What we talked about
Saumya Bhatnagar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, Co-founder and CPO of involve.ai, and one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech. She has built her career at the intersection of product, engineering, and AI:helping companies scale smarter and predict customer needs through data-driven insights. Saumya is also a Stevie Gold Entrepreneur of the Year award winner and a two-time honoree among the Top 50 Women CPOs in the U.S.
Show notes
Saumya Bhatnagar argues that product managers who can’t validate engineering estimates, or who can’t reason about why a RAG implementation is preferable to a larger context window, are already falling behind. Her position: vibe coding closes the gap between product and engineering, but it also raises the bar for product thinking.
What we covered
- The product-engineering relationship has fundamentally shifted in the last six months. What used to be two teams with “scheduled interactions” and a handoff document is now one continuous feedback loop, product managers can drop a Git repo into a codex tool and independently assess feasibility, effort, and timelines, which ends the inbuilt mistrust between the two functions.
- Saumya identified a concrete example of what siloed dashboards cost teams: her growth team spent two quarters re-optimizing a feature’s UX to fix drop-off, only to discover the real problem was an API call taking too long, information that lived entirely on the engineering side. Combining those data streams changes what decisions are even visible.
- Her PRD template required product owners to answer three questions before engineering ever saw a ticket: why is this the most important problem right now, which of at least three solutions is best and why, and, in a section she called the premortem, if this feature fails after launch, what will have caused it. That last piece gave QA a checklist before a single line of code was written.
- On vibe coding, Saumya’s view is nuanced: product owners can now build working prototypes in Lovable to test with users before engineering touches the work, which removes one of the biggest sources of wasted cycles. But she is direct that vibe-coded output is not production-ready, she found a function running at O(n²) complexity that no AI tool flagged, and product managers who treat it as a finished product are cutting corners that will generate technical debt.
- Designers in this new model no longer start from a blank page. Product owners arrive with a first-pass Lovable mockup; the designer’s job becomes optimization, edge-case identification, and UX critique, “starting at level five instead of level zero,” as Saumya put it.
- Her single piece of advice for aspiring product managers: build the muscle of first-principles thinking by practicing on products you don’t work on. She specifically suggested asking yourself, “If I were the growth PM for Cursor tomorrow, what would I do?”, and using AI to stress-test the answer rather than to generate it.
About Saumya
Saumya Bhatnagar is the co-founder and CPO of Involve AI, a company that uses data-driven insights to help businesses predict and act on customer needs. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum and a two-time honoree among the Top 50 Women CPOs in the US.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saumya-bhatnagar
- Website: https://www.jeeva.ai
Episode 38 of the PreVetted Podcast.