How Lorilyn McCue sees product management evolving for the AI era

What do aviation and product management have in common? In both cases, you’re trying to keep a complicated thing running.

Lorilyn McCue would know. Prior to her decade-long run in the product management world, McCue started out her career in the US Army, where she flew Apache helicopters all around the world.

“I got to fly around the States. I got to fly in Korea. I flew in Iraq for a year, and that was like a pretty cool job,” McCue said.

McCue—now an AI product manager for AI productivity company Superhuman—said being a pilot and a project manager both have an adventurous feel and evoke the feeling of “going into the unknown.”

“With Apaches, you’re flying the newest and coolest technology available for helicopters. You’re often literally going into unknown areas, in combat areas that you’ve never been to,” McCue said. “I know it sounds silly to say, but I also felt it in tech, where we’re using these new exciting technologies to have a new adventure, and a new frontier to see what’s possible and bring that to users.”

The road to product management. McCue caught up with IT Brew to discuss how she landed in product management. After flying in the Army and a stint as a physical education teacher at the US Military Academy, McCue had to decide what to do next in her career.

“I just had basically done everything I wanted to do in the military. I had nothing left to check off,” McCue said. “I had been a company commander in combat. I had flown Apaches. I had taught back at West Point. I did it. I did all the things.”

McCue decided to pursue a “generic” MBA to keep her options open. While in school, she landed a product management internship at Google.

“I loved Google. I loved product management. I love just tech in general. I love the speed and the velocity and the excitement and the energy,” McCue said. “For me, it was the perfect transition from the military into tech.”

After Google, McCue landed at Slack in 2016 as a product manager on the growth team, which was responsible for helping new users navigate the platform.

“It was like, ‘Let’s do an experiment. We’ll have some people in this group, some people in this group,’” McCue said. “At the end of the experiment, we’ll look at the numbers and see which experience was better for users. It was just really fun [and] a lot of velocity adventure every time.”

McCue joined Superhuman in 2023: “I’m responsible for making sure we prioritize the right features that we’re going to build next, making sure those features get built [and] that they meet the needs of customers, [and] figuring out the trade-offs that need to happen before we launch to make sure we launch on time.”

One of her most memorable moments was when Superhuman Mail launched an MCP server, allowing users to connect the application to AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT: “We’ve seen almost a doubling in the percentage of people who use AI daily since we launched this, and it’s been really exciting.”

Growing role. McCue has seen the product manager role evolve with the times. Gone are the days of “ridiculous mocks” made in Google Slides, she said. Instead, AI allows her to make more interactive prototypes when conveying ideas to her team.

“Now I can go into Claude and say, ‘Hey, I want you to make a mock of this. I want you to make it functional, so when I click here, it does this,’” McCue said. “I can just communicate so much faster to my team.”

AI is also allowing product managers to become citizen developers, giving them the ability to fix minor hiccups in the coding process.

“It’s really exciting to be able to take some of the burden of these small things off of the engineers and to be able to also be a doer yourself,” McCue said. “That’s really exciting.”

Finally, McCue said product managers can now leverage AI as a thought partner to talk through notes, as well as how to handle situations that arise: “You get a coach available at all times.”

In the future, she expects the role to become more cross-functional and involve less tactical planning: “I think the product manager job is going to be more talking to the other people that are leading the robots…And making sure that we are tight and close in sync.”