Nabeel Khan (00:00)
we see that as AI grows and as AI technologies develop, the role of the product manager actually become more important.

David (00:07)
Hey, welcome to Prompt and Circumstance. My name's David.

Ilan (00:09)
and I'm Ilan.

David (00:11)
So today we're talking with Nabeel Khan, who's got, ⁓ five years of experience at, Amazon as a product person and is now the founder and CEO of a startup.

So why don't we get introduced to Nabeel?

Ilan (00:32)
Yeah, Nabeel, thank you for joining us.

Nabeel Khan (00:32)
Awesome,

Yeah, thank you all for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, mean, kind of as was mentioned, I just came off of a five-year career stint at Amazon where I was moving. I went from being in operations and then moving all the way to being Amazon's youngest senior PM. This was about a couple years ago. Then I ended up leading the product strategy for basically the entire suite of software used to build all of Amazon's warehouses. And then I recently left to do my own sort of

large startup that are now helping head up your floor. So excited to be here.

Ilan (01:05)
Yeah, that's an exciting journey too. I think that most product people would ⁓ hear that love to learn a little bit more. How did you come into being the youngest senior PM at Amazon?

Nabeel Khan (01:21)
So again, I started with Amazon about five years ago, so back in May of 2020, right, sort of as the pandemic was really kicking off, and was moving my career into started as an operations manager. So really, I was working in a warehouse managing like a direct warehouse floor. if you've ever ordered something on Amazon, which most people have the place where it comes from, I was managing part of the floor.

moving from that sort of operations role, I moved over to a project management position with an org called GES, which is responsible for building all of Amazon's warehouses. Then from there, I kind of transitioned onto an internal tech team as well. So there was a portion of that project management group that was responsible for

actually building the software that that group used. And I was able to move on sort of as a non-technical sort of project / product / TPM manager. And then from that, I used that experience. It was managing a couple of the different tools they had and was able to formally transition within a year of the senior product manager title. And so by having that experience, not only was I able to work as sort of a ⁓ operations and program manager, but then actually moved into product relatively quickly.

So the journey kind of up and lateral at the same

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Ilan (03:14)
not everyone starts Amazon in operations management and then becomes a senior product manager within a couple of years. So secret sauce or your super skill, superpower that you brought to the role that really allowed you to succeed?

Nabeel Khan (03:31)
Yeah, 100%. I said the biggest thing is there's a couple of keys I would say that really helped me progress down the line. The first and biggest was that I was really committed to continuously learning and developing my skills throughout the entirety of my experience. most years I was spending a lot of my evenings and weekends picking up a lot of those software and product skills I needed to kind of get there. So I was prepping even before I really wanted to move into the position. ⁓ And so...

Even early, like I studied materials engineering in college and so I didn't necessarily come from like a software background. I'm still honestly pretty, I would consider myself to be a pretty bad coder. And so a lot of what this journey looked like is me teaching myself both of the sort of software skills and fundamentals and also the product management skills that you need to kind of go and move into that proper product title. The other thing I would say is like a really big sort of key differentiator in terms of what I

have taught a lot of the folks that I work with and have helped get roles too, especially recently through my business, helped somebody get somebody a VP of product title, a director of product at Tobani and some other interesting companies too. The thing I always tell people is that you want to find ways to reform your desired job in your current environment. And so what that means is a lot of times you have to get kind of creative about what are the things that you can do in your job now? How can you understand the position you want to go?

And how can you bring those in, even if it's outside of your day-to-day role or the things you're normally expected to do? So for example, when I was in operations, ⁓ I knew my first role is, I want to become a project manager. In order to manage, become a project manager or show that I can do that, I probably have to find some projects to manage. And so I looked through different sort of operations, process opportunities within the building. made some net new projects by talking to other folks within the sort of operations industry.

