Chennapragada: 0-to-1 product building requires embracing chaos to avoid local hill climbing
Aparna Chennapragada · Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada · May 18, 2025 · at 38:50
Aparna Chennapragada (Microsoft CPO, ex-Google) discusses product development frameworks, drawing on her experience leading Google Lens.
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“When you look at the solve stage, There are wide lurches. You gotta be very comfortable with the fact that you're day one thinking about, hey, a plant detection tool, and then day 15, you're like, oh, actually, the tech is really good for translating, you know, foreign language. By the way, this is not hypothetical. This is what we kind of, like, looked at in Google Lens back, back then, and said, okay, like, where, what is the intersection, and so on. So, from the outside, it looks like chaos. But actually in the, and you should be very comfortable, not only tolerant, I think you should be, like, should have an appetite for that. Because the last thing you want is prematurely, like, you know, fix on one local hill, and then you're climbing that.”
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