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Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

businessinsider.com

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Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#111

Post by trog »

dcreater wrote: post #97
LtWorf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the difference? Does anyone actually know?

Product Management = Big picture product vision. Features and Priorities. Market trends/strategy, Voice of customer Project Management = Day to day to execution, logistics, resources, schedules. Scheduling meetings, sending out meeting minutes etc Program Management = Team management towards delivering business goals/product launches on schedule Where its tricky is the differentiation between project and program mana…

What actually happens in most (small) businesses is one person gets lumped with all these jobs and the business is regularly surprised they're constantly over-worked and under-delivering

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#112

Post by LtWorf »

thwarted wrote: post #101

> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. There's that word "just". There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with piz…

Unfortunately it seems he went from professor to grifter and it paid off.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#113

Post by LtWorf »

gregorygoc wrote: post #103
crazygringo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders. > Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements…

Any efficiency gains which come from cleaner organization structure are gone because of the lossy translation mechanism between a PM and Eng team. You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it from someone in this role. Perceived enjoyment of one’s role is a separate topic, but not completely orthogonal. If someone just wants to code and…

> As engineering becomes less expensive with generative models

So, not in this decade?

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#114

Post by J_McQuade »

megaloblasto wrote: post #107
wolvesechoes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, on the other hand, tried to vibe-code BDF-like ODE solver. Not some rough prototype, because I can do the rough prototype easily myself, but something robust and fast, with event handling etc. AI couldn't do it. Actually it couldn't do correctly anything more complex than out-of-the-textbook explicit RK4, but this is something undergrad students do while learning numerical methods for the first time. And solvers a…

I see what your saying but I would argue that vibe coding an ODE solver is an incorrect use of the tool. For something like and ODE solver you need to have a really solid understanding of what data structures you will use,and solid general knowledge of the numerical methods you want to implement. Then, you can use AI as an assistant when you get stuck, or to deepen your understanding, look over your implementation, e…

> I see what your saying but I would argue that vibe coding an ODE solver is an incorrect use of the tool.

Agreed. No true Scotsman would use the tool this way.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#115

Post by akdor1154 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

I have but only once, would work again with him in a heartbeat. Absolute gold when you find a good one.

However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#117

Post by terminatornet »

jmkni wrote: post #87
zkry wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this line of reasoning holds. The only thing people should look at are peer reviewed studies, lots of them ideally, and with no conflict of interest. Who's getting productivity gains? What kinds of work are they doing? What doesn't work so well? All of these questions should be investigated by studies. People feeling productivity gains doesn't imply the gains exist. Otherwise it sounds like "many people…

While you're looking at peer reviewed studies, I'm over here being way more productive with AI and getting shit done.

> When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

Maybe you just think you're being more productive ;)

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#119

Post by exogenousdata »

akdor1154 wrote: post #115
shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

I have but only once, would work again with him in a heartbeat. Absolute gold when you find a good one. However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.

Same. Only one. And they were a real multiplier.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#120

Post by moi2388 »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
xenotux wrote: post #19

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can…

> How many times... Literally all the time? Every single month? I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding. The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered. Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineerin…

You have a full backlog with all requirements clear? The edge cases are known? I’m calling bullshit.
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