A Google AI product manager has a career advice: 'Be a crab'

• Aspiring product managers should try to "be a crab," says a Google AI product manager.
• Marily Nika, who has over a decade of product experience, says past experience is a competitive advantage.
• Product managers also need to be AI-literate in this era, she added.

A Google AI product manager's career advice is unexpectedly crustacean.

Marily Nika, who has worked in AI product roles for over a decade, said in an episode of "The Growth Podcast" by Aakash Gupta published Sunday that aspiring product managers should "be like crabs."

"That means that you need to move adjacent to what you've been doing," Nika said, adding that one's past experience is a competitive advantage.

Nika shared the example of a student in her AI product management boot camp who worked in the hearing aid industry and felt stuck and closed off from the tech industry. The student believed he was in a "completely different domain" and didn't see a clear path into product management, she said.

Nika encouraged him to look more closely at how his experience could translate. When they checked Apple's careers site, they found an opening for a product manager working on AirPods — a role where expertise in hearing could be relevant.

"We need to be open-minded. We really need to bring in the previous experience we have because that's gonna set us apart," Nika said.

Nika also provided another example involving a sports journalist who sought to transition into an AI product manager role in sports. Rather than being afraid of lacking a traditional product résumé, Nika advised him to lean into his domain expertise. Product skills can be learned, but a deep understanding of users and industries is harder to replace, she said.

Skills product managers should have

Nika said becoming "AI literate" is now essential for product managers.

"Understand the unique intricacies that AI brings, understand how dependent we are on data," she said, describing how AI has become an expectation for the role.

Aspiring product managers should also understand "what goes behind coding," like knowing what APIs are and how products are shipped.

Other tech leaders and workers echo the same message.

A vice president of product and growth for AI products at Dropbox told Business Insider last year that product managers should familiarize themselves with new AI tools, including vibe coding tools that enable non-coders to quickly prototype ideas.

Instead of spending time writing documents, product managers can use AI tools to build lightweight prototypes to test ideas early, he said. This can help "accelerate how they think about developing their taste, developing their craft, and understanding what makes sense in physical products," he added.

A senior product manager at Microsoft told Business Insider in December that product managers will increasingly be expected to use AI to work faster. He said AI tools helped him draft work documents, summarize information, and generate suggestions for approaching product management problems.