What we talked about
In this episode, Apurv Naman, Product Manager at NVIDIA, shares a heartfelt, visionary journey that starts with childhood cartoons:The Jetsons, Star Trek, Star Wars:and evolves into a career shaping physical AI: humanoids and self-driving cars. What began as wonder for machines you can “touch and feel” became a calling to work where hardware, software, and AI meet real-world impact.
Show notes
Apurv Naman’s path from mechanical engineering to product management at NVIDIA began with a question he kept asking that nobody would answer: why are we building this? As an engineer working on autonomous vehicles and steering systems, he grew frustrated that feature requests arrived from leadership with no context, and that asking “who is asking for this?” was treated as a distraction rather than a necessary input. He got his MBA at Berkeley specifically to gain the standing to ask that question for a living.
What we covered
- Apurv traces his love of physical technology to watching The Jetsons as a child, the show’s flying cars and household robots planted an ambition that led directly to mechanical engineering and then to work on autonomous vehicles, where he filed patents before making the shift to product management.
- His move to product management was driven by wanting control over what got built and why, not just how. He describes engineering as answering “how,” while product management is answering “what” with a “why”, and he found the latter far more energizing.
- Working on physical AI carries a safety burden that software products do not. He points to the collapse of Cruise as a concrete example: a mistake in a physical AI system can end a company, injure someone, or kill someone, which is why safety and traceability have to be top KPIs, not afterthoughts.
- He observed Waymo vehicles evolving from overly cautious behavior, where human drivers learned they could blow past stop signs because the car would always yield, to more assertive merging that mirrors how a human driver chips into traffic. That shift reflects an ongoing product development loop between user behavior and system response.
- On humanoids: he argues that because our entire world is built for human bodies with two hands, two feet, and ten fingers, a humanoid that can operate at human level would theoretically automate anything. But he also notes it is a far harder and less well-defined problem than self-driving cars, which at least operate in a constrained environment.
- His advice for product managers in tech: the one constant is change, and the product managers who thrive are those who are genuinely comfortable with the environment shifting under them, user preferences, engineering workflows, and what is even possible will all change, and AI has accelerated that pace significantly.
About Apurv
Apurv Naman is a Product Manager at NVIDIA, where he works on physical AI at the intersection of hardware, software, and machine intelligence. He holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and previously worked as a mechanical engineer on autonomous vehicles, where he contributed patents related to steering and vehicle control systems.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/apurv-naman
- Website: https://nvidia.com
Episode 71 of the PreVetted Podcast.