The AI-First 'Chef & Ingredients' Model
by Tomer Cohen • Chief Product Officer (CPO) at LinkedIn
Tomer Cohen is the Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn, overseeing all product teams, design, and business development. He is credited with leading LinkedIn's mobile transition, the successful revamp of the Feed (turning it from a promotional space to a knowledge marketplace), and shifting the company to an AI-first mindset long before the generative AI boom.
🎙️ Episode Context
In this episode, LinkedIn CPO Tomer Cohen reveals the strategy behind transforming LinkedIn's feed into a high-engagement knowledge marketplace. He discusses the unique challenges of "minus one to one" product turnarounds, shares his framework for AI-first product management, and explains his leadership mantra: "We might be wrong, but we are not confused."
Problem It Solves
Helping Product Managers adapt to the generative AI era where they lose deterministic control over user flows and interfaces.
Framework Overview
A framework for building AI products where the PM shifts from designing rigid steps to curating the data and objectives. The PM provides the ingredients and guidelines, and the AI (the chef) cooks the dish (the experience) for the user.
🧠 Framework Structure
Control Ingredients, Not the Dish: Yo...
Diverge then Converge: When new tech ...
PMs Must Own the Engine: PMs cannot t...
When to Use
When integrating LLMs or advanced machine learning into your product, requiring a shift from logic-based software to probabilistic AI systems.
Common Mistakes
Treating AI as a feature to 'sprinkle' on top of existing flows, rather than rethinking the core problem and letting AI handle the solutioning.
Real World Example
LinkedIn's 'Coach' in job seeking. Instead of clicking buttons to filter jobs, the AI uses the 'ingredients' of user profile and job data to conduct a personalized conversation and career advice session.
You don't control the experience anymore, you control the ingredients.
— Tomer Cohen