Productside Stories
AI in Product Management: Lessons from Pawana Burlakoti
Featured Guest:
Pawana Burlakoti | Product Management Executive and a frequent speaker at ProductCampRTP
09/29/2026
Summary
In this episode of Productside Stories, Nicole Tieche sits down with Pawana Burlakoti, Product Management Executive and a frequent speaker at ProductCampRTP, for a candid look at how an experienced product leader is building AI-ready, empowered product teams.
Pawana shares how a data analytics role and a lot of curious questions (who cares about this, where does the data come from, how do you measure value) led a mentor to point her toward product management. She explains why the hardest part of the job is matching the pace of the business, and why the tools and frameworks that worked in one organization may not be the right ones in the next.
The conversation moves through her product philosophy, where UX and research sit inside the product organization as one continuous discovery and delivery stream, and what a cross-portfolio view reveals about building core capabilities once. From there, Pawana gets practical about AI in product management: vibe coding, faster prototyping, AI-assisted jobs-to-be-done research, and a “learn and play” approach where every team is empowered to experiment and share.
She closes with what she looks for when hiring product managers for AI, how she grows early-career PMs into leaders, and why she sees this moment as an opportunity, not a threat. Last year was about understanding AI. This year is the applying stage.
“One of the goals for the team is learn and play, because a lot of technology is coming at us really fast, and it’s changing really fast.”
Pawana Burlakoti“That job of making good decisions for the product is not going to go away. What is going to be different is how you make the decision, how quickly you can make it.”
Pawana Burlakoti“Last year was all about understanding what it meant, getting over the fear of whatever it was, learning, embracing, and educating yourself. And this year is the applying stage.”
Pawana Burlakoti
Key Takeaways
Learn and play comes before the AI roadmap.
- Pawana made it almost an OKR: every team has a goal to learn and apply something with AI, and they choose what. Getting comfortable with the tools first is what builds the judgment to know which problems are ready for AI and which are not.
Product sense is still the hiring bar.
- For engineering, she hires AI engineers and AI-native developers. For product, she still looks for strong product sense and a track record of hitting business and client outcomes, plus tangible proof the candidate has built or learned something with AI on their own, without being prompted.
Put UX and research inside product.
- When product, design, and engineering each chase their own department goals, the client ends up in a three-way pull. Pawana advocates for UX, with a heavy research focus, sitting in the product organization so the client hears one collective voice.
Build core capabilities once.
- Across a portfolio, nearly every product needs data ingestion, insight generation, and audit-ready compliance. A bird’s-eye view lets you build those core systems once, with every product as a consumer, so customers move between products without feeling like they are starting over.
Every product manager can lead.
- Empowered teams don’t wait for a people-management title. Even early-stage PMs can lead their engineering teams, guide the business, be the voice of the customer, and bring the chaos of cross-team work together.
Chapters
- 00:00:00 – From Data Curiosity to Product Management: Pawana’s Career Start
- 00:02:39 – The Biggest Product Management Challenge: Matching the Pace of the Business
- 00:04:36 – Pawana’s Product Philosophy: Why Product and UX Belong Together
- 00:07:09 – Cross-Portfolio Insights: Building Core Capabilities Once
- 00:09:39 – How Product Teams Use AI Today: Learn, Play, Share
- 00:12:34 – Hiring Product Managers in the AI Era: Product Sense and Curiosity
- 00:15:58 – How to Grow Empowered Product Managers and Leaders
- 00:19:26 – What’s Next: Why This Is the “Applying Stage” for AI in Product
Why Listen to This Episode?
In this practical, forward-looking episode, you’ll gain:
- A simple “learn and play” model for getting an entire product team experimenting with AI, without a mandate on what to learn
- The exact mix of product sense and hands-on AI curiosity one SVP looks for when hiring product managers
- A clear case for moving UX and research into the product organization, and what it fixes for your clients
- Real examples of AI in product management: prototyping, jobs-to-be-done templates, competitive intelligence, and a best-practice repository built in an evening
Pawana’s message is worth holding onto: the fundamentals of good product management haven’t gone away. What’s changed is how fast you can apply them.
