What it takes to be a top PM today | Robby Stein (Google Search)
Google Search product leader Robby Stein delivers a keynote on the evolving craft of product management in the AI era. Drawing on his experience launching Instagram Stories, Reels, and Google's AI search experiences, Stein outlines a core playbook for building beloved products: deeply understanding human needs via Jobs to Be Done, rigorously diagnosing root causes of product failure, and obsessing over craft through pain elimination and emotional delight.
- Feature lists mislead teams because consumers hire products to solve hyper-specific emotional and physical problems. Read →
- Instagram spent two years shipping failed prototypes to increase Stories sharing before uncovering the true blocker: audience anxiety around exes and family seeing casual posts. Read →
- Product craft boils down to a single question: can users tell whether the creators actually cared about the experience they shipped? Read →
- Product teams at Google use AI models to process massive libraries of open-ended user comments, pulling out non-obvious user friction that standard analytics miss. Read →
- Execution alone no longer makes a product manager valuable because generative tools and agents make shipping code cheap and fast. Read →