And I was able to kind of find these like safety projects and process improvement projects that I could install that then helped the building kind of grow as a whole. So I found, I got funding for them. I created project charters, created logos, and all that together gave me the ability to create this strong portfolio and then move me to project management. So that fundamental, I continue to do it really at every step of my career. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing that most people don't do because they're really just focused on what's happening today. Whereas if you keep...

the view of like, hey, here's where I am. Here's where I want to go. What do I need to do and reframe the things that I'm doing in a way that gets me to that? You'll get there a lot.

Ilan (06:05)
or forgive me, I'm going to cut this out, but how do you pronounce the name of your

Nabeel Khan (06:09)
Nobody knows how to say it, so we're changing it. Basically the name is pretty soon going to be Skill Atlas, which is a lot easier to

Ilan (06:16)
And what are you doing now?

Nabeel Khan (06:17)
Yeah, yeah. So just a little bit about what I'm doing now. So we are a future of work training platform. What we do is we basically use AI to understand a person's specific and unique past experiences and create customized training curriculum environments and simulated training environments for them to actually build the skills to get where they want to go. So lot of the kind of from my own journey, two of the big things that picked up, right, is that when I was

learning all those different resources to become Amazon's Senior PM. I just understood how sort of broken up the experience of online solutions really is and how sort of the ed tech market is just very fragmented. Like, you you pick up five hours of material here, 10 hours of material here, but there's very few places that actually give you the opportunity to learn the entire thing for you. And so most learners are stuck kind of trying to find what's the next thing for them? Where should they really go?

Like what should they learn? When have they learned enough? Those are some really common questions we find people asking and also that like education systems today, know, they really just lack on keeping the ability to actually perform the roles that you're trying to do and so we I'm really big on that whole idea of like find ways to do your desired job in environment leans on that principle of like people learn mainly by doing so we want to create opportunities for that and for us that's basically creating this platform of community of

knowledge workers changing how they learn to ensure that they grow alongside AI rather than be replaced by it through again that personalized learning and giving them simulated training experiences that get them where they want to go. So our primary beachhead is we work a lot with product managers first to kind of grow their career. We're expanding to a bunch of knowledge work fields.

Ilan (08:03)
So you mentioned that at Skill Atlas, one of the key things that you're doing is helping PMs and other knowledge workers grow alongside AI. So what does that look like for you? What does that mean?

Nabeel Khan (08:17)
Yeah, so the biggest thing with that is what we really want to enable again is for people to use these agents and tools as they come out as part of their sort of work experience and environment rather than sort of having those tools be isolated and develop only in an environment that just thinks about like the business value. Because really, if you think about most of the broader tech industry and most mid-market companies, they're really focused on, hey, what AI solutions can I use and what sort of workflows can I build?

to sort of like cut down on the cost of labor within my teams. But both the companies and the learners aren't really thinking much about like, okay, well, how do I really staff my team around this in the future? There's just so many of these little AI agents and tools that the sort of AI ops of like, okay, this is the agent or tool I should use for this and this is how I should use this process. It's really very, very far from standard. And that's gonna continue to evolve as these tools over the next couple of years.

And so what sort of growing alongside AI looks like is we create these environments wherein people can actually go through simulated projects and have an experience and say, okay, well, if you're trying to become a product manager, you want to grow the product manager in the first steps of your career, you're going to start by doing market research. And so you're going to use XYZ tool to do this. Okay. And then you're going to use, let's say a PRD creation tool. And so you want to use the tool like

ChatPRD or some other third party platform that also you can use within that cycle. And okay, well now I want to create it into a prototype. And so I use that whole like Bolt or v0 or prototyping segments to be able to create it there. And so really what it means like go growing alongside AI rather than being replaced by it. The thing that we kind of teach people is that you have to rely on the fundamentals of the role. Product management as a specific discipline is going to continue to be.

understanding the user and understanding the business club well enough to be able to say, here's what should be improved or here's how we can change that customer experience. That's really like, when you really boil it down, that's all product manager really is. The art kind of shows itself in different formats. And then the tooling is really what's going to, right? So as long as you have the foundation, you can kind of grow, expand and

David (10:36)
do you have, ⁓ a hot take on, AI? mean, everybody's, ⁓ you know, really either super bullish on it or, super doomer, ⁓ about it. ⁓ you know, like what's, what's, what's your, what's your take? What's an interesting take that you've got?

