Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
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What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
When we look at the skills required to do your job, by 2030 it will change by 70%. So whether or not you're looking to change your job, your job is changing. In order to stay competitive, you actually have to go back to some first principles, go back to the drawing board and reimagine what it means to be building.
You're experimenting with a very different way of building product at LinkedIn that fully embraces what AI unlocks. We call it the full stack builder
model. The goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market, regardless of their role in the stack and which team they're on. It's really a fluid interaction between human and machine.
This feels like this could be a model for how a lot of companies operate and how product ends up being built in the future.
Change management here is gonna be a critical part. It's not enough to give them the tools. You have to build the incentives programs, the motivation, the examples to how you do it. I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt. Doesn't work this way.
There's always been this question is AI gonna just make people that are not amazing more amazing, or is it gonna make amazing people even more amazing?
Top talent has this tendency of continuously trying to get better at their craft. The key traits that I'm emphasizing for builders is
Today, my guest is Tomer Cohen, longtime chief product officer at LinkedIn, who is piloting a new way of building that I think will become a model for how companies operate in the future. It's called the Full Stack Builder Program, and essentially the idea is to enable anyone, no matter their function, to take products from idea to launch. They've scrapped their APM program and replaced it with an associate full stack builder program. They've introduced a new career path with the title Full Stack Builder that anyone from any function can become. And as you'll hear in the conversation, they've built a bunch of internal tools and agents and processes to basically build a human plus AI product team that can move really fast, adjust to change quickly, and do a lot more with a lot less.
If you're looking for inspiration for how to rethink how your team operates and to lean in To what AI is unlocking for teams and companies, this episode is for you. A huge thank you to Shira Gestarch for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including a year free of Devin Lovable Red. Replayed bolt in it and linear superhuman D script whisper flow gamma perplexity warp, granola, magic patterns, raycast, chapter, D Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to Lenny's Newsletter.com and click Product Pass.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main focus of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–5:34
2
Why does LinkedIn need to rethink traditional product development?
5:34–13:01
3
What is the Full‑Stack Builder model and how does it work?
13:01–17:46
4
How is AI and automation being integrated into LinkedIn’s product process?
17:46–20:16
5
Why can’t off‑the‑shelf AI tools be used directly on enterprise code?
20:16–28:46
6
How fast can LinkedIn take a feature from idea to launch with this new approach?
28:46–33:20
7
What early results and feedback have been seen from the pilot program?
33:20–41:30
8
What change‑management tactics are used to get teams to adopt AI tools?
41:30–1:07:28
Speakers
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