Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model
Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 87%
A three-part operating model for thriving as a long-term individual-contributor PM when the direction is unclear. Bring energy to break friction and set culture, embrace the PM's role as the 'wanderer' who ventures into the unknown to find direction while the rest of the company waits, and use AI to amplify sparse signal from many sources so you can be in many places at once.
Origin
Aman Khan's synthesis from his intentionally IC career at Arize AI, including lessons from his CEO on energy and from his chief product officer on what 'zero to one' feels like.
Core principles
- 01Energy counts a lot when you're unsure which direction to go
- 02Humans pick up on subtle signals — engaged energy breaks down friction
- 03The PM's job is to be the wanderer who finds direction, not to wait and see
- 04'Zero to one' feels uncertain, but you know it when you get there
- 05AI lets you amplify sparse signal and be in many places at once
How to run it
- 1
Bring energy (and do the work)
Show up to meetings with visible energy — it makes friction fall away and conversations flow. Energy also means rolling up your sleeves: when direction was unclear at Arize, Khan personally became an outbound salesperson, sending LinkedIn messages to people with 'AI' in their title to learn and to show the team he'd get into the details.
Pro tip Energy is personal — for some it's enthusiasm, for others simply asking how someone is doing and keeping the tone positive. Doing the work alongside people also builds empathy for their job.
- 2
Wander while others wait
Recognize that companies lean toward waiting and doing what's worked so far. The PM's role is to be the wanderer — pushing the boundaries of what the company thinks is possible, sitting in the squishy unknown, and iterating until you feel the product pull you in a direction.
Pro tip It's like sending scouts ahead while the camp waits — accept the discomfort of being out in the unknown looking for any signal to bring back.
Watch out This feels genuinely tough and uncertain even when the engineering side feels settled with a clear roadmap — expect the emotional weight of not knowing.
- 3
Amplify signal through the noise with AI
When signal is sparse, use AI to scale yourself. Feed call transcripts (e.g. from Gong) into long-context LLMs to extract the most common customer problems, or turn them into a NotebookLM episode — you can't sit in a hundred meetings a week, but you can mine them.
Pro tip This is a superpower: it lets you be in many places at once and bring real signal back to guide where the product goes.
In the wild
Facing an existential question — how much to invest in LLMs versus the existing customer base — Khan didn't wait for clarity. He wrote and iterated LinkedIn cold messages to people with 'AI' in their profile, maxed out his five messages a day, and sat with the sales team to learn how. This taught him how to message the product and showed the team he'd get into the details with them.
→ Both learning and credibility: he raised the whole team's bar by acting as a 'player coach' when morale and direction were uncertain.
Unable to attend a hundred meetings a week, Khan fed call transcripts into long-context large language models to pull out the most common customer problems, and could even turn them into a NotebookLM episode or query them by voice.
→ Sparse signal from many conversations became a concentrated, actionable read on customer pain — effectively a superpower for being everywhere at once.
Common mistakes
Waiting for the next model instead of wandering
Defaulting to 'we'll just wait for the next OpenAI model and build around it' cedes the PM's core job of finding direction; the company stalls while competitors who wander find the path.
Showing up low-energy when direction is unclear
People pick up on subtle signals — arriving deflated or unsure adds friction and drags the room down, whereas even a small lift in energy breaks down barriers and keeps the team moving.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual-contributor PMs operating in ambiguous, fast-changing zero-to-one AI environments
Not ideal for
Highly stable, well-defined product areas with a clear roadmap where wandering adds noise rather than signal
From the transcript
“there's really three things I think about there which are uh energy waiting versus wandering and then amplifying the signal to make a decision”
“energy can count a lot when you're not sure which direction to go”
“to me I actually think the role of a PM is to be that Wanderer”
“you can be in so many places at once uh and and kind of use technology to your advantage to get that signal back”
From the episode
Becoming an AI PM
Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise)