Google, Alibaba, and the New Production Relations
Jason Xu — founder of PrepPal. Grew up in California, studied at Berkeley, and started in finance before moving into big data during the MapReduce era. Product manager at Google, then at Alibaba in China, where he worked on B2B products and went through the company's management training. Now based in Hong Kong, where he builds with an AI-first workflow and thinks about how AI reshapes the structure of organisations themselves.
Chapters
- 0:00Intro
- 0:14Welcome back — Compass Studios
- 0:45A Berkeley guy, ex-Google, ex-Alibaba
- 2:05Meet Jason
- 2:18Growing up in California, studying at Berkeley
- 2:48What a product manager actually does
- 5:40Product management in the Google sense
- 7:30What product managers are supposed to do
- 9:15Getting engineers to build the right thing
- 10:08Movies that flop first and matter later
- 11:54Buying his mother a jailbroken iPhone
- 14:35Theory mattered, 2015 to COVID
- 15:28Why Asian and Western product work differs
- 16:33Say two good things about Google
- 17:17Say two good things about Alibaba
- 18:14Alibaba's management training
- 19:07Growth at Alibaba vs Google
- 20:01From finance into big data
- 20:55'AI product manager' used to be a joke
- 21:49AI and ML are still different things
- 23:35Is AI overexposed right now?
- 25:23What this means for graduates
- 27:13One human, one assistant
- 30:26Production relations, rethought
- 32:16Getting the maximum out of a team
- 34:08If we all had agents
- 36:48Rework used to be expensive
- 37:40PrepPal — what he is building
- 39:28Hard mode, and being criticised by AI
- 41:13Structuring a document that AI can use
- 43:01Resistance to all this
- 45:42Big systems that are hard to maintain
- 49:23Years of training, compressed
- 53:21'I want a Star Trek future'
- 54:16Keeping an open mind
About This Episode
Jason Xu has built product on both sides of the divide — years at Google, then years at Alibaba — and he is unusually precise about how differently the two think. Asked to name two good things about each, he does, and the answers say more than a critique would. Then the conversation turns philosophical: if AI collapses the cost of reorganising a team, what happens to the relationship between a company and the people in it? Jason reorganises his own workforce every three months. He explains what that means when most of the workforce is a model.