The skill every product manager must learn in 2026
with Aakash Gupta
Aakash has led product at Affirm, Epic Games, and ThredUp, and runs the Product Growth Newsletter on Substack. He came in with a clear point of view: AI prototyping is the most significant change product management has ever seen, and most PMs aren't taking it seriously enough. We walked through his six-step framework and built a working sleep tracker app from scratch using Bolt, V0, and Lovable — in under 15 minutes.
What I took away
Watching Aakash go from concept to prototype in minutes was arresting. The implication isn't just speed — it's that a PM who can prototype has a fundamentally different relationship with their engineers and designers. It changes what you bring to a room. I also liked his insistence on starting with problem discovery, not tool selection. The constraint is never the tool.
Where this connects
I've since run versions of this session with PMs at Atlassian.