Chennapragada: Consumer PMs fail in enterprise by ignoring governance or crippling UX
Aparna Chennapragada · Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · May 18, 2025 · at 8:15
Aparna Chennapragada, Microsoft CPO of experiences and devices, discusses the differences between building consumer products and enterprise software.
0:00 / 0:40exact quote · 40.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the enterprise, you almost have every time you think you have one use case, you really do, which is how do you make sure that the feature works well and there's governance of the feature, right? If you think about like even something as simple as sharing a link to a document, you want it to be easy, frictionless, but at the same time, you want that to be secure and kind of safe and being able to have auditability and all of those things. And often I find that When you go from consumer to enterprise, you fall into a trap of either disregarding that, right, and say, oh, you know, we'll just focus on one side of the house, or kind of overly crippling the user experience, right, and kind of, you know, leaning on the other side.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Aparna Chennapragada
Chennapragada: Microsoft built the first deep research AI agent for work
“We like, we just built this world's first agent for deep research agent made for work, right? Post train for work.”
Chennapragada: Prompt sets are replacing PRDs in the AI era
“In this day and age, if you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. I call it the prompt steps of the new PRDs, right? Like, I really insist on folks saying, if you're building new projects, new features, o…”
Chennapragada: 'Coding is dead' is fundamentally wrong; abstraction is just shifting
“A lot of folks think about, oh, you know, don't bother studying computer science, or, you know, the coding is dead, and I just fundamentally disagree. If anything, I think You know, we've always had higher and higher layers of abstraction in programming. You k…”
Chennapragada: AI pairs incredible intelligence with AOL dial-up era interfaces
“Today, I feel like there's an opposite problem. I think these things have amazing intelligence, and the interface we have largely is like the AOL, AOL dial-up modem chat bot.”
Chennapragada: Using mature metrics for zero-to-one products creates false precision
“When you're looking at something zero to one,
If you decide on a metric too prematurely, that's false precision, first of all, right?
Like, you kind of I mean, CTR, when you have, like, thousand people, doesn't mean anything.
you know, retention also may not …”
Chennapragada: Independent AI coding tools do not directly threaten GitHub's ecosystem
“And I think the, yeah, the idea again is that, you know, code generation as a tool will unlock lot more products. I mean, they're not all competitors to the fact of they're not all kind of you know doing the same job. I think when you're at the end of the day,…”