How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)

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How to win in the AI era: Ship a feature every week, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and create magic your competitors can't copy | Gaurav Misra (CEO and co-founder of Captions)

Gaurav Misra (Captions CEO) on how to win in the AI era, lessons from his time at Snap, how science fiction is now real

Mar 27, 2025

Transcript

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Brought to you by:

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Gaurav Misra is the co-founder and CEO of Captions, an AI-powered video creation company and one of the most successful consumer AI products in the world today. Previously he was a product leader at Snap, where he created the design engineering function and spent years helping develop features used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. With a background in both engineering and design, Gaurav brings a unique cross-functional perspective to product development.

What you’ll learn:

Why the “ship a marketable feature every week” approach helps his team stay focused and the product stay top of mind for users amid constant AI breakthroughs

How to balance rapid shipping with maintaining quality by cutting scope rather than compromising on timelines
The “secret roadmap” strategy that helps Captions develop breakthrough features competitors never see coming
Why taking on strategic technical debt is essential for startups to outpace larger companies
How Captions accidentally ignored their most successful product for 1.5 years (and why it still grew to 500K users with no updates or support)
How Snap’s unique product development approach—with designers functioning as PMs—enabled their success as the last major social network to break through
Why AI video will transform marketing before other industries

Some takeaways:

Ship marketable features weekly: Gaurav’s team follows the principle that “every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.” A marketable product is something users would come to your app specifically for or even pay for.
Cut scope, not quality: When faced with time constraints, aggressively reduce scope by asking, “What if we remove this? Is the product still useful?” rather than compromising on quality. They “cut, cut, cut until we can really say that it’s going to be useless if we cut anymore.”
Use customer complaints as prioritization signals: “If nobody complains, it’s almost a red flag,” Gaurav explains. User complaints highlight what matters most to your audience and should guide your immediate product improvements.
Implement a two-roadmap system: Maintain both a “public roadmap” (features users explicitly request) and a “secret roadmap” (innovative ideas that could transform user behavior). The biggest wins typically come from the secret roadmap.
Strategically manage technical debt: “As a startup, your job is to take on technical debt” to move faster than larger companies. Ask “Is this a problem we need to solve today, or can a future engineer solve it?” Just be mindful of your “technical debt runway.”
Focus on solving real problems: In the AI hype cycle, remember that fundamental product principles still apply—“At the core of building products is solving problems.” People may try your AI product out of curiosity, but they’ll only stay if it solves a genuine need.
Use cross-functional innovation: Gaurav found that merging roles (like designer-PMs at Snap or design-engineers) leads to distinctive insights. “A lot of unique insight and innovation can come from one person doing two different functions.”
Distinguish between product engagement models: For AI video, Gaurav differentiates between “documentation” (capturing reality) and “storytelling” (entertainment). Understanding these distinct use cases helps prioritize features appropriately.
Don’t ignore existing product-market fit: Gaurav’s team built Captions in two days, then ignored its success for 1.5 years while pursuing other ideas. When they finally noticed its organic growth and refocused, “what looked like a vertical line at that time became a horizontal line.”
Create companywide ideation processes: Captions’ secret roadmap comes from quarterly brainstorming that includes everyone. “It’s not just a product team thing. It’s like engineering, recruiting . . . everybody comes up with ideas.”
Take a strong position on your product’s scope: Snap maintained clear principles about what was in or out of scope based on their mission. This clarity helped them stay focused even when it meant passing on potential opportunities (like what would become TikTok).
Prototype before full investment: For significant new directions, build smaller prototypes to test concepts before committing full resources. This resembles startup methodology—“Build fast, get it out there, get feedback, understand whether it works.”