Tomer Cohen
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders”, covering product design, team leadership, and AI product work.
Episode
Why LinkedIn is turning PMs into AI-powered "full stack builders” | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
Summary
Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's CPO, discusses how he led the transformation of LinkedIn's feed from an underperforming afterthought into a high-engagement professional content platform by going all-in on AI. He shares how he overhauled product strategy in fall 2022 — before ChatGPT was public — by dismantling existing roadmaps and rebuilding around LLMs, established an internal AI Academy, and explains why product leaders must personally own the AI strategy rather than delegating it to engineering.
Key Takeaways
Product leaders must personally own AI strategy — know the objective of your algorithm, what features feed it, and how it is being fine-tuned. Delegating this to engineering is how you lose your product's biggest lever.
When adopting a new technology paradigm, let teams diverge freely first to build excitement, then converge top-down around 4-5 clear bets. Skipping the diverge phase kills energy and misses discoveries.
With AI, you no longer control the experience — you control the ingredients. Shift from dictating every user interaction to setting objectives, guardrails, and training signals.
Lead with conviction rather than evidence: start from a strong belief about what a product could become, then find evidence to test that belief.
Index career decisions on genuine passion and where you can make a real dent — not on prestige or demand signals.
Notable Quotes
“I felt that I tried for a few months to play on the overall experience with everybody, but it was really hard, almost like impossible because you have an organization that is so tied into how things work that I was just hitting walls after walls after escalations and it was just unproductive.”
“In fact, you should go all the way to infrastructure. You can have massive lifts in your product outcomes and goals if you probably enhance your infrastructure. How many product people talk about the infrastructure they have? Not many. Influencers, those are things ultimately your goal is to win with your products and build a much more experience to your members and customers. Literally just changing the infrastructure on top of what you build. That could be the biggest lever than you building another button or experience for your members on the top of it.”
“I start backwards. It's like what is the potential here? If you start from the premise that LinkedIn ultimately is a platform for economic opportunity that sits on top of a very strong social graph. Almost every aspect of economic transaction is possible.”