Meet Haren Bhatia, AI Product Manager
AI Product Manager Haren Bhatia shares how building Abnormal AI's first GTM transformation product in under three months redefined how he thinks about impact, velocity, and what it means to build for builders.
April 15, 2026
Shortly after joining Abnormal, Haren Bhatia had already shipped a product to 250 people and started rethinking what it means to be a product manager in an AI-native company. But the moment that reshaped how he defines his own impact had nothing to do with a launch. It happened when a second AI PM joined the team and built something equally ambitious, faster, on top of the infrastructure Haren's team had already created.
The product role, he realized, had shifted. He wasn't designing cars anymore. He was building the factory.
From Meeting Prep to Proof of Concept
Haren came to Abnormal from Hitachi, where he worked on internal on-prem AI solutions. He has a background in computer science and product management, but what drew him here wasn't the resume fit. It was the mission and a specific promise about what the role would look like.
"Abnormal showed me that it's a place for builders, along with its commitment to AI-nativity," Haren said. "The team followed through on their promise of providing us, AI PMs, space, visibility, and resources to develop products that have an impact on people."
That promise showed up fast. His first project was AI-initiated Meeting Briefs, a product built for Abnormal's Account Executives. The idea was straightforward: before every external customer call, an AI agent would automatically compile a detailed briefing with the right artifacts attached, delivered two business days in advance. No manual research. No workflow changes. AEs would show up to every meeting already equipped with relevant insights, customer history, and talking points.
The rollout was designed to build trust incrementally: prototype, gather feedback, optimize. The first pilot ran into criticism for being too generic. Some feedback was blunt. But as the team collected input from top-performing AEs and learned how they actually prepare for meetings, the product improved at an exponential rate. AI evaluations layered on top of human feedback created a compounding loop.
"It was a full-circle moment when our first critic was won over and became one of our champions in their org," Haren said.
"It was a full-circle moment when our first critic was won over and became one of our champions in their org."
Rolling out to the entire AE organization in a couple of months felt like a blink compared to past product cycles, and it made the development of every product that followed move exponentially faster. As the first product under Abnormal's GTM transformation initiative, Meeting Briefs became more than a tool. It became proof of concept that the AI Transformation team could deliver impact at a pace the company hadn't seen before.
Speed With Direction
That pace is intentional, and Haren is careful about how he describes it. He draws a distinction between speed and extreme velocity.
"Speed has no direction. Extreme velocity is speed with direction," Haren said. "Our team proactively focuses on planning and ensuring we are building in a direction that makes sense for our end users, and that also allows us to build compounding capabilities over time so we can build at a faster rate in the future."
Time spent used to be a proxy for quality. That's no longer true when AI has reshaped how work gets done. The team's challenge is knowing when to stop going down a rabbit hole. Their tools let imagination run wild, but sometimes they have to take a step back and recalibrate.
"It's also no longer just the velocity of execution but the velocity of impact," Haren said, "alongside the willingness to delete workflows that were rooted in the 'old way.'"
At the same time, they've had to unlearn pre-AI workflows and question the purpose of each step they take. The shift in mindset, Haren noted, is well justified by how AI has reshaped what's possible.
Building Proactive Value: A Team Mindset
The mindset shift that defines Haren's story clicked midway through his first product cycle, when Abnormal hired another AI PM. That new teammate was able to create a similar level of impact for a completely different function, at a faster rate, over shared infrastructure. The team aims to share roughly 80% of their infrastructure across related products.
That's when the framing changed. The team started picking problems where the tools and infrastructure they developed would be more reusable, more scalable, and where workflows were more abstractable.
That philosophy extends into how the team thinks about product strategy. Their products are "pull" based and AI-initiated, proactively delivering value before someone asks for it. That's the opposite of the reactive, assistant-style "push" approach that many AI products default to.
"We realized that we now have the ability to reactively solve almost any problem in the most naive way possible, but that it would be better to proactively pick problems that not only have the largest impact and reach, but also support other products that our org is developing to supercharge our AI transformation."
AI-Native Means Something Different Here
Before joining, Haren assumed he already understood what it meant to work in an AI-native environment. Abnormal redefined that for him.
"I thought I was 'AI native' when I got here, but Abnormal showed me what it really meant," he said. "It's an org-level shift of trust in what the capabilities of AI can be extended to when designed properly. There's also a sense of every conversation with every person being grounded in 'how do we get better faster using AI.'"
That trust shows up in how Haren works. He has bots set up to run a weekly review across his Zoom conversations, acting as an executive coach that tells him what he could do better. He gives the bot access to his career action plan, so he gets weekly advice and reminders on what to improve and how. Another bot tracks pending action items and surfaces changes his team made during the week so he can stay current without manual monitoring. A separate workflow runs through user calls and emails, organizes feedback into a document, analyzes bugs, and gives him advice on how to fix issues.
Between the internal AI development platform, the automated workflows his team has built, and the tools available across the company, Haren said the ecosystem is hard to replicate. "It's going to be pretty hard to switch out from Abnormal after all the tools and automated workflows we have here," he admitted.
Rolling With the Punches
When asked what surprised him most about this environment, Haren's answer was about his own growth.
"I deal with the chaos of product development a lot better than I thought I would," he said. "A lot of things can go wrong and will go wrong, but having the ability to roll with the punches and still deliver impact has given me a lot of confidence in the work I do."
The mission anchors that confidence. Haren joined Abnormal because of the morality of the work, and once he tied the speed and the AI resources to the purpose behind them, the decision to come here felt obvious. "Once we tie that into our mission of protecting humans from cybercriminals, it seems like a no-brainer," he said.
His advice for someone who wants to build more effectively with AI reflects that same dual focus on imagination and discipline. "There will be a lot of ways to get to your solution. Develop the ability to stretch your imagination beyond legacy development to set your vision. At the same time, ground your progress in the fastest path to creating impact 'now' while still building toward your final vision."
For Haren, the measure of success isn't the products he's shipped. It's the products that will be built on top of what his team creates next.
