Ravi Mehta: Data-driven prototyping with AI | Product in Practice
Ravi Mehta is a senior product executive with experience leading product organisations at TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Tinder. He's the co-creator of Reforge's AI Strategy Program and currently works as a full-time product strategy adviser and investor with consumer brands and fast-growing startups.
Key takeaways:
AI generates the average - and that's both its strength and limitation. Large language models are trained on existing data, which means they excel at producing "pretty good" results quickly. But exceptional products aren't average - they're outliers. The goal isn't to move faster towards average solutions, but to use AI's speed to iterate rapidly towards something truly exceptional for your users.
Product work is splitting into human-speed and AI-speed activities. Understanding customers, creating a strategy, and building adoption happen at human speed. Writing documentation, creating prototypes, and increasingly design work happen at AI speed. The most successful product managers will focus on human-speed activities - customer discovery, product sense, and strategy - because these are where you add unique value.
The emphasis is shifting from craft to taste. Creating things used to require both taste (knowing what to build) and craft (the ability to build it). AI is democratising craft across creative fields. When anyone can generate beautiful designs or working prototypes, taste becomes the primary differentiator. For product managers, determining what to build becomes 90% of success, up from roughly 50% before.
Data-driven prototyping unlocks more sophisticated testing. Rather than starting with specifications or designs, begin with the data schema that will drive your experience. Generate mock data (or pull from existing systems), then ask AI to create an interface around that data. This creates better separation between presentation and data layers, makes iteration faster, and produces more realistic prototypes for user testing.
Three cohorts exist in every organisation: evangelists, interested learners, and sceptics. Evangelists are already experimenting daily. Interested learners need access and education to get started. Sceptics need to understand that whilst AI won't fulfil all the hype, it's genuinely transformative. People who refuse to engage with AI tools will fall behind in pace - not because AI replaces them, but because they're moving slower than necessary.
Chapters:
00:00: Introduction to Ravi Mehta
01:00: Why Reforge created the AI Strategy Program
03:00: The four parts of AI strategy: disruption risk, market, product, and execution
04:00: Insights from running Reforge’s inaugural AI Strategy program
06:00: Three ways to raise AI fluency across product teams
09:00: The most powerful move PMs are making with AI
11:00: Why AI is also “average intelligence” and what that means
13:00: Skills moving at human speed vs AI speed
15:00: The shift from craft to taste in creative work
18:00: Which PM competencies are changing and which remain essential
21:00: Can AI actually think? The nuanced answer
23:00: How AI is transforming product discovery
26:00: Demo: Introduction to data-driven prototyping
28:00: Spec-driven vs design-driven prototyping
30:00: Building a trip planning feature the traditional way
35:00: Generating structured data with Claude and MCP servers
39:00: Creating prototypes from data schemas
42:00: Iterating on features with separated data layers
45:00: Switching data sets to test different scenarios
49:00: Recommended resources for product managers
50:00: Developing product judgment through mindful observation
Where to find Ravi Mehta:
Website: https://www.ravi-mehta.com/
Substack: Ravi on Product
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravimehta/
Where to find Axel:
Newsletter: www.axel.pm
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelsooriah/
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