Disclosure
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Contradicted
Cohen: LinkedIn was the first company with a social feed
“We actually were the first company to have a social feed.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
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%.”
Disclosure
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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. …”
Disclosure
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”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: Small, cross-trained mission pods will win future organizational races
“And an analogy I have in mind is kind of Navy SEALs. You know, you come to training, you, they're all kind of learning. They're cross trained across multiple areas. What they specialize in is the mission. And they operate in small pods and they're very nimble …”
Disclosure
LinkedIn is re-architecting core platforms so AI can reason over code
“The platform for us as an example is re-architecting all of our core platforms so AI can reason over it. So we're building kind of this composable UI components with server side that we actually build. We're basically building for AI to be ready to bring it in…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cohen: LinkedIn's internal AI agent found vulnerabilities missed in original launches
“So we run, we walked that spec from a couple of years ago through the trust agent. Not only was it able to find all the stuff we initiated at the beginning, but all the holes that we did not catch until later.”
Insight
Tomer Cohen: AI agents fail when given raw enterprise knowledge bases
“It's not great to just give it access to your drive and say, reason all of this knowledge base. It actually does a very poor job understanding importance of the past and putting weights on stuff.”
Insight
Cohen: Alignment enables success; confusion leaves outcomes entirely to luck
“Now pulling through in the same direction doesn't mean you're going to be successful, but this gives you a chance of success and that confusion, the system only luck can save you.”
Insight
Generic product principles are useless without explicit sacrifices
“And the best principles have teeth. So saying that we should build a simple product for me is useless. Who doesn't want to build a simple product, but saying that I'm willing to sacrifice or trade off this. That's when you, that's where I get excited.”
Insight
Cohen: Product turnarounds are harder internally than zero-to-one products
“What you find is it's actually most of the time it's internally harder to do because there's so much entrenched flows and processes and metrics that people are using on that on that specific area.”
