Tomer Cohen
Former Chief Product Officer, LinkedIn. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorhostinvestorLinkedIn ↗
Over a 14-year career at LinkedIn, Cohen served as Chief Product Officer, steering global product strategy and modernizing the content feed. He also hosts the Building One podcast, interviewing prominent technology builders and product operators.
2shows
4appearances
77statements
12resolved
8supported
3contradicted
67%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Tomer Cohen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cohen: LinkedIn is replacing its APM program with Associate Product Builders
“We used to have our APM program, which this is about it's ending this year. And then starting January, we're going to start having our APB program and they're going to come into LinkedIn. We're going to teach them how to code design and PM at LinkedIn.”
Cohen: Tech companies will need fewer specialized roles than before
“I think there are system builders that empower full stack builders and then you have people who are specialized, but I don't think we need as many specialized people as we did in the past.”
Cohen: Third-party AI tools never work off the shelf at enterprise scale
“So you can't just go and bring a third party tool. And have it work on the LinkedIn stack. In fact, that's one of our biggest learnings. It never works. Never works.”
Cohen: LinkedIn introduces formal 'Full Stack Builder' job title internally
“We have a full stack builder title formally inside of the organization and we are gradually putting people in that bucket.”
Cohen: LinkedIn was the first company with a social feed
“We actually were the first company to have a social feed.”
Product leaders must lead with strong beliefs, not evidence
“I tend to lead with beliefs versus evidence. I try to prove my beliefs with evidence, but I don't lead with evidence.”
AI-first PMs no longer control the user experience, only the ingredients
“When you become an AI first kind of leader is that there's a realization that you don't control the experience anymore. You control the ingredients.”
Cohen: LinkedIn intentionally curtailed record viral feed growth to prioritize quality
“We made a core decision to curtail growth even at the expense of engagement that we've never seen at LinkedIn growing at such record levels to make sure we go back to the drawing board and we focus on trust and quality.”
Cohen: Product leaders must give up deterministic control when building AI
“You don't control the experience. AI is not deterministic. If you ever had an interaction with JGPT, it's, you know, you're, most of the time you're trying to, hard to anticipate how it would respond. And I give the analogy of a chef in a restaurant where befo…”
Cohen: LLM pre-training on public data diminishes historic incumbent data moats
“Technologies like GPT are already trained on all public data. They've read every book, every healthcare book. They've trained on every piece of literature, art, best practices. This, the whole idea of the pre-trained is one of the biggest inflection points of …”
Cohen: 70% of job skill requirements will change by 2030
“When we look at, like, the skills required to do your job, By 2030, which is literally four years from now, sounds a long time, but 40 years, four years from now, it will change by 70%.”
Cohen: LinkedIn replaced rigid PM trios with quarterly builder pods
“One of the things we've done as an example, we kind of started to do the idea of pods. We're no longer large teams. We assemble a team, ideally a full stack builder is coming together. And, you know, it's less about, can I have an engineer design PM working to…”
Cohen: AI Design Tools Will Not Be a Winner-Take-All Market
“What you'll see that ultimately, I don't think there's going to be a winner takes all because the starting point of You know, the customer or the user will dictate a lot how simple they are for that use case.”
Tomer Cohen: AI maintenance agent fixes nearly 50% of LinkedIn's broken builds
“In fact, I think we're close to 50% of all those builds being done by the maintenance agent.”
Cohen: Releasing AI tools without change management yields only 5% adoption
“I think I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt. Doesn't work this way. Some will adapt. That tends to be kind of your cutting edge, five percent of talent that just wants new tools and they have a bias for change. …”
Cohen: LinkedIn now evaluates AI fluency in hiring and performance reviews
“So when we hire right now, we look for those, and then this upcoming cycle, we do a biannual. It's, that's going to be part of the performance evaluation piece, and we announced it to everybody”
Tomer Cohen: Product teams should set massive goals instead of under-promising
“I actually believe in, especially when it comes to products to really set ambitious goals, but then try to over deliver on them. Like really said, like, what are you trying to, almost like the opposite, right? People are like under, you know, underplaying it a…”
Cohen: Product turnarounds require carved-out cohorts unless the CEO accepts companywide metric drops
“I think when you do minus one to one, it's really hard unless the CEO says, I don't care about, you know, how the company performs for the next two years. We're going to go for it. If you want to keep the site, keep growing and the experience keep growing, car…”
LinkedIn forced all product teams to scrap their roadmaps in Fall 2022
“And one of the things we've done there was really asking the teams to completely revisit their entire roadmap. This is fall of twenty-twenty-two.”
Cohen: AI will become so intimate that users experience separation anxiety
“Yeah, I think we all, I think we're in for AI of, AI-nophobia at that point, where you're gonna get to a point where AI is gonna feel so intimate, so personal, that it would actually feel concerning to you to be away from it.”
Cohen: AI strategy must originate from the CEO, not be delegated
“But for many product builders, AI is something they delegate. I mean, it's like really delegated to the AI team or the engineering team. I think AI strategy starts from the CEO and makes its way down.”
Cohen: Massive startup innovation will emerge in AI model routing tiers
“If I think of like why I would expect to see some massive innovation and startups to show up, it's in this tier to really allow people to leverage multiple models at multiple call centers and resources and efficiencies, and then completely mask it from the dev…”
Cohen: Job skillsets changed by 25% over the past five years
“The skillset necessary to do a job changed by 25% in the last five to six years.”
The other half of the tape: Tomer Cohen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tomer's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Former Chief Product Officer, LinkedIn | 2 | 42 | 67% 6/9 | full record on 20VC → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Former Chief Product Officer, LinkedIn | 2 | 35 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |