How AI Is Transforming Product Management with Eric Neuman | Ep 269 | DevReady Podcast

Eric Neuman, Co Founder and CEO of Dotted, joins the host Anthony Sapountzis, CTO and Co-Founder of Aerion Technologies and DevReady.Ai on the DevReady Podcast to explore the future of product management, AI driven strategy and enterprise decision making. Eric, whose background spans engineering, product leadership and multiple startup exits, has built a career at the intersection of technology and organisational efficiency. After formative roles at Amazon, Microsoft and Digital Domain, he founded Dotted to solve a challenge he experienced repeatedly in big tech: product managers drowning in communication, reporting and alignment work instead of focusing on genuine innovation. This episode is ideal for technology leaders, product managers, founders and anyone looking to understand how AI is reshaping strategic work, product delivery and enterprise culture.

Eric reflects on his journey from childhood coder to serial founder, eventually discovering that his greatest value lay in product management. His time at Amazon revealed just how fragmented and decentralised large enterprise environments can be, where every visual element on Amazon.com. Spend less. Smile more. is treated as a standalone product owned by its own team. This scale creates a system driven not by strict processes but by persuasion, negotiation and meticulously structured documents. At Microsoft, he encountered similar challenges, where each team follows its own communication expectations and templates, making alignment far more complex than it appears from the outside.

These experiences led Eric to build Dotted, an AI powered platform designed to reduce the heavy reporting load placed on product managers and strategic leaders. He explains that while AI has accelerated coding dramatically, most strategic work still exists in PowerPoint, Excel and manual status reports. Dotted aims to bring a continuous integration style workflow to strategic decision making, automating up to 90 percent of repetitive reporting tasks and generating virtual stakeholders that offer predictive feedback on documents before they reach real executives. This shift enables teams to focus on what truly matters: deciding what to build and aligning effectively across the organisation.

Anthony and Eric also unpack the current AI landscape, arguing that many AI initiatives fail due to unrealistic expectations, poor understanding of the technology and misaligned use cases. They discuss the overlapping hype cycles of chatbots, agents and multimodal capabilities, as well as the rise of “vibe coded” software built quickly but without architectural discipline. While senior developers with AI tools can perform like entire teams, juniors and no code builders often produce fragile, inconsistent systems due to limited context and lack of foundational engineering practices. They expect AI assisted code quality checks and guardrails to become standard as development speeds continue to accelerate.

Despite the rapid pace of AI driven execution, both Anthony and Eric reinforce that successful products still rely on focus, clarity and genuine business value. DevReady’s planning framework helps teams avoid building the wrong solution faster by defining the vision, requirements and outcomes before a single line of code is written. Eric compares today’s feature explosion to the fashion industry’s experimental eras, where possibilities grow faster than purpose. In the end, they agree that the products that win will be the ones grounded in real human needs, helping people save time, save money or create more value, rather than simply generating features for the sake of speed.

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