From Data Curiosity to Product Management: Pawana’s Career Start
Nicole Tieche | 00:00:00 – 00:00:33
Hi everyone, I’m Nicole Tieche, your host of our segment Trailblazing Women in Product Management. Today our guest is Pawana Burlakoti, Product Management Executive and a frequent speaker at Product Camps. Pawana is passionate about product and mentoring up-and-coming product teams, and I’m very excited to have her with us today to share her learnings with our product management community. So welcome, Pawana.
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:00:33
Thank you, Nicole. Glad to be here.
Nicole Tieche | 00:00:34
Great, fantastic. My first question is always a fun one: how did you get started in product management?
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:00:45 – 00:02:14
Well, I think all of us from product teams, in various positions, have a very different story about how we started. Mine maybe isn’t as unique as others. I was working toward identifying some data patterns in the product at the company I was working for at the time. After building some models and really working with what the data can do and what insights it can bring, I had these questions: Who cares about it? Where do we get the data? What does this mean? How do you actually measure value?
A lot of those questions were really, organically, product management questions. I just didn’t know I was asking them. I was curious about it. I was very fortunate to have an amazing manager and mentor who recognized that curiosity in me, and some skills that I had, and suggested that I actually pursue a career in product management.
And so we got started. I got a lot of on-the-job training, but also a lot of very good formal product management best practices training along the way. It was probably good timing, because product management as a function was getting more mature, more defined, more recognized, and not just a hidden function in the organization at the time. And so, yeah, it was many years ago now.
I still love that I found this career path and this journey, and I really love being in product management.
Nicole Tieche | 00:02:14 – 00:02:39
That’s great. I love that it was just an innate curiosity you had, and those questions guided you to product management. We know there can be some great days, successes, and accomplishments in product management, but there can also be challenges that need to be overcome in this discipline. Can you share one of your biggest challenges in product management and how you addressed it?
The Biggest Product Management Challenge: Matching the Pace of the Business
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:02:39 – 00:04:22
Yes. I think a lot of it is around meeting the pace of the business. I’ve worked in a lot of different industries and different sizes of companies, and they all have their own speed that they move at and the complexity that they move in. So as a product manager or a product leader, you might have all the tricks and tools in the world, but it’s really about learning when to apply what, based on the company you’re working for and the life cycle of the product itself.
Maybe you’re really a zero-to-one innovator, and you’ve been given a product portfolio that is at a very mature state with a very large customer footprint, and you’re trying to see if the product needs to evolve into something different, or you’re potentially looking at sunsetting that product. Those need very different skill sets. So I think the challenge really taps into your core strength in product management, which is listening and understanding the need.
And not necessarily always your customers’ needs, so that you can build the best product, but also your business needs: what those goals are, where the organization is at that stage, and what kind of product management skills, tool sets, and frameworks you need to apply at the time. I would say that is the biggest challenge, because businesses tend to be dynamic and they have changing needs. And so whatever worked for you in a previous organization, or even a different department, might not be the only way to do product management today.
So I would say it’s really understanding the pace, the direction, and the need of the business, and then applying the right skill sets and frameworks of product management at the time.
Nicole Tieche | 00:04:22 – 00:04:36
That’s great. And you’re always evolving and always learning. It sounds like such a journey, always a growth journey for sure. Can you tell us more about your product philosophy?
Pawana’s Product Philosophy: Why Product and UX Belong Together
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:04:36 – 00:06:53
Sure. It took a while for this to become a philosophy for me. It was a way of doing something when I got started, and it was really around learning what makes the best product and how we get to that success together. That came with understanding the key players: who you’re doing it for and who you do it with was really important.