Nabeel Khan (10:53)
Yeah, yeah. this take that I have is actually something I kind of realized and was backed by recently. was sitting down actually at an accelerator. that with the president of DoorDash, the old president, his name is Christopher Payne. And we were talking about product management teams and the future of product and how it looks. know, everybody is again, because AI is so focused on automation right now, everybody is like, well, developers are going to go away. Designers are going go away. Product managers are going to go away. And I actually think that the last role that is going to

be replaced quote unquote or the role that will probably never end up being replaced by AI is product management. Because again, the role of product management is it just is something where you are representing on behalf of the user. And so in any business environment that's going to exist, whether you're doing it on a small scale, whether you're doing it in your own startup, whether you're using a lot of set of AI tools, understanding the needs of the business user and

kind of building experience with whatever technologies exist on their behalf. That's all that product management is. So I think product management is really the role that is not going to necessarily get replaced over time, because it's the most human really of all these roles. And interestingly, that person, the CEO of DoorDash or past president of DoorDash, he also was kind of sharing the same belief where he said, actually,

we see that as AI grows and as AI technologies develop, the role of the product manager actually become more important.

And so I think that's a shared belief that everyone's focusing on like what roles is it going to replace? Is my job safe? Is my job safe? When I think at the end of the day, if people, if you start to think more like a product person, you'll end up finding that a lot of these tools, whether or not product people end up doing little bit of engineering or design, I think those types of things will happen. The core fundamental of representing user and building on their behalf will always exist.

Ilan (12:42)
I'm curious just to be a little bit contrarian there's some pretty good research, mostly in the medical field these days about how LLMs can often be more empathetic than their human counterparts.

Does that influence the way that you think about that take at all, right?

So if AIs are showing that they are more empathetic than equivalent humans in some roles, why doesn't that apply to product?

Nabeel Khan (13:12)
Yeah, no, I think that's a very fair point. think they're kind of, mean, in the medical space, I think it's a kind of a fundamentally different, different equation, right? Like the doctor who's diagnosing a disease, largely what they're doing is they're using some degree of mental decision tree to say, okay, well, you're experiencing symptom X, that means it could be related to disease or infliction Y or Z. And okay, if it's not one of those, then maybe you're having a second system. And so it's really like a big mental decision tree, which is a lot of the way that LLMs

think anyway. And so that's kind of why I think there there's a huge opportunity for like sort of the medical field to continue to be augmented and improved in diagnosing and accuracy. What I do think even in the product space, right. So going back to that point I was mentioning of the core fundamentals of how do you understand the user will continue to exist. But what will probably happen is the tools you use to do that will continue to get more and more advanced. Right now we've got tools even for basic product analytics for things like

let's say a Hotjar or a Mixpanel or Amplitude that do things like understand a little bit of where users looking or what they're looking at or what buttons they've clicked. But really, as these AI technologies get smarter and sort of understand it, let's say, for example, understand patterns of how people are actually using software, you'll be able to get much more data and analytics around what your users are doing. And so the product person still has to kind of understand and say, OK, well, does that mean that all of these users are feeling X? it mean that if...

feeling Y One of the fundamental truths of product management is users oftentimes, will unintentionally lie to you. And they think they mean one thing, but in reality, oftentimes their behavior and usage data show something else. And so I think with AI being integrated into platforms as a way to understand a lot of these users.

and get their data about like, here's how they're using things. That's really what's going to amplify these people's and these product managers' ability to understand.

