Cross-Functional Competency in Product Teams

The AI-Native Product Leader: Becoming a Fast-Thinking IC CEO

In the AI era, product leaders must return to being hands-on individual contributors who deeply understand the technology they're building. Howie Liu, CEO of Airtable, shares how he restructured his company and leadership approach to thrive in this new paradigm.

The IC CEO Mindset

• CEOs and founders must get back into the details and become individual contributors again
• "As we started the company I was very much in this mode - I was literally writing code both on the backend thinking about the real-time data architecture of our platform, also the frontend UX"
• When finding product-market fit, especially for pure software products, the tech decisions are the product
• "You can't separate those two. You can't say 'okay I researched the jobs to be done, here's the workflow, here's the process' and then 'some engineer can just build it as an afterthought'"
• The intimate design decisions, both architecturally and on the frontend, are the product's value proposition

Why This Matters Now: The AI Paradigm Shift

• "Every software product has to be refounded because AI is such a paradigm shift"
• Unlike shifts from desktop to mobile or on-prem to cloud, AI is rapidly evolving
• Each new model release implies novel form factors and UX patterns
• "To be continuously relevant and refind product market fit in this era, you have to be in the details"
• There is no looking at it from a 10,000-foot view and saying "we're just gonna throw a bunch of people at this problem"

Fast Thinking vs. Slow Thinking Teams

• Restructured Airtable into two distinct groups:
  • Fast Thinking Group (AI Platform): Ships new capabilities on a near-weekly basis
  • Slow Thinking Group: Makes more deliberate bets requiring premeditation
• Fast thinking creates top-of-funnel excitement and inspires new use cases
• Slow thinking allows those initial seeds of adoption to grow into larger deployments
• "You need fast and slow thinking in the commonsense to operate"

How to Become an AI-Native Product Leader

1. Use AI tools constantly

• "I'm proud to say I'm pretty sure I'm still the number one most expensive in inference cost user of Airtable AI"
• Use AI hourly, not just daily
• "For me, hundreds of dollars spent on this exercise is trivial compared to the potential strategic value"
• Experiment with all new AI products, not just your own

2. Create personal projects to force deeper learning

• "I try to invent little side projects of my own to have a real reason to use these products"
• Example: Creating a short video using AI-generated scripts and avatars
• These projects help you understand both the models and the product form factors
• "It's not just understanding the models, but understanding the product form factors in which they can be placed"

3. Prioritize experimentation over planning

• "It's more like an experimentation playground versus a more deterministic resourcing timelines view of execution"
• Shift from "we're going to put this many people on this problem with this timeline" to rapid iteration
• "I want to see actual interactive demos because it's hard to understand in a deck or PRD"
• Prototype over decks - show don't tell

4. Encourage cross-functional capabilities

• "Each of those functions needs to get good at one of the other functions at least"
• "If you're any one of those roles you need to be like minimally good at the other two and then you can go deeper into your own specialty"
• PMs need to become more like "hybrid PM prototypers who have good design sensibilities"
• Engineers should understand product and business requirements
• Designers need to understand technical capabilities

5. Break down role silos

• "Try to break down role silos, not just for EPD in the typical triangle, but also for non-product roles"
• Marketing teams should be able to execute all aspects of campaigns themselves
• Sales people need to be more like solutions engineers, fluent in the product
• "Everybody needs to become more full stack"

6. Start with vibes, then move to evals

• For novel product experiences, start with open-ended exploration before formal evaluation
• "For a completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you should start with vibes"
• First throw things against the wall to see what works
• Only after you've converged on the basic scaffold should you implement formal evals

The Return to Founder Mode

• "Don't step away from the details that you love"
• Cut standing one-on-ones to make room for more timely, urgent topics
• Focus on a barbell approach: either very timely, focused meetings or longer, in-person relationship building
• "The times where I felt most disintermediated from what I felt was the substance of this company was when I thought I was almost forcing myself to step away from the details because I thought that's what an at-scale CEO was supposed to do"
• Remember what made the product magical in the first place and stay connected to that

Wisdom for the AI Era

• "If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach?"
• If you can't leverage your existing business effectively for AI, "you should find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, go and start the next incarnation of it"
• "Everyone can learn how to be a versatile unicorn-like product-engineer-designer hybrid in the AI native era, and the only thing stopping you is just going out and doing it"