Pretty early on, I realized that we had an engineering function, a design function, and a product function, and they would all come together to try to solve a customer problem and build an amazing product. Although all of us had the same goals and were working toward the same outcome, we sometimes had different, conflicting department-wide or functional goals. And so I realized that for this to be a truly successful partnership, the UX team, with a heavy focus on research, needed to sit with the product management organization.
So there was really just one team: product and design as a continuous discovery and delivery stream. And then you are working with your clients. For the client, you don’t have the product team asking, “What do you really want out of this? What problem are you trying to solve?” and then the UX team asking, “What problem are you trying to solve, and how do you want to use it?” It really became a collective voice and a collective journey we went on.
Since then, I’ve been a pretty strong advocate of that, because I have seen how effective that model has been, regardless of the product life cycle and regardless of the industry. It also avoids a three-way pull between your delivery teams, where design wants something, product wants something, technology wants something, and the client wants something at the end of the day.
And so it’s all of us joining hands to solve the need of that product and where the product needs to go. That’s something I’ve been really fortunate to have as well. I’ve had a lot of executives sponsoring that kind of org structure, which is not very common. I’ll just say I’m fortunate.
Nicole Tieche | 00:06:53 – 00:07:09
Very interesting. Yeah, it’s not very common, I would say. So, working with your teams in this rather unique way, can you share some examples of key insights you’ve learned from pulling all these teams together?
Cross-Portfolio Insights: Building Core Capabilities Once
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:07:09 – 00:09:18
Yeah. A lot of it is really useful when you have a cross-portfolio team. If you have a company that offers multiple types of products for different personas, sometimes even completely different business lines altogether, and you don’t have a lot of overlap, so your users don’t actually cross between your products, sometimes you start developing products in a silo, because you develop for your persona and your industry, and the product has a defined value proposition.
But when you are working across a shared model, you start to see a lot of insights. Regardless of your domain, your customer size, or even the persona, everybody has a data or information ingestion need. Everybody has a need to process and get insights from that information, or they’re tapping into insights that you might be providing. Everybody has a need to be compliant, to have audit-ready things, some kind of completion signals. So you start learning about some of these core capabilities that exist across products.
Sitting in that bird’s-eye view, you can see how you can actually develop these core systems once, and have all of these products and applications as almost being consumers of it. Then your customers get the benefit of a larger development cycle happening outside of your individual product teams’ roadmaps, because you are able to look at the holistic information.
This is also valuable for a client when they graduate into other products and other systems, because that move doesn’t feel like a sudden switch into a brand-new product yet again. Your backend connectors were already there, and you’re tapping into something shared. Now you just have something available for you. I almost think of it as: you have Gmail, and then going to Google Drive is not that much of a lift for you, because they already know what you want and what you have access to.
Nicole Tieche | 00:09:18 – 00:09:39
Interesting. So benefiting, of course, the team and the customer as well. Very interesting. Now, with the teams you’re working with, tell me how you see the prevalence of AI play out in their day to day, and how they are incorporating it into their roles.
How Product Teams Use AI Today: Learn, Play, Share
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:09:39 – 00:12:22
Yeah. It is such an exciting time, again, to be in product management: all the tools that have come out, all the thought leadership that has come out, and also the real experimentation the teams are doing. We have a team that is really, really excited, and I would say almost pioneers. They are figuring out what they can do with it. They are playing with the tools and experimenting themselves, a little bit of vibe coding.
We have our UX and design teams really leveraging AI to cut down on the time it takes to build a prototype. We also have a community that we have built within our product and UX teams where we share what we’ve done.
A recent example: we’re trying to refresh our jobs to be done across our tax domains and really get an understanding of it. We’re conducting interviews, learning, and doing user journey mappings and jobs-to-be-done templates. And one of the product leads said, “Well, you know what, I think we can have AI do that for us now.” So they created a standardized template and were able to map the content into it. So really, a lot of efficiency play.
