting AI product and she's going to share with you her journey how she conquer all the challenges and all the critical and all the Practical tips you can Implement in becoming an AI Prime manager as [Music] well hey guys this is Dr NCD a direct product feature informs at help thousand people land the dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startups and continue get promoted as a product leader in this channel we talk about tech Trends and free prodct Management training like And subscribe check out new video every Tuesday hi

cat welcome to the show thank you thank you so much thanks for having me and I'm so excited to really learn about your journey becoming an AI PR manager and as we also know you already have prior PM experience now it's a brand new field to become AI pm and you're also the only lead aipm in your company creating amazing new AI features and can you start to share with us regarding what's your background and how you get where you are right now uh so so I came from um a software development background I started

as front-end developer in my early on in my career eventually moving on into more product role um so I've I've done a product a business analyst I was a product owner and then eventually getting into product management um so I've been doing that for product management for some time for about eight years already so so I I'm very well-versed in the product life cycle and so uh just recently just transitioned into AI this is awesome can you tell us a specific past um becoming an aipm um I was also aware based on your LinkedIn post

that you were laid off um last year so how did you really like come back not only to land a PM job but also like becoming an AI PM actually you did two steps Within one shot so how exactly you did it and what's your pass to aipm yeah I uh I was laid off in uh back in July of 2024 and uh it was very difficult to get back into the market um I've never experienced anything like it before and I'm sure others are experiencing it too um normally in a regular Market if I

look for a job it will be in two weeks I would land an offer and uh it was unusual to to be looking for a job still uh for six months and then only Landing just you at most three interviews that whole time um so it took a very long time to get interviews um prior to taking the product management accelerator of course I had only had two interviews and uh it didn't go as far as the second round um so I didn't get chosen yeah let's talk more because I do want to understand the

lady challenges for other aipm out there or PR managers in general because it is a sad truth that on last year there's a lots of laid off and also it's quite competitive even like tier one company L of employees so during the job hunting process and you mentioned you can only land a few interview opportunities can you tell us more what eventually really helped out and when you learn few interview opportunities I believe in your blog post on your LinkedIn you talk about you took many different actions such as like mindset shift different things can

you tell us more how exactly that you start to have a comeback ESP special only land like two interview opportunities earlier yeah I I went to go see a career mentor and that really really helped me to kind of really understand what my goals are in my career uh they had me take a briar it's basically a personality test to to understand your work ethic and how you basically how you would make decisions naturally and so understanding that I was able to kind of figure out okay this is what I could do who I am

how I can I I guess you can say uh showcase my personality in interviews I also went to see a therapist because you know going through the the job hunting process is is very it's tough and it it does a number on your uh confidence and you know especially for someone like me who's been in the industry for more than 10 years uh it was a lot because it's kind of like okay you know what did I do wrong I got laid off you know and why did I get laid off you know all those

different reasons and so I went to go see a therapist and then kind of gaining that confidence again and then I was like you know what instead of just sitting here and just pressing a button writing resumés I just felt like I needed something more and if I wanted to break into AI I needed help from experts and I I I had a feeling that one of the things that I needed to do to stand out was to actually have ai experience yeah and thank you for being very vulnerable actually talking about seeing a therapist

and myself also have a therapist I highly recommend everybody when you are going through lots of stress and sometime in your life people do need to seek external help and also it is also a shock to lots of senior Prim managers out there and as you said earlier in the past people can just let job offers left and right and nowadays wow what's going going on how come there's no even no interviews something's wrong with my application experiences different things and I think a lot of senior PM out there is thinking about how going to

use brand new strategies to start to land New Opportunities can you also tell us more regarding AI because this app is mainly focus on like not only land a job and also Landing aipm have a huge return comeback so you mentioned a little bit and saying hey I realize I need gain more AI part management experience hands-on experience can you tell us what exactly did you do to become an AI product manager yeah I I took several courses and I just try to study as much as I could and especially with AI you know the

technology is changing so quickly um and I also knew that if I was going to get into AI I needed some sort of experience like hands-on experience and so I decided to you know join the product manager accelerator course for AI PMs and start there and that's when I got to actually work with a team and kind of like sharpened my skills because it had been I would say three months before I actually even talked to a team started thinking about technology again and you know all those skills that you know product managers need um

so it was really good practice to to get back into that again and and problem solving that's a skill that we have to continue um to practice on so cine tell us more regarding the hands-on experience I think a lots of people has a lots of wrong assumptions they thought hey if I want to become aipm let me take some theoretical classes regarding what is AI but you said something quite different you said hey I learned that I must gain hands-on experience to become aipm so how do you even find out you need handson experience

