CPO Rising Series: Tubi CPTO on Why This Is a Golden Era for Product Management

What happens when coding stops being a constraint for product teams, and what should product leaders do right now to get ready? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Tubi Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli will be speaking on why this is a golden era for product management and how the entertainment industry is about to go through its biggest disruption yet. Mike shares how Tubi runs “Tinker Days” to keep the whole org experimenting, why he’s investing countercyclically in junior talent, and what it means to build for model capabilities that don’t exist yet.

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Show Notes:

1. We’re in a golden era for product management because AI is removing coding as a constraint. Product managers with great ideas now have far more throughput to get those ideas into the world than ever before.
2. The traditional pod structure of PM, engineer, designer, and data scientist is fundamentally changing. Teams can now be smaller and more productive, or stay the same size and dramatically expand their ambition and output.
3. PMs at Tubi are already deploying to staging environments, and the next step is shipping to production with the right checks in place. Engineers no longer need to wait for designers to get UI direction, and data scientists no longer need to wait for engineering to set up experiments.
4. The most important thing a product leader can do right now is move their organization to this new way of building. If your team isn’t showing up to weekly reviews with working prototypes or deployed experiments, they’re probably not using the right tools.
5. Leaders have to personally try the tools to credibly lead the change. Mike started taking one day a month off the calendar specifically to read research papers, prototype things, and test the latest tools, and came back each time with an entirely fresh perspective.
6. Tubi rolled out “Tinker Day” across the org: one day a month with all meetings blocked, everyone free to prototype, read, or experiment, and a Slack channel where people share what they find. The results have been remarkable both for what people build and for the culture it signals.
7. You’re no longer building for the capabilities that exist today. Given how fast AI models are improving, product leaders need to be building six to twelve months out based on what the models will be capable of, not what they can do now.
8. The pace of change is genuinely exponential and hard to predict. Mike says he would have given a more confident three-year forecast 12-24 months ago than he can today, because the step function changes have been so dramatic and the downstream effects are still arriving.
9. The future of the entertainment industry is that video creation will inherit software-like iteration speeds. Solo creators will be able to produce and test content the way engineers ship and iterate code, and the barriers to creating a hit will drop dramatically.
10. Tubi’s three-sided marketplace between viewers, creators, and advertisers is hard to displace, but Mike refuses to take that for granted. He stays deliberately paranoid and keeps pushing the organization toward experimentation, because any company that treats the rules as static will eventually be disrupted.
11. Mike’s three hiring criteria are the pace at which someone learns, how hard they’re willing to work, and the quality of their ideas. He believes idea quality is more important now than it has ever been.
12. Tubi is now adding a product sense interview to its engineering hiring process. As AI handles more of the coding work, the ability to identify good problems and think about user needs is becoming a critical skill for engineers too.
13. Tubi’s Builders Program invests countercyclically in junior and new graduate talent at a time when most companies have pulled back. The program runs three rotations across PM, engineering, ML, design, and data science, received 12,000 applications for 25 spots, and has produced some of the most creative and motivated people in the org.
14. Early career talent has less prior baggage, which turns out to be an advantage with AI tools. They arrive at solutions faster precisely because they don’t have ingrained habits about how things are supposed to be done.
15. Smaller teams aren’t a compromise; they’re the strategy. Keeping teams lean forces the right tools discipline and avoids the communication overhead and inefficiency that come with over-hiring, while still allowing the team to expand its ambition significantly.
16. Mike stress-tests new market ideas by loading the full thesis into ChatGPT and asking it to poke as many holes as possible. The first time he did this it surfaced the biggest flaw in the plan, something he genuinely hadn’t considered, and it caused him to delay the initiative and rework the approach entirely.
17. The cost of video creation is dropping exponentially, following the same trajectory software did earlier. Mike points to VEO 3.1 and SeaDance 2.0 as early indicators of what high-quality AI video generation looks like today, and the trajectory is steep.
18. NotebookLM’s audio feature is Mike’s current favorite tool because it lets him turn downtime like driving or cleaning the kitchen into productive research and learning time. He’s excited about voice and audio becoming the interface for a much larger share of productive compute time.
19. Tubi was one of the very first connected TV advertising companies, founded on the insight that connected TV ads would eventually look like digital ads. That early bet is now baked into how the whole company thinks about the next wave of disruption.
20. Mike watches his own children’s conversations with Alexa as a window into how AI interaction patterns develop over time. They started with wild questions and are gradually developing more specific and sophisticated lines of inquiry, which he finds fascinating as a product person thinking about how users evolve with AI tools.