David (15:15)
I'm thinking about the ⁓ aspect of empathy as relates to a doctor and how that might actually also differ a little bit from how a product manager would be employing that skill. So for example, ⁓

in the TV series House. I mean, Dr. Gregory House had a terrible bedside manner, ⁓ but he was still able to diagnose the right illness or condition in the end.

with a product manager, ⁓ the empathy there is really what drives the very nature of the diagnostic as to what to do or what the problem is. ⁓ Whereas, you know, with the medical doctor, that might be a bit more about symptomatic diagnostics and running tests and so forth. It is certainly something to think about though, where ⁓ are there product managers out there who are more like Dr. House?

maybe they are the ones who are at at a bit of

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Ilan (16:49)
⁓ so Nabeel, when, when we asked you on, we were talking about, ⁓ you had posted about this relatively recently, and it's something that's coming up more, which is about, vibe coding in product interviews and how does vibe coding fit into the

product manager skill set. I'm wondering if first maybe could you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing there Skill Atlas.

Nabeel Khan (17:24)
Yeah, I mean, we've actually seen some really interesting things where people have now started to, especially with some of the folks who work at mid-sized companies, mid-sized tech companies that are a little bit more agile and can change their processes faster than maybe some large companies. We've actually seen a ton of results with these people being able to actually use these tools in production. Like a lot of these people view sort of these AI prototyping platforms as kind of like toys where they do them in isolated environments, but

we're actually seeing huge results of people being able to build prototypes at production what that means is that the product manager kind of in the past, again, it's one of Google's head of products, I actually talked about this recently, where the product role is very much, has always been very document-centric. And what that really means is that

You know, there's always this sort of just degree of disconnection between the product manager and this sort of accompanying development team and even some of the customers because they're conveying these things only through the lens of document. And so a product manager might not be able to fully convey what they want the experience to look like. Whereas now the product manager is able to iterate so much faster using these product-driving tools that they can really convey their ideas.

in a way that doesn't necessarily rely as heavily on the whole, okay, well, we have an idea, here's the design, here's the sort of test out environment. And what it does is it just creates much more fast iteration and feedback, instead of saying, okay, well, this person is responding well to this portion of the environment. You can take this sort of bold or let's say a V0 prototype and actually put it into something that customers can use in their hands.

And so those teams are starting to list. We're starting to see bigger companies adopting.

Ilan (19:14)
Got it, so there's almost like ⁓ at these companies, mid-size companies where you're seeing the most success, they're almost like ⁓ creating a shell around a vibe coding prototype, vibe coded prototype such that users can actually work with it in a way that's like safe at production scale. Is that right?

Nabeel Khan (19:38)
Yeah, yeah. again, largely these midsize set companies, they've had a lot of success kind of deploying these applications at scale. We had ⁓ one of our clients who basically is working on creating sort of AI led prototyping tools for his entire company. We helped him actually present this to his company's COO and it's got really good buy-in. So by focusing on not just creating prototypes, but production scale applications, these companies are able to actually deploy.

What's now happening too is there's interesting shift of where product managers are almost becoming like these pseudo front-end engineers because by building these applications, these prototypes using these AI tools, they can actually take the code components that they developed in the front-end and hand those directly to an engineer who can plug in the backend systems, do all the routing and spin up a system a lot faster.

David (20:30)
Yeah, that's really interesting. ⁓ you know, the, the shift from what you described there as a product role being writing first to building first, right. As, an alternative to, writing. ⁓ I mean, you know, there's a picture being worth a thousand words, but then, ⁓ maybe a prototype is worth 10,000 words.

Nabeel Khan (20:51)
Yeah, 100%. Because I mean, even moving from tools like Figma in the past, right just so much that like, even Figma has had these interactive prototypes, but it's really like, you kind of play mocking a scenario where a person actually clicks through. What really matters at the end of the day with these products too is like, what are the subtle things that happen when your users interact with products?

I mean, how's the best way for you to get that feedback? And the best way to do it is really to watch them use it real time and get sort of that data about what they're working with, what's not working, et cetera. So these prototypes now kind of open up a new dimension of interaction and ways for us to get product feedback that really creates products closer to what solves the actual user need. And at the end of the day, that's what we all, that's what tech team exists for. So this is taking us in the right direction.

