How Tomer Cohen Builds AI-First Product Strategy at LinkedIn

TL;DR

Tomer Cohen argues that impactful AI product strategy starts by making AI part of every product team instead of leaving it to a separate horizontal group. After rebuilding LinkedIn as a mobile product and later leading its newsfeed team, he recognized that ranking, not just interface design, defined the experience. Read on for his lessons about AI-first thinking, product leadership, prompt engineering, and Reed Hoffman’s mentorship.

Transcript

foreign thank you so much for making time um I as we were thinking about what to talk about and with everything that's been going on for the last all of three or four months um the rest of us have woken up to AI but one of the things that's most interesting about you in terms of AI is that you you literally like created a course about Ai and trying... Read More

Key Insights

• 🎓 Early adoption of AI education in 2019 by LinkedIn's Chief Project Officer.
• 👤 Importance of AI in transforming product development and user experiences.
• 🥺 Emphasis on product-led growth and aligning vision with product development.
• ❓ Insights on leveraging AI for innovation and product transformation.
• 💠 Mentorship role of LinkedIn's founder in shaping AI product leadership.
• ❓ Significance of AI in reshaping product development approaches.
• ❓ Future impact of AI on diverse industries and technological advancements.

Questions & Answers

Q: Why should companies make AI part of every product team?

Tomer Cohen saw a major gap when product leaders, designers, and even engineers assumed a separate AI team would handle the technology. He argues that companies create stronger experiences when their teams think AI-first, and says LinkedIn now has AI product leadership in every team.

Q: How did Tomer Cohen recognize AI’s potential before its recent surge?

Cohen connected AI’s emergence with his earlier experience in mobile, which large companies initially struggled to understand and support. Having watched mobile transform both product development and product use at LinkedIn, he believed AI would produce a similar transformation.

Q: What did rebuilding LinkedIn for mobile teach Tomer Cohen?

After joining LinkedIn in late 2011 or 2012, Cohen had the opportunity to rebuild LinkedIn as a mobile product from scratch. The experience taught him that people working near the frontier can recognize an approaching technology shift before large companies fully adjust to it.

Q: How did leading LinkedIn’s newsfeed team change Cohen’s view of AI?

While leading the newsfeed team, Cohen managed mobile, desktop, UI, engineering, and design teams, while AI remained a separate horizontal function. He realized that ranking determined the core newsfeed experience, prompting him to treat AI as part of the product itself.

Q: Why is ranking central to the LinkedIn newsfeed experience?

Cohen says the most important part of a newsfeed is what gets ranked. Interface details and pixels matter, but the ranked content ultimately shapes what users experience.

Q: What did AI product management involve on LinkedIn’s newsfeed team?

Cohen shifted his mindset toward working on AI as a product and says LinkedIn had a product manager focused on AI for the first time. The team worked on questions such as objective functions and features rather than treating AI as an isolated technical component.

Q: What role did Reed Hoffman play in Tomer Cohen’s thinking about AI?

Cohen describes LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman as a mentor whose understanding of technology and trends is highly philosophical. He says Hoffman brings emerging ideas back to principles and axioms about what to build, how to build it, and how to understand product-market fit.

Q: Why does Tomer Cohen consider prompt engineering important?

Cohen identifies prompt engineering as one of the most important skills associated with generative AI algorithms. He describes it as the skill of knowing how to talk to generative AI.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The interview discusses the early adoption of AI education in 2019 by LinkedIn's Chief Project Officer.

• Insights are shared on the transformative impact of AI on product development and user experience.

• The importance of product-led growth and aligning company vision to product development is emphasized.