Why AI is disrupting traditional product management | Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn CPO)
LinkedIn CPO Tomer Cohen explains how LinkedIn scrapped its APM program for a Full Stack Builder model that uses custom AI agents to collapse the product development stack.
- LinkedIn killed its APM program; starting January, new hires enter an Associate Product Builder program teaching coding, design, and PM simultaneously.
- LinkedIn’s maintenance agent now handles close to 50% of failed builds automatically, freeing engineers entirely from that work.
- Off-the-shelf AI tools never worked on LinkedIn’s codebase — every tool (Cursor, Copilot, Figma) required deep customization before yielding gains.
- Giving AI access to the entire knowledge base failed badly; curated “golden examples” were required to make agents useful and reduce hallucination.
- Top performers, not average employees, adopted AI tools fastest — AI amplifies the best rather than leveling the field.
- Change management outweighs tooling: LinkedIn tied full-stack builder behavior to performance reviews and 360 evaluations to drive real adoption.
- LinkedIn built specialized internal agents — trust, growth, research, analyst — each trained on proprietary data and LinkedIn-specific context, not generic LLM wrappers.
- By 2030, 70% of skills required for current jobs will change; 70% of today’s fastest-growing jobs didn’t exist on that list a year ago (LinkedIn data).
2025-12-04 · Watch on YouTube
