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A comprehensive guide to choosing AI tools from Google’s Group Product Manager. Learn how Anshumanni Rudra runs 6 Claude Code terminal windows simultaneously, why he dictates instead of types, and the exact 4-tool stack that powers AI-first product managers in 2025.
Here is the transcript:
Introduction (00:00:00 – 00:02:46)
Aakash: Every product manager is asking the same question right now: which AI tools will I be using in 2025? There are hundreds of apps. Which ones make you 100X faster? Which ones are just hype? Today I’m with Anshumanni Rudra, one of the most legendary product leaders in India and Singapore. He was the VP of product at Hotstar. Now he is a Group Product Manager at Google in charge of all of APAC payments. Today we’re breaking down the top product management tools of 2025, and we’ll be ranking them all tier ranking style. So stick to the end of this video if you want to know our favorite AI tool. Anshumanni, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Anshumanni: My pleasure. It’s been a long time pending, but it’s good to finally be on your podcast. I’m a big fan.
Aakash: When it comes to product leaders in your region of the world, when I ask people who we need to have on the podcast, they always mention your name, so the honor is mine. I have been seeing you tweet, post on LinkedIn about all sorts of AI tools, so I thought there would be no better person in the world to create a tier ranking of AI tools. Do you think we can do that?
Anshumanni: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s dig in.
AI Agents & Automation Tier Ranking (00:02:46 – 00:08:18)
Aakash: The type of tool that everybody is obsessed with these days is AI agents. So I brought together some of the AI agent tools here. There’s N8N, there’s Make.com, there’s Lindy, there’s Airtable, there’s Zapier, there’s Relay. Let’s go ahead and work through each of these and take a look at them and give them a ranking. How would you describe N8N for folks?
Anshumanni: I think the way to think about N8N would be you have a chain of things to do. You have a set of tasks to do and you want to put all of them together in a very visual flow. The way I think about it is if you have kids and you’ve ever taught them Scratch programming, it’s very much like that. So building agents in that way in this sort of really interesting flow way of doing things, like A leads to B leads to C. I think that’s a really smart way of people thinking about their processes and people thinking about how they are going to automate and do the work. And I think N8N does a really good job of that.
Likewise, I think it’s got to be the most powerful agent building tool out there, but I think it has a little bit of a technical barrier. It’s really geared towards more of an engineering audience or a very technically proficient audience.
Aakash: So where are we putting this on the tier list ranking for product managers?
Anshumanni: I think for PMs who have a very strong technical background, they might enjoy using a tool like this, but for a lot of other PMs who just want to quickly prototype stuff and might want to just test things out and see if this kind of an agent works for them, this might not be a great first tool to pick up. So I was thinking it’s like a B. I’d say a higher grade B. It’s a B+, but it’s stuck in that B range.
Aakash: All right, so Make.com is making a lot of hype right now. This is really another version, kind of like N8N. I would say it’s slightly easier to use. It’s got as many integrations, which is really powerful. A lot of enterprise are using it. What’s your take on Make.com versus N8N?
Anshumanni: I’ve heard good things. You’re absolutely right. I think in terms of integrations, which data sources are available to you, which of your products are available to you to add is going to be a key part, and I think integrations will make it work, but I haven’t used it heavily.
Aakash: Yeah, I think it’s just that one tier below N8N and the reason that it does that is just because it’s still technical, but it’s just not as powerful as N8N and it has even more integrations and functionality. So we’ll go ahead and give Make.com a C.
So Lindy.AI is one of those tools that I pay for myself. I’ve talked about it in other podcasts that this is amazing. I have an email responder, a meeting prep assistant. I turn podcasts into blog posts. I have an email negotiator, and I’m gonna be creating more agents. What’s really cool is they recently just released, not just a flow editor but an agent builder where you can prompt it via AI. So I think Lindy is the version of N8N that every PM really wants because it’s really easy to use and you can just prompt an AI. So I would say Lindy is either an S tier or an A-tier tool. Where do you think it lands?
Anshumanni: Yeah, I think anything which allows you to build agents and using the power of generative AI, right? So you can actually chat with it and then figure out what should your agent look and feel like as opposed to figuring out the bones of it, feels like it’s more powerful.
Aakash: 100%. So Lindy, we’re gonna give it our first S tier ranking. We’re not gonna give out too many of those.
Next up, we have Airtable. Have you been using, what have you heard about Airtable?
Anshumanni: I’ve used Airtable pre-AI, which is, and it was always a standout tool back then. I’m hearing great things about it in its new AI transformation for sure.
Aakash: Yeah, I think that Airtable AI they have a bunch of very specific things built for product managers, and it leverages a lot of the power of Airtable so I think it’s an incredibly good tool. It has like literally tens of thousands of integrations. There’s so many real companies actually building on top of Airtable for production grade workflows that I feel like it has to be an A grade. Airtable gets the A.
Onto the last one, Relay.app. So this was actually built by a former director of product at Google, Jacob Bank. He was leading Gmail for a long time and it is a very easy to use agent builder. It’s not super advanced, doesn’t have the AI to talk to. It doesn’t have as many integrations as N8N, but it’s really easy to use and you can build like a 40 agent marketing team, which is actually what he’s done straight in the tool. So where does this land?