One of the goals for the team is learn and play, because a lot of technology is coming at us really fast, and it’s changing really fast. Learning what it does is a really important first step. Then you can think about what it can do for your clients and your products, and you can really start having an AI-focused roadmap, because you understand what you’re talking about. You understand the potential of it.
And you know the problems that are ready for AI versus the problems that possibly are not. I know it can solve a lot, but it cannot solve for everything. Being able to have really good judgment around when to use AI starts with actually getting really comfortable with AI, using it in your day to day, and teaching your teams to use it. I make it almost an OKR that every team has a goal to learn and apply something of interest.
Without giving a specific thing to learn, they go and explore what they want to learn the most. They might be prompting for the first time. They might be using certain templates. They might be doing a summary of all the newsletters they get. However they want to solve the problem using AI, they’re empowered to do that. They are encouraged to do that. And then we share what we do, so no one’s gatekeeping anything.
Nicole Tieche | 00:12:22 – 00:12:34
Right, that’s very exciting. I love the permission to learn and play, as you said. Figure out what it can do, so it’s not just something to do, but really something that makes things more efficient for your team in so many different ways.
Hiring Product Managers in the AI Era: Product Sense and Curiosity
Nicole Tieche | 00:12:34 – 00:12:51
And then, how has AI impacted how you hire and what skills you’re looking for when you do hire for your team?
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:12:51 – 00:15:22
Yeah. It’s probably a little bit different within the UX and product teams, and very different for engineering talent. In terms of the build, we are looking for AI engineers and more AI-native developers. But within the product team, I’m looking for someone who still has a really good product sense, because that job of making good decisions for the product is not going to go away.
What is going to be different is how you make the decision, how quickly you can make it, the speed, and the information collection you can do. You probably get more confidence using some of the tools. So in hiring, I usually look for somebody who has a really strong product sense, has delivered, and has met the business outcomes and the client outcomes, but at the same time has played around with the technology, so they’re not afraid of it.
We are not going to get an AI-mature product manager yet in this industry. If we do, then I think we’re still talking about machine learning or natural language processing, some version of AI that has been around for a long time, not the gen AI that we’re seeing now.
Because the tools have been around for only a few years, the explosive tools, I do look for individuals who have taken this on as a passion project of their own, who have really jumped into it, learned something, built something, and have something to show. They talk about it without being prompted, because this is really just on their mind all the time. So I’m looking for some tangible things they have done using AI, either for their products or, if the company they were at and the products they were managing were not really jumping into this AI journey, then something they have done on their own, because they wanted to learn about it and stay ahead of the learning curve.
So that natural curiosity, a really good sense, those core competencies of who you are, how you think, and how you make decisions, are still criteria for hiring. At the same time, I’m also looking for somebody who’s not afraid of it, who is not risk averse, and who is always looking to push boundaries.
Nicole Tieche | 00:15:22 – 00:15:58
Yes, that’s great. And that curiosity is such a core function in product management anyway, so bringing AI into it really magnifies that. You’re definitely going to need those curious product managers. And I love your passion for the team and for developing teams. So talk to us about how you help foster those skills. You mentioned the permission they have to work with AI, but how do you encourage their growth and really advance their careers in product management?
How to Grow Empowered Product Managers and Leaders
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:15:58 – 00:18:50
Yeah, I love this question, and I could probably do an entire podcast just on this one, because I’m really passionate about it, going back to my early journey into product management. It was a conscious choice to stay in this career, for many reasons. And there’s what we can do as product leaders, or even as product managers when you’re starting out on the journey.
I want my teams and other product managers to feel that joy of being in a product position. So I believe in a lot of what the thought leaders in the industry say around creating an empowered team, an empowered product team, and what that actually means: investing in them through coaching, learning, formal learning, and informal learning. At the same time, it’s letting them take a strong leadership role, regardless of whether they have people management responsibility or not.
