Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio and former leader of GitHub Copilot, discusses the transformative role of AI in product strategy. She emphasizes that successful AI integration is more than just adding features; it requires a comprehensive rethinking of strategies to enhance customer outcomes. Inbal also shares insights on measuring AI's business impact and the critical technical skills product managers need in an AI-driven world, highlighting a customer-first mindset in all innovations.
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insights INSIGHT
AI Is A Tool, Not A Strategy
AI is a tool, not a strategy; start with the customer problem first.
Choose AI only when it clearly improves customer experience or automation for real outcomes.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Measure Business Outcomes Not AI Metrics
Define measurable success criteria tied to real business goals like CSAT, time-to-resolution, or developer velocity.
Measure those outcomes, not abstract AI metrics, to prove impact.
insights INSIGHT
Design Behavior, Not Deterministic Flows
AI shifts PM work from deterministic flows to defining desired behavior and guardrails.
Expect stochastic AI outputs and design boundaries, not exact deterministic responses.
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In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, the $18B customer engagement powerhouse trusted by over 320,000 businesses worldwide. Inbal is a trailblazer in AI-first product development. Before joining Twilio, she led the launch of GitHub Copilot—one of the most transformative AI tools for developers, reshaping how engineers write code. Now at Twilio, she’s steering a product portfolio that infuses AI into the heart of customer communications, helping companies unlock smarter, more personalized digital experiences at scale. In this conversation, Inbal shares why successful AI adoption goes far beyond adding models to features—it requires a rethinking of product strategy itself. She also dives into how Twilio measures real business impact from AI, why PMs need technical fluency more than ever, and what it takes to lead a product org into the AI-native future.
What you’ll learn: - How GitHub Copilot shaped Inbal’s approach to building AI-native products. - Why AI adoption alone is not a product strategy—and what to focus on instead. - The metrics Twilio uses to evaluate AI’s business impact. - The evolving technical skill set required for PMs in the age of AI.
Key Takeaways👇: - Beyond the Hype: Inbal’s perspective on what truly makes AI transformative for end users. - AI as Strategy, Not Feature: How to align AI capabilities with customer outcomes. - PMs in the AI Era: The must-have technical skills that will define tomorrow’s product leaders.
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