Satya Nadella: "We used to have product managers, designers, front-end engineers, and back-end engineers. We combined them. They're all full-stack builders."

That's the CEO of a $3.69T company.

And he called it "the biggest change in knowledge work since PCs."

----

I've seen a few people post the headline this week (even though the clip is from January). Honestly, I think they missed the context around it.

I'd point out 3 things:

First, look at the question he was answering.

He said this in response to the question "Four years ago, you had the same number of employees, but you put $90 billion onto the top line and doubled income. How did that happen?" Why that's relevant is he actually did bring this point up specifically as a reason they've been able to keep headcount flat while improving outcomes. That's wild.

Second, the quote is about LinkedIn's APM program.

A few people are conveniently leaving this out. He's talking about LinkedIn's shift from an APM to an APB program. He's not saying Microsoft is holistically merging these roles. In fact, later in his response, he actually mentions a different model where there are actually 2 people instead of 1: a full-stack builder or product manager + a systems engineer at the backend.

Third, he goes further to explain the new key skill.

I think this is actually the most important point. Satya goes on to say "to build an AI product today, it starts with evals. Evals are done by product managers." And he emphasizes how important this is: "There's a new loop, and you have to structurally change." That's the real signal, I think.

See the full video yourself: youtu.be/5nCbHsCG334?t=…

----

So what are the practical takeaways for PMs?

a) Adopt the skills of a builder

b) Learn what makes building AI different

c) Ramp up hard on the evals skill in particular

Here are the resources to get there.

(♻️ Save and repost this)

a) Builder skills

• The builder PM roadmap: rb.gy/xlwgsp

• Claude code for non-technical PMs: shorturl.at/ZFU4g

• GitHub for PMs: news.aakashg.com/p/gith…

• PMs shipping to production: bit.ly/4zh7H9J

b) Building AI products

• AI fundamentals: youtube.com/watch?v=Rls…

• RAG v finetuning: tinyurl.com/y8sfdc6f

• AI strategy: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-p…

• AI pricing: short.do/e7zadP

c) Evals

• First principles: youtu.be/Raa3qjEBvKE

• Vibe eval process: bit.ly/4wZtXnj

• Error analysis process: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-e…

• Frontier quality evals: linkedin.com/posts/aagu…

----

📌 Want these in one roadmap? Comment 'EVALS'

I'm curious what you think. Is the product builder role going to expand beyond junior roles and AI products?

#productmanagement #productbuilders