David (21:41)
All right. So maybe let's double click a little bit on the vibe coding interview. So what, how would that manifest in an interview setting? Is it that they would give you a scenario like a business case, and then you would be expected to use vibe coding tools to solve it?

Nabeel Khan (21:56)
Yeah, yeah, those are really interesting kind of article that we saw. The biggest thing with that is the person was unfortunately in that interview case was a little bit blindsided by the fact that they were going to be doing this interview. Um, and so they, they kind of dove deep into what are the sort of technical fundamentals that they weren't sure they started talking about RAG and LLM. They're really like really deep concepts. But the actual reality of the scenario is that they were still kind of testing for that main product thinking. So what they wanted them to do is start by decomposing the problem.

in a way where they kind of identified what are the key business drivers and what are the main sort of like user interactions that you need to have. And so now with these tools, we have the opportunity to create just like coding interviews have done in the past, spend with just a few minutes thinking about how a product manager actually decomposes a user's sort of jobs to be done, understands their ICP, understands what are the sort of customer journey that you want to take them on.

and really bring those concepts to life by using this AI Prototype tool. So for anybody who is using these types of platforms or is conducting these sorts of interviews, the big thing I would say is just go back to focusing on those customer experience and product management fundamentals. So when you're faced with one of these problems, who is your ideal customer? What sort of pain points do they have? What sort of main interactions do they have? What's their existing jobs to be done or the existing journey of completing the actions?

And where do you specifically see in their journey things getting better? So for example, if like I was in a scenario where Uber didn't exist, like if I, if people in New York were just taking taxis, like they would be first maybe taking people out to dinners and they'd be booking these rides before and after. And you want to think of like, okay, in this scenario and this specific person's example, how are we making their experience better? ⁓ And then really manifesting the pieces of your user journey around that. Cause what they want to see is okay, can

Can they really take this problem, decompose it and think of the user has to interact first with step one, then step two, then step three. We use a lot of these product tools and these prototyping tools with on our day-to-day flow as with my team. I helped actually Amazon become, my old team at Amazon become one of the company's first AI native product teams by using these tools as well. And at the end of the day, you're relying really strongly on these product fundamentals

And so that's really what they're testing

David (24:23)
That's really interesting. people today, have. LLMs resume for them for the application that's tailored to the company. And then presumably the applicant tracking system, the ATS would have some AI power tool that would boil that all down. So.

know, what's what's your take on on all of that? I mean, on either end.

Nabeel Khan (24:45)
Yeah, mean, a hundred percent, right? Like I think the system gets skewed when you don't sort of put the human input into the tools correctly. Like if you really just sort of outsource your thinking to it, that's really where you're going to suffer. And so is the entirety of the system, right? If everyone's just kind of like, okay, well, I need a job description that does X, Y and Z. And so I just let the tool kind of trust it. know, the recruiter's sourcing for the wrong type of candidate entirely. And then the person is

creating the wrong type of resume to fit that role. so like at the end of the day, right, the hiring, like matchmaking process is just there to find somebody who deliver business value. And so for kind of messing it up on both ends of the equation and all we're doing at the end of the day is hurting the actual business. Interesting point you bring up kind of on resumes and in your interviews is like what we help a lot of people do is

a ton of time kind of like deep diving the experiences to kind of showcase what are the things that the actual roles are looking for. And then we spend all month, we, and we tell candidates by themselves to, if you want to do this on your own, spend a couple of hours really just like deep diving everything you did in the experience and kind of showcasing it then into these big project examples, kind of grouping these examples together and showing what are the main things that you own so that when you put them into an AI bot to kind of

parse up and polish up the writing, it's so much better than if you just said, hey, I did these two sentences and let the bot issue is when

they're using again those AI tools kind of outsource the thinking and have it do that part instead.

David (26:17)
Got it, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yep.

Ilan (26:17)
curious.

I'm curious as maybe kind of a final thought here, Nabeel, given everything that you're working there was one specific thing that you would recommend every PM

to stay up to date and as you said grow alongside AI. What would that be?