why do you think you need it how the employers react to it and especially mentioned your employer actually interviewed like over 100 candidates they already have PM experience but Choose You to become the aipn actually the only aipn in your company which is Curren core minor um can you tell us more how you even know handson experience is important how the recruiters even future you in the interview process so when I was taking some AI courses and and it like for some PMS they might not be Technical and it's kind of hard to grasp those

ideas like and because it is pretty Technical and I've sat through several of them and you kind of glaze over because it's it's like how can I relate to that and I think it's the important thing it's the context like how can I use this technology to solve problems it's that connection that was for me I didn't have that with a lot of the AI courses and so with with the PMA course I was able to take a problem and say how what technology would I need to solve this problem and because of that it

clicked for me and and didn't get that with other courses because it was just theoretical and we were just using you know you're studying business cases but it it didn't make any sense I didn't it didn't connect and so it wasn't until I actually was working in a team problem solving and then running into problems was where you actually learned those like important things those those aha moments awesome so C you brought a really good point regarding the haaha moment when you use those AI Technology Building real life AI product with team of people um

more regarding the product you develop and what what the type of aha moment you have encountered when you build real world AI product compared with people who taking theoretical classes I think people need to know the differences um tell us more I'm very excited to learn more about your AI product yeah I um I I had a a previous idea about uh there was a problem or really a need to look for BYO businesses like businesses that are owned by bipo um business owners so those who don't know that term it means black indigenous people

of color um so and you know I can get into all of that because I I love it I'm so passionate about this and being able to represent uh those who struggle and and it's it's really to look for small businesses because a lot of times where we want to support small businesses but we can't find them and um and so we went into the program thinking you know I'm I'm want going to try to solve my problem as a customer I want to look for for a business owner and you know the PMA course

um and especially our great mentors there they teach you like how to structure your problems and and make sure that you're actually solving the right problem and because as you know a lot of people might know 80% AI businesses fail and why is that is because you're solving the wrong problems uh there's so much technology and it's great but you have to solve the right problems um in order for your act to be successful uh and and so like it started there and then comes to find out I was I was solving the wrong problem

and was more there was more the thing was you know the foundational problem here is small businesses don't have the education the resources the tools to be able to reach out to to their customers and so then that's when we decide okay we're going to switch and use AI Technologies to solve that problem tell us more so did you do voice customer interview and realize that you on the wrong direction then you pivot your initial idea yeah halfway into it yeah we did and we were just focusing on the wrong thing and so after that

we you know we we changed or we interviewed different customer in said it's actually the business owner that we should be interviewing and kind of listening to them a little bit more because I think the the foundational problem is there and from there we we decided to work on problems on how to help business owners reach their customers and there's just a multitude of things that you can do with uh with technology so we just started with this one one problem and um that's really just to how can I at least the one question is

how can I reach my audience that was that one question and that was the one thing that we were trying to solve so tell us more what kind of AI technology do you use to solve such problem and how you reach your audience uh so we we did several things we started with uh a recommendation system system um and this was to at least identify or validate that you know that there were actual business um that was found in in Google business and then we uh we recommended for the business some competitors that were within

their location or or in their industry and then say and look into their digital presence the competitors dig pres and say well looks like they've done this this and this in Twitter or they have a really great presence in Instagram you should also try doing the same thing here's the type of post that they put out there and just it's very very personalized to the business uh so that was something that we actually created Tommy n is our data scientist genius and he created a custom you know system that algorithm basically to create something that's

a lot more personalized to business owners this is awesome and especially when you discuss and how specifically the AI canot take to small businesses I can literally feel like I'm going to use it seriously myself is running small businesses in typ of hey what other the competitor doing for this kind of Instagram post let's R take us a lot of time and effort to really understand what works what doesn't work and actually the best way is really get inspiration for other businesses in the same domain same Niche that's how you really get lots of inspiration

also give you competive research ahead of time so basically your scientist or AI they research for small businesses like me say hey this one more likely going to work because your competitor or someone with similar businesses did this that went viral that's actually amazing idea what you had this is awesome so now cine can you tell us more so what is the the aha moment is your aha moment is a selecting the right technology or your aha moment is more like hey I realized I was solving the wrong problem and how those aha moment conversation

actually help you during the interview becoming an AI product manager so while I just remember this moment where I we ran into problems about the data to use and and and this was something that I learned from other previous courses that you have to choose where your data source is coming from um whether it's free or not right and didn't realize that um it was so important to start with the data first where are you getting the data is it even accurate yeah um and and you think that was something that was critical to our

