Lessons From Three Product Leaders Living in the Future

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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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

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Where to find Sharmeen:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

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Where to find JZ:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

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Where to find Henrik:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

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Join The Skip:

• Skip Coach

• Skip Community

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Find The Skip:

• Website

• Substack

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

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