Meta is one of the biggest dinosaurs in the park, yet in a matter of months it rebuilt PM top to bottom, and almost none of it was bought. My guest is Jagjit Chawla, a VP of Product at Meta who’s running a growing share of the Facebook app: Feed, Reels, and more recently Search. I worked alongside Jagjit for nearly ten years across Google, Credit Karma, and Meta, and almost nothing is as I remember it. These systems were built by the teams themselves, sometimes in a single evening, on tools you already have. Jagjit walks me through how a product org of a few thousand people learned to move like a startup again.

Key topics:

• Inside Meta’s “no-meeting week” that set the org loose on the tools

• The one job AI can't take: influencing other humans

• Why the PMs winning on Jagjit’s team aren't engineers

• What to do when you’re the bottleneck

• How to become an "AI captain"

• Triaging tens of thousands of bug reports with agents that validate and pre-write the fix

• Why letting AI write code made site incidents spike, and how Meta clamped down

• Building a morning brief that flags the decisions only you can make

• Why the management "compression algorithm" is dead and what replaced it

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

05:47 Why the biggest change is pace

07:29 From detailed PRDs to a paragraph, a prototype, and an eval set

09:32 Why the management "compression algorithm" is dead

10:37 Visibility is high, but synthesis is scarce

14:45 "Finding a scissor" when you don't have fancy tools

16:10 A morning brief that flags the decisions only you can make

22:37 When the agent quietly drops your source links

25:53 The one job AI can't take: influencing other humans

30:18 Getting an analyst's answer in five minutes, not 24 hours

33:33 Three ways AI changed the products, not just the process

37:25 Why letting AI write code made site incidents spike

40:39 The no-meeting week and the birth of "AI captains"

44:55 The world's largest Jenga game: why institutional knowledge wins

48:41 Why economics and physics PhDs are "out-PMing" engineers

52:14 Ideas and agency before tools

56:19 "AI lowers the floor and raises the ceiling"

58:40 Closing advice: once you taste it, you can't go back

Brought to you by:

• Glean—Work AI that works

• Framer—Design and build your website effortlessly with Framer Agents

Referenced:

• Claude Code

• Credit Karma

• Facebook

• Ferrari

• Gmail

• Google

• Google Chat

• Google Drive

• Indian Premier League (IPL)

• Instagram

• Meta

• Porsche

• Prince of Persia

• TikTok

• Workplace from Meta

• Zoom

Where to find Nikhyl:

• Twitter/X

• LinkedIn

Where to find Jagjit:

• LinkedIn

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