Vishria: AI product development completely inverts traditional product management
Eric Vishria · Everyone Is Still Undersizing the AI Market | Eric Vishria · Invest Like The Best · Aug 11, 2026 · at 15:23
Benchmark General Partner Eric Vishria argues that AI product managers must deeply grasp model mechanics rather than remaining detached from technical implementation.
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“I think it's actually a complete inversion of how product development used to work to how product development happens now. And product development, you know, it always used to be, so you'd always say like, hey, product managers, you trained, oh, the product manager shouldn't, you know, should understand the technology, but like really shouldn't be thinking about implementation and shouldn't be specifying implementation and shouldn't be doing this and doing that. And the product manager's job is to really understand the customer and translate that problem to the engineers so that the engineers build a solution like that was traditional product management. Like, good luck doing that now. That's a horrible way to do it. You can't do it that way. You actually really need to understand the nuances of model capabilities, what they're great at and where they fail, and you need to understand the customer problem. And put those together and bridge those gaps to build valuable solutions.”
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