Ed Biden on building with AI, becoming a CPO, and leading continuous delivery
Product State Q&A
Ed Biden is the Founder of Hustle Badger. He was formerly CPTO at FYLD, CPO at YunoYuno, SVP of Product at Jobandtalent, CPO at FutureLearn, Director of Product at Depop, Director of Product at Rocket Internet SE, Product Lead at Wooga, and PM at Kobojo.
Website / LinkedIn
EC: How can product leaders get good at AI building?
EB: Even in the last few weeks it feels like we’ve hit a new inflection point with AI:
Boris Cherny built Cowork entirely with Claude Code in about ten days.
A CPO I know is hiring senior PMs with the explicit expectation that they’ll ship code themselves
The Pragmatic Engineer is reporting about teams going all in on AI … and how some devs aren’t engaging with this.
2026 is going to be chaotic and exciting wherever you work in product. None of us have ever seen change this fast. No one knows exactly where this goes, but it’s clear we’re still very early in the AI adoption cycle and things are still accelerating.
Naturally, people are nervous.
I expect roles to blur and titles to change, but fundamentally there will always be a demand for smart people with two instincts: customer empathy and commercial sense. If you’ve got those, you’re going to be ok.
So what can product leaders actually do about this?
First, recognize that this is your job, you can’t delegate it, and it’s existential for your career. This is a proper transformation and you need to lead from the front. You’ve got to be experimenting with the tools and exploring what’s possible and right for your organization.
Then you’ve got to create the conditions for meaningful change across the organization. You can’t just tell people to ‘use AI more.’ You’ve got to do this holistically, and there are four ingredients:
Role modeling. Leaders need to be using AI tools regularly — and visibly. If you’re not demonstrating the commitment to changing how work gets done, why would anyone else take it seriously?
Tool access. Teams need access to the right tools, which in practice means someone very senior pushing things through security and procurement. This is often the hardest part, but it’s non-negotiable.
Upskilling. Teams need to know how to use these tools well, and that usage needs to be established as the default way of working through job descriptions, hiring processes, competency ladders, communities of practice, and so on..
Clear goals. Why are you doing all of this? You need a clear idea of what success looks like. The more clarity you have on the outcome, the better your chances of getting there.
EC: What do PMs need to get right to become a product exec?
EB: The jump from VP to CPO is as big as going from IC to manager. It really caught me off guard when I made it.
There are roughly four levels in a PM career:
Individual Contributor (APM, PM, Senior PM) - working in cross-functional teams to ship features
Manager (Head of, Group PM) - hiring and coaching other PMs, dealing with underperformance
Functional lead (Director, VP, SVP) - defining what product management means at your company, setting overall strategy, allocating teams against high-value opportunities
Executive (CPO, CPTO, CPMO) - running multiple functions, representing them on the exec team and to the board
The things you should have mastered at the VP level become table stakes as a CPO: Setting company strategy and vision, designing and running the product operating model, and cross-functional collaboration. But there are several new challenges that are fundamentally different.
The new challenges you’ll face:
You’ll have three very different stakeholder groups to manage: The people reporting to you, your exec peers, and the board. These are all high-stakes relationships that require completely different approaches.
CEOs want execs to remove a top five anxiety from their plate entirely. You need to identify what’s keeping them up at night and own it completely.
You’ll be managing non-product teams, which means you can’t fall back on your own technical expertise. You need to be a master coach.
You won’t just be dealing with product problems—you’ll get dragged into fundraising, M&A, and major company initiatives that require robust and flexible problem-solving skills.
One thing that surprised me: You’ll have VPs reporting into you, and these are serious, accomplished people. If you ever had the mistaken notion that your reports somehow needed to be ‘parented,’ that will be immediately knocked out of you.
To get a foot in the door for a CPO role, you’ll need:
Credibility - the right logos on your CV and appropriate seniority
Scale of team managed - comparable to what you’re being hired to manage
Non-product teams managed - demonstrates you can abstract your leadership principles beyond product
Very clear commercial impact - evidence you’ve really made things happen, not just been along for the ride
Then you’ll be tested on:
Fit with the other execs and whether you fill gaps the current team has
Whether you can solve the specific problem the company faces right now
Strategy and execution capabilities
Leadership aligned with company culture
Domain expertise (overweighted in my opinion, but common)
But here’s what I’ve observed about the most effective people: they continuously take on hard, ambiguous problems with an ‘I’ll figure it out’ attitude, and they don’t worry about titles, team sizes, or internal career ladders.
If you take that approach and focus on solving real problems rather than checking boxes, you’ll be rewarded regardless of whatever career progression framework your company has defined. It’s uncomfortable because as humans we crave certainty. We want to see what’s ahead. But spending energy trying to predict exactly what AI will do to your job function in three years so you can perfectly plan your next move is a waste of time.
Take that energy and deploy it to being at the frontier of using new technology in your profession. You’ll be much better positioned to navigate whatever changes come.
EC: How can product leaders drive continuous delivery that leads to great outcomes?
EB: This is the whole problem you’re trying to solve as a product leader!
In this case, you need to understand that you manage a value chain. The product team takes in company objectives, converts them into customer problems to solve, solutions to build, and then finally outputs working software that delivers those results.
Your job as a product leader is to understand how this value chain works, and to optimize it as a whole.
That means having visibility at the various steps along the way (e.g. through product reviews or delivery updates), and then seeing where you optimize things for even better results.
You are a systems designer and you can’t work on everything at once. You’ll need to look at the overall software development life cycle (SDLC) and treat this as you would a product. You understand the flow, where there are big drop offs, and then you make targeted interventions to resolve these.
In practice, I try to check in on teams at critical points in the SDLC, so I have an overview of value creation from the product org as a whole:
OKRS: What are their objectives? What customer problems are they focused on?
Kick off: What features are they going to build?
Design review: What will the new features look like?
GTM review: What are the launch plans for the new features?
Impact review: What actually happened when the feature was launched?
That said, these classic phases are starting to collapse as the speed of development increases, and product leaders are going to have to rethink what their SDLC looks like in an AI world. Where they get transparency, and how they accelerate teams is going to change.
“2026 is going to be chaotic and exciting wherever you work in product.”
- Ed Biden
