187 / AI Native: Reimagining Product Roles and Development Cycles, with Adam Creeger

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187 / AI Native: Reimagining Product Roles and Development Cycles, with Adam Creeger

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Adam Creeger is the CTO of Slate and creator of iLoom (pronounced “il-LOOM”). His leadership experience at Meta, Greenhouse, and Frame.io not only informs Slate’s transformation into an AI-native organization, but also shapes the way AI influences product strategy, engineering workflows, and operational models. Throughout his conversation with Sean and Dan, Adam argues that becoming AI native is not about layering AI features onto existing products. Instead, it requires companies to rethink how software is designed, built, and operated – from the ground up. His perspective offers a practical framework for product leaders navigating AI-driven transformation. Here’s what else we learned: ‘AI Native’ Requires Organizational Reinvention AI native organizations are willing to rethink every layer of their business, Adam says. Rather than adding AI features superficially, AI native organizations redesign workflows, team structures, and customer experiences around AI capabilities. He emphasized that AI transformation changes not only products, but also how people contribute inside organizations. “To be AI native requires this deep exercise in re-imagination and not just imagination,” Adam continues. “In an AI native company – from the day-to-day operations to the ‘who does what’ – the roles and the owners of things are going to look very different.” AI is expanding participation across teams, enabling designers, support teams, and non-engineers to contribute directly to product delivery. That shift signals a major change for modern software organizations. AI and the Future of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Our conversation then turned to an exploration of how AI is already changing the traditional software development lifecycle. Years ago, Agile development emerged because humans had historically struggled to fully reason through complex systems before implementation. “I’ve realized that Agile was really a mitigation of a few things, mostly that we humans are limited in our abilities to reason through abstract concepts,” Adam says. “So when we thought about a software project, we didn’t have the ability to see around corners and understand the problems we’d face – until it was real, until you really started playing with it. Turns out that many of those challenges are very solvable by AI, allowing us to go much deeper into the problem space without ever writing a line of code. In addition, AI-assisted planning allows teams to revisit some waterfall-style thinking, but with dramatically faster iteration and validation cycles. Product Managers’ New Role: Communicate Context Importantly, AI is actually elevating the role of product managers, Adam offers. Rather than acting primarily as tactical decision-makers, product leaders can (and should) focus on providing context that enables teams to make informed decisions independently. “More than ever, the product manager has become a role about providing context,” he adds. “PMs should be elevated to a much more strategic role, understanding the long-term vision and helping to translate that to engineers.” Adam also feels that PMs should be using AI to communicate ideas about the product vision much more effectively. That evolution creates a faster and more collaborative product environment. Teams can evaluate real implementations earlier, gather customer feedback sooner, and align around outcomes instead of specifications alone. [05:54] What it means to be ‘AI native’. Conceptually, it’s same as digital native from when the internet was born many years ago. In the abstract sense, I see AI native being about the folks and the companies that are either just starting in the age of AI where everything they do is shaped by the existence of AI and their ability to use AI. [15:08] Is waterfall making a comeback? Oh man, this is one of my favorite topics. Growing up in the industry, waterfall was always like the evil thing. But with AI-assisted coding or agentic coding, you can go really deep, create a much bigger scope, and deliver it much more quickly…and it resembles more of a waterfall mentality. [21:51] The PM’s primary role: providing context. The product manager more than ever has become a role about providing context. The most powerful thing PMs can do in an organization is provide context to other people. [25:49] Exploring Adam’s iloom tool, and how it can help. Hear a quick story from Adam about how he used his iloom tool to create — and demo — a new product feature during a call with his customer success team. [28:47] Swarms. What are they, and how do they work? A swarm is a number of AI agents working together in a very collaborative way with the potential of real-time communication between them. [35:03] Avoiding ‘AI slop’ to defend and elevate a brand’s quality bar. Slate is creating a tool that makes it very difficult to create AI slop. This is a valuable proposition to...

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