Podcast Summary: How I AI

Episode: “PMs who use AI will replace those who don’t”: Google’s AI Product Lead on the New PM Toolkit | Marily Nika

Date: December 1, 2025<br> Host: Claire Vo<br> Guest: Marily Nika (AI Product Lead, Google; AI educator)

Episode Overview

This episode centers on how artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing product management, featuring Marily Nika, an AI Product Lead at Google. Marily demonstrates, step-by-step, how AI can turbocharge the PM toolkit—from radically speeding up user research and PRD creation, to prototyping and stakeholder buy-in, all the way to innovative uses in evaluating product pitches. The episode provides a detailed, practical walkthrough for PMs looking to enhance their skills and workflow with the latest AI tools.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolution of the AI-Enhanced Product Manager

• Background: Marily shares her journey from “pure AI PM” working on speech recognition to today’s tool-rich, AI-enabled environment.
  • “Since 2017, when all these tools we use every day started coming up, I started figuring out how can I be an AI enhanced PM? So how can I be better at my job, have more impact, be more productive?” (03:20)
• Core Theme: Product managers must now not just build AI products but also augment their own workflows using AI.

2. Hypothetical Use Case: The Smart Fridge

• Inspiration: Marily’s viral LinkedIn post about her smart fridge’s expiry alerts for her 80-day-old Coca-Cola. Sparked a lively conversation about smart appliances' potential.
  • “I did not know my fridge could do that... I put my PM hat on. What an interesting insight.” (04:20)

3. Rapid, AI-Powered User Research

• Traditional User Research vs. AI Methods: Examines how AI can compress hours-long research into minutes.
  • Tool: Perplexity AI (with Reddit discussions filter).
  • Method: Marily demonstrates how to instantly tap into global opinions and debates:
    1. Search “Would families be interested in a smart fridge?” (07:20)
    2. Use persona-based prompting: Have one AI agent argue “for” and one “against,” and request a multi-round debate.
  • Major Benefit: Surfaces nuanced adoption barriers and feature requirements incredibly fast.
  • “Now this alone is pure gold and the treasure. However, what I love doing is taking things one step further…create two items, one that is pro smart fridge and one that is against smart fridge… and have these two agents debate…” (07:20)
  • Claire’s Insight: Prompting the AI to generate debate avoids the tendency of LLMs to be overly agreeable.
    • “It’s just a really great little hack on getting higher quality, more critical thinking out of these LLMs…” (10:00)

4. Seamless Tool-Hopping: Features to PRD to Prototype

• From Insights to Requirements:
  • Copy AI-derived minimum feature set and paste into a custom GPT in ChatGPT for instant, voice-styled PRD generation.
    • “Now I have created an AI product, GPT as I like to call it, that has a template of my favorite PRD… it outputs a PRD in the style that I speak in my own voice.” (11:17)
• Prototyping:
  • Tool: V0 (also mentions Google AI Studio).
  • Process: Paste the PRD into the prototyping tool to generate a UI mockup.
  • Insight: A well-crafted PRD as input improves prototype quality, even over more direct prompting.
    • “The number of tweaks I had to do later on really got me overwhelmed, tired versus me starting spending some more time in order to make sure the input is very, very good.” (15:58)
• Outcome: End-to-end, this workflow reduces multi-day effort to under 30 minutes, even with tweaks.

5. The Power of Prototyping for Influence and Stakeholder Buy-in

• Effective Communication:
  • Prototyping is more persuasive than static docs in product reviews, especially for skeptics.
    • “You communicate your vision and your passion more effectively. Versus here's a PRD that I turned into a deck for you so that I can walk you through it. It's just so much more. It adds credibility, it adds value.” (17:00)
• UI Review: Fun tangent on fridge dashboards (door status, temps, usage), and why local privacy features resonate with users.
  • “Hundred percent local processing. Look at this. It has a little badge that shows you so you can feel safe. Yeah, this is great. I would buy this.” (19:52)

6. AI-Generated Video Demos for Vision Setting

• Tools Discussed: Google Flow, OpenAI’s Sora
• Workflow: Text-to-video platforms used to prototype visual (and audio) product pitches for stakeholders, showing potential user experiences.
  • “I may actually generate myself a Sora opening … I think that would be a very interesting. I think we should do.” (26:36)
• Live Demo: Generated fridge videos, including playful commentary on the quirks of generative models (multiple screens, character swaps).
  • “I think the man has disappeared and it's replaced by a lady… Well, we don't need him anymore. We're good.” (26:18)
• PM Tip: Combine feature lists with “user-centered narratives” to improve video prompts.
  • “I might generate a narrative here and try the like pick a hero story from the narrative as opposed to over indexing so much on the features. But the quality is amazing.” (27:32)
• Speed: The end-to-end workflow (user research → features → PRD → prototype UI → video pitch) is possible in less than half an hour.
  • “If we didn't comment and laugh, it would have been like a 20-minute workflow. So it's just…” (27:41)

