Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?

The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.

> How many times...

Literally all the time? Every single month?

I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.

The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.

Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"

The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.

A fully curated backlog with complete specifications that is kept up to date with current changes in the product/industry? I've never had the privilege of working in an environment like that.

Obviously not every item in the backlog has a full design, for work that might be years out.

But yes, the next few items for the team to work on should always have the necessary specifications to start work. Whether it's UX mocks or a requirements document or whatever. Having that stuff ready to go is a primary job of the PM who manages the backlog.

Obviously the engineering team then has to break it down further into tasks to complete, but that's what engineering is. And you will run into areas that turned out to be underspecified and the PM needs to liaison with other folks to figure out answers, but again that's part and parcel. That's not generally stopping the whole team from work, and teams often work on multiple features at once so even being temporarily blocked on one doesn't keep you from progress on another.