#31: How AI Is Transforming Product Building, Leadership, and the Future of Work

In this episode of Divot, we sit down with Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer for AI at Microsoft, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way products are built, teams collaborate, and companies scale in an increasingly automated world.

Aparna has spent her career at the intersection of technology and human behavior, from leading product at Google and YouTube to shaping Microsoft’s AI strategy today. In this conversation, she shares how the rapid acceleration of AI is compressing years of innovation into months, forcing leaders to rethink how they build, experiment, and make decisions.

We discuss what it means to design AI-native products, why traditional development cycles no longer apply, and how the best teams are adapting to constant change. Aparna also reflects on leadership in an era of uncertainty, the importance of curiosity over certainty, and what it takes to build systems that genuinely help people work better.

This episode offers a thoughtful look at the future of work, product development, and the mindset required to build responsibly in an AI-driven world.

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Timestamps:
01:44 – “This Time Is Different”: Why AI Adoption Is Unprecedented
02:13 – The Brick Phone Story: How Slow Adoption Used to Be
03:32 – The “Scanned Brochure” Moment: Early Web vs Early AI
04:27 – AI Agents at Work: Prompts as the New PRDs
05:37 – Designers Are Unlocked: Building End-to-End With AI Tools
06:26 – The “Barbell Team”: Model Whisperers + Product Builders
07:31 – How Aparna Stays Ahead: Build Things (No Shortcuts)
09:55 – Thin Steps vs Fat Steps: What Got Easy, What Became the Bottleneck
11:17 – Making AI a “Contact Sport”: Building Reflexive AI Habits
14:33 – Why Startups Win Next: Rethinking Workflows Beats “Just Add AI”
15:54 – The Data Flywheel Problem: Designing for “Learnability”
17:16 – The Next Phase: Products That Improve via UI Reward Signals
17:45 – Small Teams That Ship: Why ~10 People Can Build Fast Now
18:42 – Startup Opportunities: Rewriting the Web for Agents

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