Even early-stage product managers can be extremely well-rounded leaders if they know how to move the dial forward. They can be leading their engineering teams. They can be a guiding light for the business. They can be the voice for the customers. There are just many ways to be a leader. And so I do, in a way, expect the teams to assume that leadership role: be the voice for the product, be the voice for the customers, and really bring the chaos together, because it can sometimes be chaotic and dysfunctional working across teams.
Then, as they grow into their own leadership roles and are now managing other product managers, there’s a really heavy focus on learning: learning the craft of product management, and learning about the domain you are in so that you can serve your customers and your business well. There is also learning in general around operational efficiency. Sometimes it’s basic accounting, because you need to learn how the math works in your product and how to make a really good business case. How do you think about your competitive intelligence, for example? There are just various ways you can grow, and so we look for opportunities.
You can do skills and competency rankings across your product teams, and really invest in the areas where somebody has a natural tendency to be good at something that the person needs to be good at for the job. So you actively learn, and you also round out the whole team, because I have quite a large team and not everybody’s an expert in everything. But collectively, we tap into the expertise of that person or that team. And so my full team is well-rounded.
Nicole Tieche | 00:18:50 – 00:19:26
For sure. Bringing that diversity of experiences and passions together benefits each individual as well as the team, I’m sure. That sounds fantastic, especially from your early career, knowing how important mentorship is and drawing those passions out in your team members. That’s really exciting. And then, looking ahead into the near future for you, Pawana, is there something you are really excited about in your career in product management?
What’s Next: Why This Is the “Applying Stage” for AI in Product
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:19:26 – 00:22:04
Definitely. I’ll say it again, maybe for the third time in this podcast: it’s so exciting to be in a product role in this day and age. I know there is sometimes fear about whether product management is going away, that everything can be done by AI now and you just need somebody with access to code. But I do think a good business sense, a good product sense, what makes somebody stick, what makes somebody pay for problem solving, what makes your business grow: none of that has gone away.
What we are facing and seeing, and I really see this as an opportunity and not a challenge, is that we now have a way to do things we sometimes might not have been able to do before. It’s almost like computing: we could analyze data we couldn’t analyze before. And now we have tools at our disposal. We can do a quick mock-up of things ourselves and just tell the story through a visual product. That’s not even a product, in a way. Nothing is built, but it looks and feels like a product.
Being able to do that quickly on your own, without having to tap into somebody else, and being able to have a stream of your competitive intelligence coming into your inbox without having to go and subscribe to thousands of newsletters: there are just so many possibilities in how we do our job.
On my teams, they are creating their own repository of best practices. That would have taken a multi-month project, a team of people, to go and create that thing together, have an operating model ready, and then share, iterate, and publish. And then somebody, over an evening, put something together and quickly dropped it, and everybody else could look at it, chime in, and make something real.
So the creation process, I think, is faster, which means our iteration is going to be faster. When we say fail fast, we really can fail fast now with these tools.
I said even earlier in the year, in one of the sessions, that last year was all about understanding what it meant, getting over the fear of whatever it was, learning, embracing, and educating yourself. And this year is the applying stage. We are able to apply it, and we’re able to see the results for ourselves, for our teams, for our products, and for our clients. And so I’m super, super excited that we have these tools available.
Nicole Tieche | 00:22:04 – 00:22:21
Yes, that sounds like such a dynamic, exciting place to be on your team. I definitely wish you and your team well. Thank you so much, Pawana, for being with us today and for sharing your experience. How can our listeners get connected with you?
Pawana Burlakoti | 00:22:21
On LinkedIn. That seems to be the place I go to find everybody from my professional world. So, Pawana Burlakoti on LinkedIn.
Nicole Tieche | 00:22:30
Fantastic. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe and stay tuned for more fascinating stories from the world of product management. Until next time, I’m Nicole Tieche, and this is Productside Stories.
