How are Chief Product Officers redesigning their org charts and ways of working to build truly AI-native product teams? In this podcast hosted by Hoda Mehr, Co-founder and CEO of Up My Mojo and a Board Member at Products That Count, Monumental Chief Product Officer Pawan Gaargi will be speaking on building an AI-native product team. As organizations move beyond using AI as a feature-level tool and begin rethinking how products are built, shipped, and managed, product leaders are being asked to reshape processes, decision-making, and collaboration across their teams. Drawing from his experience scaling teams and rebuilding workflows through acquisitions at Monumental and from his early product leadership roots at Zynga, Pawan shares how experimentation, hypothesis-driven thinking, and hands-on leadership are helping teams become AI-native while keeping core product fundamentals like retention, player motivation, and growth metrics firmly in focus.
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Show Notes:
- Becoming AI-native is less about adopting specific tools and more about rebuilding how teams operate and make decisions.
- Product leaders today are expected not only to build great products but to rewrite workflows, processes, and org structures for the AI era.
- Many existing AI playbooks are either too abstract or too narrow; leaders want team-level guidance on how CPOs are changing execution models.
- AI dramatically reduces the time required to gather insights from sources like community feedback, metrics, and research, allowing PMs to spend more time deciding what to do with insights rather than collecting them.
- The biggest shift AI creates is freeing capacity for higher-quality decision-making, not replacing product judgment.
- Strong product teams should approach AI adoption with a hypothesis-driven experimentation mindset, just like product development itself.
- Product leaders increasingly benefit from getting hands-on with AI tools, even at the executive level, to understand their real capabilities.
- CPOs are moving closer to IC-style work again—building prototypes, testing ideas, and exploring tools directly—to lead effectively in an AI-accelerated environment.
- AI expands creative exploration by enabling teams to generate many more viable solution options than before, improving decision quality.
- AI improves both execution speed and idea diversity, strengthening product discovery and delivery simultaneously.
- Teams should avoid letting AI “think for them”; instead, AI should accelerate iteration while humans retain ownership of reasoning and judgment.
- In gaming—and increasingly elsewhere—product success still depends on aligning core loops with user motivations, regardless of AI adoption.
- AI enables deeper analysis across retention, engagement, and behavioral metrics, allowing teams to identify overlooked opportunities faster, such as new-user retention gaps.
- Product success metrics themselves have not fundamentally changed because of AI—growth, retention, and lifetime value still anchor strategy.
- What has changed is the depth and speed at which teams can analyze second- and third-order KPI relationships.
- Rather than mandating tools, effective leaders create a culture where experimentation spreads organically through shared discoveries across the team.
- Visible experimentation by leadership helps normalize adoption and signals permission for teams to explore new workflows.
- Large organizations often struggle with AI adoption because they treat it as a tooling decision instead of a mindset and experimentation challenge.
- Incentivizing AI usage directly can backfire; success comes from ensuring AI supports core business outcomes rather than becoming a metric itself.
- The strongest AI-native teams treat adoption as a cultural shift first and a process shift second, allowing capabilities to evolve naturally as tools improve.
About the speaker
Pawan is the Chief Product Officer at Monumental, overseeing game development and product management. Before Monumental, Pawan was General Manager of Zynga Poker and a member of the Product Management Council at Zynga. He has extensive experience running and growing games through features and live ops, as well as expertise in leveraging growth channels and driving retention and monetization.