AI Product Management
Product management is experiencing a paradigm shift. Today, the work is about finding where AI fits in workflows, freeing up time, and doing more with less. Tomorrow, though, the work will be about setting the conditions for AI agents to execute reliably, satisfying curiosity through experimentation, and knowing how to apply taste and judgement to build products that deliver real value to users and the business. We help product leaders get ahead of that shift.
The pace is changing. So are the stakes. Product management has to change with both.
AI agents are writing code. Engineers are becoming quality gatekeepers, reviewing, directing, and validating what gets generated rather than writing every line themselves. The delivery cycle has fundamentally accelerated.
When engineering moves faster, the PM job doesn't just speed up. It changes shape. Less about defining requirements, more about directing outcomes. Less about writing specs, more about knowing what good looks like before a line of code is written.
Product and engineering are navigating this shift together, and that's the opportunity. When both disciplines are learning at the same time, they can shape how they work together from the ground up. New delivery practices, shared ways of working, and a clearer picture of what end-to-end ownership looks like in an AI-native team. That doesn't happen often. It's worth getting right.
Each engagement is designed to build real capability for where product management is going, not just where it is today. We work alongside your team and leave something behind that lasts.
For organizations navigating both phases of the shift: figuring out where AI fits today, and building the capability to direct agents reliably tomorrow. We bring senior product leadership to both problems.
A practical program built around both phases of the paradigm shift. From integrating AI into your workflow today, to developing the taste, judgement, and orchestration skills that define the next generation of product leaders.
Raise the floor on product thinking across your organization. Discovery-first principles, outcome orientation, and the foundational skills that make teams ready for whatever AI demands of them next.
Keynotes, conference talks, and executive briefings on the paradigm shift underway in product management. What it means today, what it demands tomorrow, and how to lead through it.
Principal
Founder & Principal
Automated Machine, LLC · New York, NY
Automaton is the independent practice of Michael Varona, a principal product leader who has spent over a decade at the intersection of product, design, and emerging technology. He has seen firsthand how product management changes when the tools do, and has spent the last several years helping organizations navigate exactly the shift underway right now.
Michael has operated at every level of the product function: as VP of Product Management and AI Product SME at Globant, as Interim Head of Product at Kroger's data science subsidiary 84.51° (leading a 50-person org), as Head of Technology and Data Products at the Anti-Defamation League, and as a Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks for nine years. He holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design and a BCom (Honours) from Queen's University Smith School of Business.
The through-line in all of it: helping product teams build the right things faster, and developing the taste, judgement, and operational clarity to keep doing it as the landscape keeps shifting.
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Whether you're trying to make sense of AI for your product team today, building capability for where the role is headed, or looking for a speaker who understands the shift from the inside. We'd like to hear from you.