decision making because we only had two months to build something and and also we didn't know where to get it and I think those those problems have at the same time helped me interview for my employer so like it was at the same time it just kind of happened and I I just was like oh this is something just happened to me last week we had to switch where we getting a data resource because we couldn't go on social there's no way that we could get like uh social media data from a small business owner

if they need to connect or like there has to be some sort of API um to get that information we don't have that it's going to cost money and so because of that I mentioned that in the interview and they were that it was a panel interview and they were really interested in that because not a lot of people can talk about a product that they're currently building it's always something that's happened in the past on their resume and um and I think that's what helped me to kind of stand out out of all those

hundreds of candidates that apply for that job I see actually it's quite interesting problem trying to solve given you cannot have the small business owner upload their data so where did you find the data eventually solve this specific challenge uh so we we had to just kind of create this it's almost kind of like a scoring system based on the best performing businesses in certain locations in in in each industry and we kind of created some sort of kind of like a like this is the best list right kind of like top list uh for

this industry in this location and using that as a kind of like a North star for for each and every one of those small businesses this is awesome we started there so I mean if we had more time I think we would have been able to diversify our our data source umbe a of bit Yeah is quite very very exciting actually because the specific hook you had doing interviews oh we switch data source and all the interviewer even I'm the interviewer like my I'm the small business owner yeah how exactly I'm wondering and you're right

most candidate when they study the theoretical models oh you can get data from this five different places in real life it doesn't work we need be smart and each individual case is quite different verify the data source and also structuring the data very different we have other teams what they learned actually was in AIP and book and were building AI interviewer AI resume writer AI chatbot and the interviewer literally was like hey Nancy you have five years of like training you have recorded but the AI wasn't able to tell who is do because all like

female voices or different people talking and they want to do those learning fine-tuning your model like what if they took students voice and saw that was Darkness C and you train the model the answer will be very incorrect or at least not to my standard right so those are real life challenges people are facing but for people when doing thetical study oh there are five different places go do it it's like 1% of the entire battle you need to hit this is like you hit the nail on the head that's a perfect example cool so

K you also mentioned something quite shocking and new to me actually you mentioned last time saying that currently the years of experience of PM and also the brand of company doesn't matter anymore so can you elaborate more especially how does for example if you are working for famous company we have 20 years experience do you think those people have managed become aipm or is a new game moving forward tell us more you you brought a very very shocking idea actually yeah I I uh after my whole experience of job searching I realized that your experience

doesn't even matter anymore uh the the length of your experience because of AI tell us more the capabilities of what you can build now is just it's just so much easier and you don't need a team to build anything before you would need to have like you know 10 years of experience before you can actually land a job and you're depending on being employed to get to gain these experiences now it's totally different you don't need to have a team there's no code apps that are out there that can help you build your your ideas

and people can get started with their Stars right now and um I don't think a lot of people take advantage of that and it's it's unfortunate but I think um what's going to help other PMS it like it's it's G to be totally different like 2025 is going to be a game changer because now anyone can get any job and a lot of and it's not just the big tech companies now that are using AI it's everyone and so because of that you can either decide to work at a huge company a very famous company

or make a really big impact in another smaller business or midsize business where you can actually make an impact and also use AI exactly yeah I think this L really bring El everybody back to the starting line of the AI race because AI is so new and let's say you have 20 years experience working on traditional products so you don't work on AI so what you don't even know the where to get data in real life as an example you talked about earlier right so they 20 years experience in management was erased and but of

course if you do have 20 years experience as a PM probably easier for you to talk about how to do voice custom interviews maybe collaborating with a team doing stakeholder management however all the hands-on experience as aipm everybody start from zero so therefore like like as you said which I totally agree the bigger names yes same thing as for example if work at Google working on Chrome extension uh in the past 20 years sorry it had nothing to do with AI in the past so you have to really learn how to use AI to optimize

Chrome extension starting from today so all your past 20 years experience started become irrelevant even if you got opportunity working with Google nowaday that's also the reason yourself kicking out other the competition even if you're other competitors other candidate working for big teag company but you're the one with more real life hands- on experience was able to impress a h manager and also become the only aipm company right y yeah I I I feel very lucky and still right now just in just I can't believe that I was able to do it and and really

it's it's all about um being prepared and I think having that experience is going to help anyone and I I I've been telling everyone this is just build something it could be anything it doesn't have to be a startup it could just be a very small tool just to help yourself in task management um or just some like cool feature um there's so many fun apps out there that you can just try something um and and go from there and I think if I were to try this again I think I would have uh especially