Anshumanni: I think one tier below Airtable and Zapier.
Aakash: All right, so we are gonna give Relay in the B category.
AI Coding & Prototyping Tools (00:08:18 – 00:19:04)
Aakash: So let’s move into AI prototyping. Obviously, everybody has been talking about AI prototyping. Lovable has crossed 120 million ARR in less than a year since founding. What’s the grade here we’re giving for Lovable?
Anshumanni: Lovable is a solid A. The only reason I wouldn’t give it an S is everything made using Lovable starts to feel the same, starts to look the same. If you use the default Tailwind CSS React front end, it all sort of starts—every app that you build with it looks very beautiful, but looks similar. And I think that’s a huge opportunity there for someone to actually build really good UX libraries, UI component libraries. Shadcn folks have done such a phenomenal job. It’s the most standout component library, but we need more, we need a lot more.
Aakash: Yeah, I found that Lovable when I’ve been testing it head to head against a lot of these tools, it’s good, but it’s not amazing. Like, it gets the job done of air prototyping, but it doesn’t necessarily make me feel like it’s built with incredible craft or something like that. People saw my dashboard. I have live Lovable sites where I’ve bought domains for them. I’ve tried all sorts of things and ultimately I feel like this lands in the B category. It’s an AI prototyping tool, but it feels like it’s probably just mainly a wrapper on Claude Sonnet. What do you think?
Anshumanni: I think B would be fine because if you think about it, what it doesn’t do is, for one, it doesn’t give you a very good structure to work with. Something that maybe would stand out perhaps for Replit, for example, is that it helps you build a plan before you actually start building. And it sort of looks decent and it doesn’t do a good job of building back ends as well.
Aakash: Yeah, it’s not very good at back end yet. Hopefully the team and Elena Verna will improve on that. All right, so the next tool that everybody’s been talking about, this one also passed 100 million ARR recently is Bolt, built in import from Figma, GitHub. I have plenty of Bolt projects. In fact, I just recently launched my cohort, and that was through Bolt. So it works, you can live build things.
The next tool that everybody’s been talking about is Magic Patterns, and I’ve been using this one personally a lot also have launched an app through Magic Patterns. It can clone LinkedIn, it can recreate a screenshot. The coolest thing about Magic Patterns is that it is only front end, so it’s really, really fast. So it’s purpose built for AI prototyping. It’s not built for vibe coding, but I do think that’s a bit of a deficiency having vibe coding. So I’m inclined to put this in the B category. Does that sound right?
Anshumanni: That’s absolutely fine.
Aakash: OK. The next app that everybody’s been talking about is v0. I’ve done a lot of bake-offs where I like run all of these air prototyping tools against each other, and what I love about v0 is after Magic Patterns, it’s always the one to finish and it actually does back end. And it’s backed by Vercel infrastructure, so it’s pretty easy to just publish something altogether.
Anshumanni: Yeah, it’s very easy to deploy products on Vercel. So anything that you make with v0 and you actually want to put it in the hands of a few users, even if it’s just friends and family members, I think v0 does a much better job.
Aakash: I love it. I actually think it’s like one of the best at back end and actually creating an app. So I’m inclined to put this in the A tier category as well. So the hot question then is, we have 3 tools in the A tier category from this AI prototyping. We put Bolt, v0 and Base 44. If we have to crown a winner, what is the best AI prototyping tool right now?
Anshumanni: I think right now I would say for me at least Bolt is slightly ahead by a few points, mostly because it has a better structure. When you start off it by default thinks about both the front end and the back end in a better way, allows you to build a little bit more advanced apps from the get-go. In my book, I would say Bolt is a little higher for prototyping.
Aakash: I think it’s neck and neck. We have a difference of opinion for the first time. Anshumanni giving Bolt the best air prototyping tool title. I will give it to v0 just because in a lot of these head to head bake-offs that I have, Bolt runs into like errors sometimes it doesn’t seem to be able to dig itself out of those errors fast. v0, it’s like almost never runs into errors. I never have to hit like fix this.
But you know what, there’s one that might beat both of these, and that is Replit Agent. You have to remember that Replit is overall, even before the whole AI sort of usage came in, Replit was already a very, very strong sort of web-based IDE. So Replit has been doing this really well for a long time. So I think that there’s a bunch of accrued benefits that they have in understanding what developers are thinking about. I would, I think for me it’s probably the highest in all the other prototyping tools. I’d probably put it right there at an S.
Anshumanni: All right, so Replit is the real air prototyping tool winner. We had put it in the vibe coding category, but it spans the air prototyping category as well. It has a very highly agentic agent, I would say. It can go out and plan and just work for hours and hours, which is something that really does set it apart.
Meeting Tools: Granola Takes S-Tier (00:58:15 – 00:59:51)
Aakash: So really quickly, Granola, everybody’s probably heard about it. Is Granola A tier, B tier?
