Howie Liu
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI, covering AI product work, product design, and strategic decision-making.
Episode
How we restructured Airtable’s entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
Summary
Howie Liu, CEO of Airtable, discusses restructuring his entire product team for the AI era — including moving toward "ICCO" (individual contributor CEO/operators), collapsing the EPD triangle, and the counterintuitive lesson that "step back from the details as you scale" was wrong. He shares a framework for which companies and roles will win in AI: those who become full-stack and break down role silos.
Key Takeaways
Use AI products multiple times per hour as a personal operating norm — constant use surfaces new product ideas and honest assessments of where current products fall short.
Collapse role silos aggressively: PMs should prototype, engineers should have design sensibility, AEs should demo without SEs — anyone dangerous across the full EPD triangle has a structural advantage.
Ask the "greenfield founding question": if you were founding a new company today with the same mission, how would you execute it AI-native? If you can't answer, find a buyer and start the next incarnation.
Don't use evals too early — they constrain divergent discovery needed to find product-market fit. Apply them after converging on valuable use cases.
The advice to step back from product details as CEO at scale is wrong for product-led companies — integrative thinking requires staying close to engineering, design, and GTM details.
Notable Quotes
“If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then you should find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, go and start the next carnation of it.”
“I think that is a big part of it because on the point about the pace of the world moving so much faster in AI than any other landscape in SaaS, in the mature SaaS era, it was important to study your competition. If you were building a SaaS company, you'd be crazy not to follow Salesforce every year and see what the major releases they're putting out are, or ServiceNow, or so on.”
“If he could spend a hundred percent of his time on just being close to the AI and the research, I mean, he would and he's even said as much. Ranging to like Brian's with Airbnb, it's pretty clear that people like this are not motivated like... Airbnb was not founded because like, "Oh my God, we want to make a lot of money off this arbitrage opportunity against hotels."”