The Fubon Center’s Tech Leadership Lab and the Stern Technology Association had the pleasure of hosting Ritcha Ranjan on October 22, 2024. Addressing a packed room, Ranjan recounted her career, from early work with machine learning and speech recognition to her product management roles at Google and Microsoft. Today, she leads Microsoft Office Copilot (including the product team), one of the most impactful GenAI tools yet. Ranjan’s talk highlighted how managing an AI product fundamentally differs from traditional tech product management approaches.
A key difference, Ranjan explained, is that GenAI is non-deterministic: it can hallucinate and is also vulnerable to attacks that provoke unintended responses. Building user trust is crucial, she noted, achieved by involving humans in pivotal control points. Ranjan then shared management strategies for adapting to GenAI’s rapid innovation cycle and discussed how infrastructure costs are pushing product managers to rethink revenue models beyond standard software-as-a-service offerings.
During a lively Q&A, Ranjan reflected on how tech product management responsibilities are shifting as tools like Copilot expand, compressing roles and enabling faster prototyping cycles. She explored the challenges of balancing multitasking with strict deadlines, the essential role of data quality teams, the impending transition from prompt engineering to more visual user interfaces, and how product priorities vary across tech companies — on whether they emphasize innovation, measurable impact, or real-time customer feedback.
Ranjan closed with insights into keeping product teams motivated amid uncertainty, navigating GenAI’s arms race, and understanding how evolving tech can enhance or lessen the value of specific skills. She underscored the importance of non-tech expertise within product teams and described the essential qualities of a good tech product manager. With AI advancing rapidly, Ranjan emphasized that tomorrow’s tech product managers must stay “flexible, adaptable, and always ready to burn it all down and start again.”
