Tech Shift Survival Guide with Aparna Sinha, SVP of Product at Vercel

Sep 30, 2025

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How do you build products in the middle of an AI tornado, stay ahead of rapidly evolving technologies, and lead teams through uncertainty? Aparna Sinha, SVP of Product at Vercel, shares her playbook for navigating the future of product development in the AI era.

Host Francois Ajenstat kicks off the conversation by exploring how Aparna’s unconventional journey has shaped the leadership approach she brings to her daily work at Vercel. Aparna also reflects on the early days of Kubernetes, her time at McKinsey, and what it means to go from building for users to building with users.

You’ll hear how Vercel is redefining developer experience with frameworks like Next.js and tools like v0, and why product agility, not long-term roadmaps, is now the cornerstone of innovation. Francois and Aparna also cover future challenges and opportunities enterprises are facing as a result of unfaltering AI usage.

Whether you’re shipping code in the AI era or leading platform strategy at scale, this episode delivers hard-won lessons on product velocity, strategic clarity, and building what’s next.

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Guest Bio

Aparna Sinha is Senior Vice President of Product at Vercel, where she leads product strategy across performance, developer experience, and AI-driven tooling. With over a decade of experience building developer platforms, she is known for bridging cutting-edge infrastructure with intuitive product design.

Previously, Aparna spent nearly ten years at Google, leading teams behind Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and developer tools for Google Cloud. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and advises startups through Pear VC, with a focus on AI/ML, cloud, and dev tools.

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Guest Quote

“My passion is technology, and that often starts with understanding what the fundamental breakthrough is. Once I understand that, it becomes a lot easier to talk to a customer about what it could mean for them. That requires sitting in their shoes, really knowing their environment, their goals, and the pressures they face. Then you marry that technical insight to user need, and that’s where the real value gets created.” – Aparna Sinha

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Time Stamps

00:00 Episode Start

01:50 Aparna's unconventional career path

06:20 Applying lessons from the cloud revolution to today's world

11:45 Finding your passion

16:20 Vercel's journey from Next.js to V0

19:10 Staying in touch with what is now

20:45 Roadmaps are no longer written in pen

23:00 Leapfrogging of models

28:00 Aparna's "Oh Sh*t Moment"

34:00 Advice for building in the AI era

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