Anshumanni: Right now, at least for me, if you’re the type of person who has a lot of meetings, and you constantly are looking for context as to who you were speaking to, Granola does a very good job of not just transcribing but then transcribing it and turning it into something meaningful. So you can chat with Granola across all the transcriptions that it has across different charts and it then builds a much better context on you. I think the people who use Granola will swear by it, and it helps you generate. It will generate input points that you’re supposed to talk about this because you had taken these items last time. The things that it does which are really powerful.
Aakash: Yeah, then we have these other meeting tools. We’re going to very quickly go through these. I think Fireflies is the worst of the bunch. It’s pretty good, but it’s not as good as its competitor Otter.AI, which ends up landing itself in the C category. Fathom, same thing. It’s not as good as Otter.AI, so why use it? And then, tl;dv similar sort of thing, useful tool but maybe not as good as Otter. Are we OK with those rankings?
Anshumanni: Yeah, yeah.
Aakash: So by far the best meetings tool for PMs is Granola.
Dictation Tools: Super Whisper vs Whisper Flow (01:00:01 – 01:01:11)
Aakash: Let’s move into dictation next. So Whisper Flow is kind of the famous tool. There’s also Super Whisper. I think you should be using one of these.
Anshumanni: I use Whisper Flow a lot to the point where I think now I actually shudder at the idea of typing at times. I learned typing the old fashioned way on a typewriter as a kid, so I can type. I actually type at 65 words a minute, but my typing has actually fallen since I’ve started using Whisper Flow. My wife and son know when I’m specially working with a vibe coding tool, I always am dictating to it, and they can actually hear me shouting, “No, that’s not the bug I asked you to solve. That’s not how you fix it, fix it this way.” They’re like, wait, you’re just shouting at your machine. So it’s sort of gone into that territory. Whisper Flow actually makes you mildly feel like Tony Stark talking to his AI assistant and getting them to do the things in the right way. It’s as close to Jarvis as you’re going to get.
Aakash: And then I think slightly better is Super Whisper. So it basically takes what Whisper Flow does, but even with more functionality. So I think we’ll put that in the S tier and Whisper Flow in the A tier. Does that sound good?
Anshumanni: Yep, I haven’t used Whisper, but yeah, I’ll definitely do.
Aakash: The best dictation tool for you guys is Super Whisper.
The #1 AI Tool for PMs (01:03:30 – 01:03:45)
Aakash: All right, so we have to crown a single AI tool. What is the single best AI tool for PMs? Is it Claude Code?
Anshumanni: Oh. I think it’s Cloud.
Aakash: Yeah, so Claude Code is the absolute best AI tool for PMs. After that, it’s probably like a dictation tool, like Super Whisper. Then it’s probably all-purpose vibe coding tool like Replit and then Lindy. Does that sound right?
Anshumanni: Yeah, yeah.
Aakash: These are your top 4 tools to be an AI powered product manager.
How to Build Your AI Tool Roadmap (01:04:01 – 01:04:42)
Aakash: So we discovered a ton of tools. If a PM is trying to figure out their road map, what would be your roadmap for them like, what would be the best way to test out these tools and learn new tools that come out in the future?
Anshumanni: I think have really important use cases in front of you. I think all PMs, what they need to do first is they need to analyze how they’re spending their week, how they’re spending their day, and then looking at things which take up a larger chunk of their time and then figuring out, hey, for this specific problem, which is the tool that I need to be working on, and there’s enough and more information about tools in the world. But pick the tools that specifically will help you in your workflow, and then experiment with them, then figure out if they actually work for you and they’re improving your overall productivity.
Aakash: You heard it from the man himself. He is a legend. We could have another podcast just talking about all of his growth stories, and we probably will, if you guys comment below. As I previewed at the beginning of this episode, if you comment the order of the top 4 tools that we put and you DM me on LinkedIn, I’ll give you a free year of a paid subscription to the newsletter. Anshumanni, thank you so much for being here.
Anshumanni: Aakash, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Final Takeaways
This conversation with Anshumanni Rudra reveals a fundamental shift in how product managers should approach AI tools in 2025. Rather than chasing every new tool, the key is understanding your workflow bottlenecks and choosing tools that solve specific problems.
The essential 4-tool stack—Claude Code for coding, Super Whisper for dictation, Replit Agent for prototyping, and Lindy.AI for automation—provides a blueprint that any PM can adopt. These aren’t just tools; they’re productivity multipliers that enable technical PMs to 10x their output.
The tier ranking system makes clear that not all AI tools are created equal. S-tier tools like Claude Code, Granola, and Perplexity represent genuine breakthroughs in how work gets done. B and C-tier tools, while useful, often have trade-offs that make them harder to recommend universally.
For PMs looking to become AI-powered, the message is clear: start by analyzing how you spend your time, identify your biggest bottlenecks, and then deliberately choose tools that address those specific problems. Test them for one week on real work. If they’re not making you noticeably faster or better, move on.
The gap between technical and non-technical PMs is growing. Those who can prototype, test, and ship using AI coding tools will dominate the next decade of product management. The tools are here. The question is: are you ready to use them?