Nabeel Khan (26:40)
Yeah, so I'm going give you two actually. So one is really going to be like one method. I'll give you one methodology and one tool. It's like you 100 % should be used on the tool side. That's kind of the easy one. You 100 % should be using sort of like the prototyping tools. And that's why we're actually within Skill Atlas. Our platform is going to have these sort of step-by-step instructions wherein it'll prompt you on how to actually build a project using these Bolt or V0 tools. So they'll be embedded into our platform.

They'll kind show you, here's exactly how you would do it. But in terms of methodology, the thing that a PM should really do to stand out, at the end of the day, it's that deep understanding for the user. And so the frameworks I would leverage, every PM should know about the jobs to be done framework, making ideal customer profiles, translating that to user journey, using that to create user stories, and then being able to create holistic prototype experiences, or what used to be in the past PRDs from that.

That's basically a full, that's what we work with a lot of our users on, is going through that full step-by-step battle. Okay, you have a user, how do you understand what they do, where do want them to go, how do you craft the experience for them? That's really what translates into, again, whether it's user stories you put into a document or whether it's prototyping instructions you put into an LLM or a prompting tool, that's really that foundation.

David (28:00)
Hey, I've got a question. what about that are folks? What advice would you have for them?

Nabeel Khan (28:07)
Yeah, yeah. We actually work with a decent number of companies too, to kind of help them define their product operations and train their PMs. So one of the things that is interesting dynamic with these companies is as kind like I was mentioning before, like as these tools are coming out, companies are just as confused as the users. They don't really know what tools they should be leveraging or setting up to have like their team be shaped around in the future. And so I think like when it comes to, I'm going to keep going back to kind of that main.

like user empathy and really the big thing with a product manager is how can you sort of take what the user is doing and connect it to your sort of North Star goals. the sort of answer I give a lot of people is seniority, what it looks like or how you test for seniority is when you can give a person really a

broader scope of a project to work on with less instruction. And so like if I was to say, hey, I want to hire a CMO and I want them to get a million views on my application in six months, they should know, okay, that means that I have to start by uploading sort of like looking at existing marketing funnels. Maybe I have to hire a team to see how we can expand. Maybe I have to go into the process of actually like setting up analytics dashboards and then running campaigns, et cetera. So they can kind of tell you what are those step-by-step processes.

Same thing that you're going to be as a company should be looking forward to is if you give a person an increasingly complex business problem with less direction, how do they sort of break that project up into phases? And how do they use that to tie to the overarching business value? That's how you really test for those core skills, especially as you get more and more into the senior levels too.

David (29:47)
Love it. That's great advice.

Ilan (29:49)
Yeah, so a couple of just final questions for you, Nabeel. The first one is where can folks learn more about Skill Atlas if they're interested?

Nabeel Khan (30:00)
Yeah, so for right now, the biggest thing I would say is just to connect with myself on LinkedIn. We have a community of PMs, basically that's about 3,500 people. LinkedIn is going to be, I think, the biggest way to keep in touch with me for right now, especially as we do some of these broader product releases.

Ilan (30:17)
Awesome. And that answered the second question, is where should people find you?

Nabeel Khan (30:22)
Yeah, yeah. LinkedIn's probably going to be best way. Again, either that community, which is communities in my LinkedIn. I love to interact with people and kind of help them along on their careers. gives us really good insight as to what's going on in the market and as how these companies are changing. And so, love to connect with as many people first on LinkedIn.

Ilan (30:38)
Fantastic. Well, Nabeel, we really appreciate your time. This was a fascinating conversation. I love how you're thinking about upskilling product managers and it sounds like also upskilling companies ⁓ so that they're leveraging their product teams as best as possible. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us.

David (30:39)
Awesome.

Nabeel Khan (31:01)
So yeah, thanks for having me on. It's been really great to talk.

David (31:04)
All right. And ⁓ so thanks again to Nabeel for joining us today. we are very excited to hear what our audience has to say Let us know. You can find us at all the socials at @pandcpodcast

We'll catch you at the next one.

Ilan (31:20)
Catch you at the next one.