Marily Nika, Ph.D

Google

Gen AI Product Lead - Voice Intelligence 

TEDAI San Francisco

Leadership Team: Robots

AI Product Academy

Get certified as an AI Product Manager
- 6-week AI Product Bootcamp (3 certifications)
- 3-week AI Product Management 101
- 3-week Advanced AI Product Management
- 2-week AI Agents bootcamp

Founder

Harvard Business School

Thrilled to announce I've accepted an Executive Fellowship by Harvard Business School.

Executive Fellow

AI Product Leader @ Meta's Reality Labs (Avatars)

TechCrunch

TechCrunch Disrupt - Speaker, MC, Judge

-Launched multiple AI features within Speech AI & Google Assistant

-Health AI experiences for Google's AR Glass

AI Product lead, Google

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Learning Instructor (Technical Product Management, Generative AI for Product Managers)

Facebook

PhD Internship leveraging AI/ML algorithms for experiments

Data Science PhD Intern

Speech/ASR @ Google

- Join my next AI Product Bootcamp cohort and follow me for educational content on AI & Product Management

Based in Silicon Valley, Dr. Marily Nika is an award-winning AI Product Management leader & one of the world's best AI educators, with 10+ years of experience in big tech (Google & Meta) & PhD in CS.  Marily has created the best AI Product Course on Maven and the #1 AI Product Bootcamp (https://maven.com/marily-nika/ai-pm-bootcamp). She writes at http://marily.substack.com.

Courses: https://maven.com/marily-nika/ai-pm-bootcamp
Twitter: www.twitter.com/marilynika 
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/marilynikapm
Coaching: https://bio.link/marilynika
Enquiries / Private Trainings: hello@aiproduct.com

I launched the first cohort-based AI Product Bootcamp (including Maven's best AI Product Course), with over 800+ students to date. Check out my courses here: https://maven.com/marily-nika.

For years, I’ve been advocating not to build what’s possible, but to build what’s missing. Today, I decided to write about what’s missing: excited to announce that the AI Product Playbook is finally here! 📘🤖

My second book was born out of hundreds of hours of collaboration with someone I’ve never actually met in person, my colleague Diego — yet we’ve worked side by side, virtually, as AI Product Builders at Google. Our connection started from a simple exchange of ideas about what it really means to build ML products — and quickly turned into something much bigger.

For years, I assumed all product managers faced the same challenges I did. But AI product building is different — it’s probabilistic, data-dependent, and often ambiguous in ways traditional PM frameworks don’t capture.

That realization sparked this project.
We didn’t just want to describe what’s possible in AI — we wanted to help others discover this role, understand it and build what’s missing.

If you’re a product manager, builder, or technologist trying to navigate the new frontier of AI-driven products, this book is for you.

It is different than my O’ Reilly book in that the playbook provides the broader foundation, career path, technical deep dive and strategic thinking; but my O’Reilly book is about leaders as they (and their teams) move into execution/build mode. So I recommend both. 

The AI Product Playbook: https://amzn.eu/d/6hDqlEG (EU), https://a.co/d/japctzI (US)

Building AI-Powered Products:  https://amzn.to/3Dbufkp

In fact - ALL students at my upcoming November cohort course will get a free book. 

Comment your interest in this post and we will send you a DM with the logistics.

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Sora 2 is so realistic it’s unsettling. I asked for a cameo of myself on a Greek island, speaking English with a Greek accent — and it almost fooled me. A mix of awe and absurdity. 

Let me know if you still need an invite in the comments.

Stop half-building and go from Idea → Prototype → Launch (for real) ...with me.

By now, so many of us have played with prototyping tools. You had a spark of an idea, started building and then ...stopped. Maybe you didn’t have engineering support? Maybe you got stuck? Or maybe you just weren’t sure if you were really onto something.

But that's the thing — you were. You just needed the right support system to bring it to life.

💭 If you’re not sure you’re onto something: Zoom out. Ask yourself:
- “What problem am I solving, and for whom?” Try using the problem–solution-validation loop:
 1️⃣ Define the pain clearly.
 2️⃣ Create one simple prototype that addresses it.
 3️⃣ Get feedback from 3 people who actually experience that pain.

💡 If you’re not sure what you’re doing: Use the MVP Map:
 1️⃣ Write down your idea in one sentence.
 2️⃣ Identify the 1 core feature that delivers value.
 3️⃣ Cut everything else. Focus on getting that one thing working end-to-end.

🧭 If you forgot your “why”:
 Pause. Reconnect with the moment that gave you the idea.
 If it no longer excites you, pivot or pause intentionally but not out of burnout.

💡 This November, I’m opening my next AI Product Management Bootcamp & Certification Cohort — designed exactly for you: the creators who started, but didn’t finish.

This time, every team gets paired with an engineer to help you actually launch your product. We’ll go from idea → prototype → production, together. You’ll leave with something real, live, and launched.

And we’ll celebrate with an in-person meetup in SF, where I’ll hand out free books and sign them for you.

Let’s stop half-building. Let’s ship. 

If you comment "Framework", I'll send you a framework I'm putting together to help and also an offer for you or your teams/groups if you are interested in a private workshop for your company via Maven.

I loved speaking at Stanford's School of Medicine on AI tools and offering a few demos. One of the reasons I love doing this is experiencing the aha moment in people who are ready to build and create — especially when it’s about a very specific domain with pain points that only they truly understand.

Every time I offer these sessions I’m reminded that we can’t assume what people know — or don’t know. Tools that seem “everywhere” in one circle can be completely new in another. That’s actually exciting, because it means there’s still so much room for exploration, learning, and empowerment.

The best part is when someone connects an idea or a problem they care deeply about with an AI capability they’ve just discovered — the oh wait, I could use this for… moment.

Thought of the day: Are we living through the MS-DOS era of GenAI? And if so — who will create the Windows moment that turns AI into something everyone can use, not just us, the tech-savvy experts?

Back then computing was powerful but... very command-line. Until one day the concept of 'Windows' (or mac OS) really blew my mind as suddenly technology became accessible, intuitive, and visual.

Right now as you know most GenAI interactions are text-based — prompts, parameters, system messages. It’s powerful, but still niche. 

But what happens when we build the Windows for GenAI — when multimodal, intuitive interfaces abstract the complexity away? When everyone can see, drag, speak, and build with AI effortlessly? What is that going to look like? 

I don't have answers but 2026 won't be about asking the LLMs to do a specific things (like running a command or typing a prompt); it will be about the AI learning and anticipating our ongoing goals, acting as a co-pilot for our lives that surfaces the right information or takes the right action before we explicitly ask. It's the transition from tool to agent.

I wrote about the MS DOS concept in Aug 18, 2023 on my substack, and I'm only now starting to see the future more clearly.

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