Kevin Weil, CPO at OpenAI, discusses hiring criteria for product managers and why the company struggles to integrate junior PMs into its fast-moving, research-heavy environment.
“And we have trouble sometimes with more junior PMs because of this, because it's just not the place where someone is going to come in and say, okay, you know, here's, here's the landscape. Here is your area. I want you to go do this thing. And that's what you want as a, as an early career PM. We just, I mean, no one here has time and the nobody, the problems are too ill formed and we're figuring them all out as we go.”
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More from Kevin Weil
Disclosure
Weil: OpenAI will not build industry-specific vertical AI products
“There are immense opportunities in every industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI based products that improve upon the state of the art. And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want to, we couldn't, if we did want to.”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 26:04OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
Insight
Weil: OpenAI minimizes scaffolding because rapid advances erase model limits
“We don't spend that much time building scaffolding around the parts that don't match that because our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever, you know, the current set of limitations are.”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 31:38OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Weil admits OpenAI no longer holds a massive 12-month lead
“It used to be that OpenAI had this, like, massive model lead, you know, 12 months or something ahead of everybody else. That's not true anymore. You know, I like to think we still have a lead. I'd argue that we do, but it's certainly not a massive one.”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 33:28OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
Insight
Weil: Organizations should stay PM-light to prevent micromanagement
“Too many PMs causes problems. You know, we'll like fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. So I think that the, I think it's a good thing when you have a PM that has that is working with maybe slightly too many engineers, because it means that th…”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 48:25OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Weil predicts ML engineers will soon embed in every product team
“And so I think you're going to want sort of quasi researcher machine learning engineer types as part of pretty much every team because fine tuning a model is just going to be part of the core workflow for building most products.”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 58:37OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Weil: OpenAI manages 400 million weekly users with 30-40 support staff
“With 400 plus weekly 400 plus million weekly active users, we get, you know, a lot of inbound tickets, right? I don't know how many customer support folks we have, but it's not very many. 3040, I'm not sure. Way, way smaller than you would have at any comparab…”
Kevin WeilApr 10, 2025▶ 1:01:32OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
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