Building AI-Powered Products: The Essential Guide to AI and GenAI Product Management 1st Edition

Building AI-Powered Products” by Dr. Marily Nika is an essential manual for anyone serious about leveraging AI in product development. As a founder and AI PM, I can confidently say this book cuts through the hype and provides the practical frameworks, mental models, and real-world examples needed to actually ship AI-native products that matter. Whether you’re building your first AI-powered feature or leading a GenAI startup, this should be required reading—clear, actionable, and refreshingly strategic without getting lost in technical jargon.

Just finished my first read through and loved it. I can tell I’m going to use this as reference material for years to come. Marily does an amazing job illustrating complex ideas and making them digestible and actionable. Even with AI changing everyday, the lessons are foundational and help me interpret the big changes that are happening.

This is a meaningful attempt—and there’s certainly a need for more work in this space. The author is well-regarded in the field, and her classes are good, which set high expectations.However, the book felt surface-level at times—missing the depth and nuance I had hoped for. Given the author’s expertise, it felt like much was held back or left unsaid.

This is a great guide for people that want to understand what it takes to become an AI product manager in 2025. I liked the AI strategy chapter the most. It has a lot of examples, frameworks and tools on how to go about building AI products. She did a great job in writing a book with foundations likely to last for the coming years but AI is moving fast so I'm curious to see if she will need a second edition or not.

I'm a PM at a mag-7 tech company and I've found this book both stimulating and insightful. This is a very ambitious survey of an entire field, especially one that is so dynamic, so it was surprising that Dr. Nika was able to cover so much ground with useful insights throughout.

The book isn't just theory - it is packed with actionable frameworks, practical tools, and relevant case studies. It truly gave me clarity on the AI product lifecycle, and made me think of ethical considerations of AI in the PM world.

Awesome book on project management in the age of AI. A bunch of great examples of successful AI business cases. I found it to be a helpful reference when brainstorming for my own projects.

I had such high hopes for this book as there is a definite need for a good AI PM book. However I was disappointed that this book doesn’t feature in-depth examples of AI applications. For example, the author brings up AI agents in video games. Fantastic! Super interesting! Except … the example only lasts 8 lines and provides nothing of real value (what data did they get? What systems are used? What mistakes did they make? What’s the impact? Etc, etc)Another reviewer called out that the book was likely written by an AI system… I thought it’s not a big deal… the whole point is to leverage AI to build better user experiences… but I get what he meant. The style of the book sounds very superficial and lacks depth.