The Organism Conversion Loop
by Asha Sharma • Corporate Vice President of Product, AI Platform at Microsoft
Former COO at Instacart, VP of Product at Meta (Messenger/Instagram Direct), Early employee at Porch Group.
🎙️ Episode Context
Asha Sharma discusses the paradigm shift from building products as static artifacts to living organisms in the age of AI. She covers the rise of agentic workflows, the necessity of 'post-training' investment, and how Microsoft structures product planning amidst rapid technological change.
Problem It Solves
Static software that requires manual updates to improve; keeping up with the marginal cost of intelligence dropping to zero.
Framework Overview
A shift from treating product as a static 'artifact' to a living 'organism' that improves with usage. The core mechanism is a metabolism that ingests data and digests rewards to autonomously improve outcomes.
🔄 Iterative Cycle
When to Use
Building AI-native products where user interaction data can directly fine-tune model performance.
Common Mistakes
Focusing only on the UI/GUI rather than the data loop; failing to set up observability and evals for the loop.
Real World Example
Microsoft's Dragon (for physicians) improving acceptance rates from ~30-60% to 83% by feeding 600k expert-annotated interactions back into the model.
The whole KPI is what is the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome.
— Asha Sharma