The Learning Curve

Every product manager eventually learns to catch the AI project that isn't worth building before it gets expensive.

In this episode, hosts Matt Sharp and Holly Fake are joined by Technical Strategist and product leader Victoria Ragulina to talk about what happens when a product manager decides to learn AI properly, rather than pick it up as they go. Victoria walks through the formal AI courses she's taken, including one where she built her own agentic AI product from scratch, a tool that prices original artwork by scraping market data and asking a few questions about medium and size.

Victoria explains how that same instinct shows up in her day-to-day work, including why "should we even use AI for this" has become her first question, how the hidden backend costs of an AI feature are easy to miss until it's too late, and how she builds guardrails into chatbots so end users know when an answer might be wrong. She also shares the personal AI agent she built to solve a very unglamorous problem.

The real lesson isn't what AI can do for you. It's how quickly you learn to catch the moment it shouldn't be the one doing the work.

00:00 Introduction
01:03 From product manager to AI power user
03:37 Taking AI courses through Maven
05:36 Pricing art with AI
07:13 Picking the right tools
08:42 The new first question from product managers
12:12 Why AI can't replace a trained expert
16:13 Unpredictable AI questions
21:11 Guardrails for AI answers
24:18 The summer camp agent
28:05 Key takeaways

Subscribe to the Learning Curve for real conversations about AI at work, AI implementation, and what it actually looks like to build with AI inside a technology company.

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What is The Learning Curve?

The Learning Curve is Flexion’s podcast about navigating change in complex systems — one decision at a time. Each episode explores how organizations can harness technologies like AI not just to follow trends, but to drive measurable impact.

In this season, we’re exploring:

-How real teams are building trust and transparency with AI
-The practical realities of enterprise AI adoption
-Lessons learned from Flexion’s own journey, experimenting with and scaling AI

This isn’t hype. It’s an inside look at the mindset, structure, and strategy needed to lead in an era of continuous change.