7. Novel Use Case: AI Judging Demo Day at Product Bootcamp

• Scenario: Marily runs an AI Product Management Bootcamp with a Demo Day where an AI judge—built in NotebookLM—analyzes audio pitches and picks winners.
  • “I recorded the audio of every single pitch and I uploaded these separate files… This notebook actually has all these presentations. And then I went to the audio overview and I added specific instructions to focus on for these AI hosts.” (32:22)
• Procedure: Upload audio, instruct AI to choose winners based on criteria (e.g., impact, storytelling), and have AI hosts announce results interactively.
  • “It does listen to all the audio and it's just such an amazing use case. Everyone loves it.” (34:40)
• Interactive Experience: AI hosts conduct a podcast-style winner announcement, with real-time Q&A.
  • “This is incredible because it's not like this one agent we're used to talking to. It's you're talking to them and then the other person is responding… you really feel they're real and it's just magical.” (36:00)

8. PM Mindset: Embrace, Don't Fear, AI

• Key Mindset Shift: PMs who actively use AI will “replace” those who don’t—not by losing jobs to AI, but by being overtaken by their more AI-empowered colleagues.
  • “It's not like AI is taking over a role. If anything, PMs that use AI are the ones that are going to take over the role of people who don't use AI. So it's just so important to explore and adapt and see which tools fit to your workflow.” (31:41)

9. Lightning Round: Prompting Best Practices

• Claire’s Question: What’s your technique when GenAI tools aren’t delivering what you want?
• Marily’s Answer: Reset the instance and use AI itself to generate a better, more detailed prompt.
  • “The best thing you can do is just kill that instance and start over and use Gen AI to help you write the best prompt. … The longer the prompt is, the better it's going to be and the less likely to have more iterations.” (38:11)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On rapid AI research: “I can literally see what the entirety of the world is thinking about… And we did that in seconds. And it’s just such an incredible, incredible tool to have.” (07:20)
• On the AI-PM future: “PMs that use AI are the ones that are going to take over the role of people who don’t use AI.” (31:41)
• On the new PM workflow: “We have done full end to end user research… come up with a highly defensible set of features… turned that PRD into a prototype… and paired it with video-generated visuals… that package can actually be built in 15 to 20 minutes… just something that was never, ever, ever possible before.” (30:16)
• On AI pitching: “Imagine your leadership or even your cross functional partners to be able to experience your product idea. Imagine just how much more effective the meeting would be.” (19:08)
• On video gen quirks: “My favorite part of this UI is the door status widget that tells you if the door is open or closed.” (18:06)

Important Timestamps

• 03:20 — Marily on being an AI-enhanced PM
• 04:20 — The smart fridge user experience sparks new product ideas
• 07:18–09:54 — Real-time AI user research, persona debate, and feature extraction
• 11:17 — Generating a feature-driven PRD with AI
• 14:06–15:58 — Jump from PRD to prototype using V0 and value of high-quality prompts
• 17:00 — Prototyping as an influence tool in product reviews
• 19:08 — Leadership/stakeholder experience with clickable AI UI
• 21:31 — Using AI to generate promotional videos and user narratives
• 27:41 — End-to-end demo workflow done in under 30 minutes
• 31:41 — “PMs who use AI will replace those who don’t”
• 32:22–36:59 — AI as a demo-day judge (NotebookLM live demo)
• 38:11 — Pro prompting tip: Kill the instance and use AI to write your prompt

Resources and Where to Find Marily

• Follow Marily on LinkedIn for AI product management and building content.
• AI Product Management Bootcamp: Build and launch a product, get hands-on engineering and PM experience, plus three certifications. Next cohort is in December. (Details on Maven)
  • “You can be helpful by asking people to join my bootcamp. … You get to actually build a full product and start your own company because I assign engineers to every team.” (38:41)

Tone & Takeaways

• Tone: Casual, witty, candid and practical. Both host and guest trade real-world tips, playful banter, and honest reflections on what works and what breaks with GenAI tools.
• Takeaway: The AI-powered PM stacks emerging now radically compress the time and effort to go from idea to pitch, making product building both faster and higher quality. The greatest career risk for PMs is not leveraging these new tools to their fullest.

For full transcripts and more resources, visit howiaipod.com.