Aparna Chennapragada
Aparna Chennapragada is the chief product officer of experiences and devices at Microsoft, where she oversees AI product strategy for their productivity tools and work on agents. Previously, she was the CPO at Robinhood, spent 12 years at Google, and is also on the board of eBay and Capital One.
Building & Shipping Skills
Rapid prototyping is essential to develop product taste and avoid building incoherent features that don't solve core user problems.
"If you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. It becomes even more important to have that territorial and taste-making at the heart of it because..."
Career (separate track) Skills
Overcoming past biases about AI requires creating personal triggers that force you to reflexively apply the technology to every daily task.
"I have a cheesy Chrome extension. Literally whenever I open a new tab, it just says, how can you use AI to do what you're going to do right now?"
Launch & Go-to-Market Skills
Enterprise product development requires a dual-track focus on feature delight and organizational governance, as ignoring either leads to failure.
"In consumer, you're kind of like, 'Oh, we have a playbook for make the product work or make the feature work and make it delightful,' but I think in the enterprise, you almost have... Every time you t..."
Overlay: Building AI Products Skills
Designing for natural language requires defining structured grammars and invisible UI constructs rather than leaving the user experience entirely to the model.
"Natural language interface. NLX is the new UX. Often I hear a product builders say, 'Oh, yeah. With AI, the model eats the products.' That doesn't mean it's not designed."