with my job search I think I would have started this course a lot earlier and I think that would have helped me with interviews because it's not just about learning AI in this course it's it's all about like interviewing and um resume writing and those are the the skills that you kind of have to keep practicing even as a a senior Ro yeah you talk a lot regarding interviewing so let's let's shift interviewing a little bit so what type of interview questions to people ask you during PM interviews especially AI PM interviews nowadays I think

and and this is something that people don't know is that AI is very new to a lot of companies and yeah I don't want people to feel intimidated when you step in there because most of the time your hiring manager doesn't know either and um and so whether you talk about you know try to throw all these fancy technical words um it's not going to impress them I think it's it's um you know being organized and how can you um problem solve how do how do you organize so that way when you do figure out

a solution you can actually take it from zero to one and so for example like there was like a lot of Behavioral questions what problems did you run into when you were building this product and or I I think it most of the questions in my interview was more about what problems did you run into and uh just very high level what were you what problems were you trying to solve who were your like who was your audience who was your customer and um and I think I think with with that because AI is so

new um and everyone's still trying to figure out out right and and also like another thing is are you able to are you a fanatic of AI are you always trying to find the latest technology because this you know once you start the job there's some new you know like um agentic a AI That's gonna it's G to change the aim again are you g to be able to are you that person that would research about this uh this type of technology and use that to help solve problems for customers so I I think if

you continue to build if you continue to research and understand what is out there what does a technology landscape look like and they know that that's what you love to do that you're passionate about it then that's going to it's going to you know you're going to stand out I love this I think the key words here is you need to execute continue learning and growing and also show your passion in Ai and also the best way to show passion actually doing it instead saying I I love this and loving it means nothing you love

something you got to do it and you really have to tied all the three themes together um so um CAD something I I want to quickly demissy a little bit people ask me question hey oh do you need to know how to code to become aipm what do you think because yourself people may oh she has vanished she was a softw developer 10 years ago November she was hired do you agree with the statement uh no I and I don't want to ever code again um uh no I although I I do like to learn

I I do like to understand what my team um works on um and I do that on the side it's great but but I don't have to code and it's it's not important you don't need to I I don't do any coding at all so it's more important working in your team and using those AI tools to create those real life AI product and being able to talk about your experience working team and solving the real life problems am I right yeah and I I think like even even just knowing the different you know every

the whole ecosystem of AI and just being like Oh I heard about this tool maybe we try this and see what that is and dig into it like I didn't know anything about open AI API uh I didn't know the capabilities and the data you know and and I think and then only that I got to talk about it right because you're learning about those things and and as long as you keep learning because there's always going to be new technology yeah and that's a great thing that's the advantage here is that okay yes it's

going to be something new so it's not expected that you know these things but are you interested in learning perfect and that lead to my last question second to second to last I always I have two questions ask all my guest which growth and you mentioned growth multiple times at the seam of today's talk what do you think of the grows mindset and how would you grow yourself and personally and professionally any any other resources you recommend people to grow uh growth yes there's a lot of growth this past year I I definitely recommend keep

learning uh and what I mean by that is while you're learning theoretical parts of you know the foundations of AI and machine learning also learning you know like basic PM skills and and those things are are B you know what you can actually practice in the PMA program um so those are the things I feel like are really important to and and also practicing the skills like if you're in a class and you're just reading about it are you practicing like are you practicing interviewing customers you need to be able to do things and so

that will help you practice because a lot of PMS you know it's it's a lot of soft skills right so you know especially with cross functional teams you need to be able to communicate externally you know besides just your engineering team but can you also communicate with sales marketing and all that stakeholders this is awesome you're right so when we grow we grow in different dimensions after uh growth is defined by learning and execution this is awesome and now let me ask you last question and Katherine how can people get in touch with you how

can they find you or follow you uh you can definitely find me in LinkedIn I'm I'm also on a Discord as well and yeah I think that's that's it thank you great we're going to link your LinkedIn in the description of the show note and everybody feel free to follow Cad and I believe CAD is going to publish lots of AI related uh learning and also notes for everybody on LinkedIn as well so make make sure to follow her and for anybody who's interest in AI part management bookand to gain hands-on experience with team of

developer data scientists and designer and mentors all together you can go to this website go the link in the description download the syllabus so they can learn more about the program or you can also directly use our syllabus DIY yourself to gain experience and as long as you're gaining experience creating the amazing product the impact milons people's life that's the mission of PM accelerator awesome so thank you for joining can so much inside share during today's episode thank you thank you so much for having me awesome so everybody if you like all the amazing tips

we share today make sure to like comment and subscribe to our Channel and our podcast and YouTube channel and join us in different kind of social channels to engage with us this Dr nity from PMX serator doio I'm going to see you in our next episode right here