Product Talk AI Is Turning Product Managers Into Builders Again: Laurel CPO
9 snips
Mar 30, 2026 Jiaona Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Laurel and experienced product leader, talks about AI-powered automatic time capture and how it reshapes product work. She explores privacy and user control, AI-native team structures, faster design-to-engineering loops, and how product roles shift when builders become more full-stack. The conversation highlights hiring, outcomes-focused management, and practical AI tools.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
AI Native Timesheets Replace Manual Busywork
- Laurel is an AI-native company that auto-captures and classifies user activity to produce accurate timesheets.
- It uses an agent plus multimodal LLMs to scrape device activity, calendar, and email to write narratives and categorize time for billing and insights.
Give Users Control Over Tracking
- Give users control over what gets tracked and focus tracking on outcomes not inputs.
- Limit monitoring to work-relevant apps and let IT and users configure permissions to avoid privacy backlash.
AI Turns PMs Into Full Stack Strategists
- AI makes individual PMs dramatically more full-stack by scraping calls, Slack, Intercom and revenue data to produce strategy and customer insights.
- Agents built with tools like Dust let a single PM generate roadmap inputs that used to take weeks.