AG

Angela Guo

Product Leader · AI System Builder · Occasional Traveler & Investor

Building AI products since 2014 @ Amazon, Pinterest, VIP.com.

My story

I grew up fascinated by systems that outlive their creators — cities, companies, communities. That drew me to study Urban Planning and Operations Research at Cornell University. Although I didn't know Product Management at that time, the studies accidentally taught me many PM skills. I moved to Silicon Valley after graduation, following my role model Steve Jobs.

My first job was with VIP.com as a data scientist while pursuing a Master's in Data Science at UC Berkeley. The work was fine, but I quickly realized I cared more about bridging business and technology than optimizing Machine Learning models. My manager, a senior product leader from eBay, took a bet on me. Over the next four years I transitioned into PM, was promoted three times, and led the launch of several high-impact computer vision and NLP products.

Pinterest was where I learned to operate at a real scale — 400 million users, products that had to work across countries. I led zero-to-one launches like Shop the Look (company's top engaging products) and Virtual Try-On (featured by TechCrunch). I also drove Shopping Internationalization across 11 countries and led Content Recommendation work that helped merchants break through cold-start problems. The recurring lesson from AI product launches: sometimes you have to slow down to move fast.

Lately I'm with Amazon's Generative Intelligence (AGI) data org. I led the zero-to-one launch of Workflow Builder — an internal platform enabling AI scientists to define data requirements and rapidly generate custom tooling. My latest adventure is in the Reinforcement Learning space.

Across everything, I am drawn to the intersection of AI and great user experience. I am passionate about building products that meaningfully change people's lives and systems that last long. Outside of work, I read, travel and invest. This site is a place to document what I've learned — hopefully also useful to someone else building something that lasts.

2022 – now
Amazon Current
Sr. PMT · Alexa → Amazon Generative Intelligence (AGI)
2018 – 2022
Pinterest
Product Lead · Visual Search, Shopping, Search · 400M MAU
2014 – 2018
VIP.com 3× promoted
Product Lead · ML/AI suite from scratch · 45M MAU
Education
UC Berkeley · Cornell University
M.S. Information & Data Science · B.S. Operations Research & Urban Planning (3 years)

Product philosophy

  • 1

    "AI Product" is a term I feel ambivalent about. AI is a technology — like Java. The real job is to solve a problem. AI is a means to the end, not the end itself.

  • 2

    Understanding the limitations of models, the unglamorous data labeling work, and driving complements from engineering and UX work — that's the difference between shipping good and great AI product.

  • 3

    Product sense is knowing what users need most out of all possible requests (and which makes the biggest business impact). Between what users ask for and what they actually need — that gap is where product work lives.

  • 4

    Be a multiplier — PMs are measured by the team's output. The best PMs make engineers more effective, designers braver, data scientists more product-minded.

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Portfolio

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Blog

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Field notes

// work
Wanted to work at 10:50pm but ran out of Claude tokens for today. Feels like my coworker went off work. Time to go home.
Oct 2024
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Hiring manager?

If you've read this far, we should probably talk.

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