A program by Alisha Outridge · Byte&Chord

Build real
AI products & skills.
Get results Day 1.

The methodology used by hundreds of founders and operators to turn AI into products, workflows and measurable business results. Not pitch decks. Not theory. 80% shipped an MVP, implemented an AI workflow or advanced their career.

~150/mo
Founders, PMs, engineers, students & operators trained
80%
Launched an MVP or advanced their career within 60 days
11+
Frameworks & toolkits, built from shipped products & work
6+
Partners, universities, foundations & institutions delivering the Playbook
03 / On the record

On the record.

Selected press, podcasts, and stages. Scroll the reel.

Technical literacy isn't replacing the MBA. It's revealing what the MBA was actually selling: access. What's left now is operational execution.

Alisha Outridge · on the new MBA
Ignite Talks · Bitly NYC HQ

“3 AI Engineer Hiring Disasters and the Fix”

Five minutes on Ignite’s stage at Bitly’s NYC HQ: why she stopped hiring coders and started hiring systems thinkers.

Alisha Outridge and Nishant Bijani on The CTO Story — AI Is A Fork
Podcast
The CTO Story · with Nishant Bijani

“AI Is a Fork”: How Leaders Should Really Think About AI

Why AI is already furniture, not a differentiator. What's actually left to own when everyone rents the same models. And how the best leaders decide what not to build, and see what's coming before their competitors do.

Alisha Outridge speaking at Music Biz 2026, Atlanta Conference Photo: Picture This! Photography
Music Biz 2026 · Atlanta

From Idea to Impact: Scaling in Music Tech

A fireside chat with Jason Feinberg of KOSIGN on what it actually takes to scale music tech: trust, rights, and the messy middle between idea and impact.

AI Founder Playbook masterclass at NY Tech Week on a Manhattan rooftop Masterclass
AI Founder Playbook · NY Tech Week

Stop Building AI Products No One Pays For

A sold-out masterclass on a Manhattan rooftop, oversubscribed 8x. Founders pressure-testing what's actually worth building before they build it.

Read the recap ↗
Past events

Recent sessions.

AI changed more than how we build. It changed how we run the entire product cycle.

The Playbook teaches you the new way.

The AI Founder Playbook Method

The new way to build and run products with AI.

An 8-module AI-native product strategy and development system that takes you from deciding what’s worth building to operating a real product, learning from users, and growing it.

Strategy through production, not just prototyping.
Built around real projects, products, users, and data.
AI-native execution, human decision-making.

Eight modules. A complete walkthrough of today’s AI-native product cycle.

Follow the full method, explore the individual toolkits, or integrate modules into an existing accelerator, upskill or entrepreneurship program.

01

Build the Right Thing

Strategy & Scope

Define the real problem, the ideal user, and the outcomes that matter before you write a line of code.

Outcome

A focused strategy and a clear plan to win.

02

Make It Real Before You Build It

Design & Prototype

Map the user journey, design the experience, and validate it with a clickable prototype.

Outcome

A validated prototype and product definition.

03

Build With AI, Not Just Around It

AI-Native Development

Go beyond vibe-coding into an owned codebase — Cursor, GitHub, APIs, and a product you can actually evolve.

Outcome

A working product you own and can evolve.

04

Get It Out of Your Laptop

Ship & Operate

Handle deployment, environments, QA, and monitoring so real people can use what you built.

Outcome

A live product in the hands of real users.

05

Know If It’s Working

Measure & Learn

Define what success looks like, instrument the right metrics with tools like PostHog, and use AI-assisted analysis to see what’s actually happening.

Outcome

Visibility into what’s working, what’s not, and why.

06

Prove It. Learn. Decide What’s Next.

Evidence & Next Decisions

Evaluate results against your assumptions and business goals, then decide what to scale, change, or stop based on evidence — not opinions.

Outcome

AI-powered analysis, evidence-backed decisions, and a clear roadmap + prioritized backlog.

07

Don’t Ship a Legal Problem

Privacy, Legal & AI Responsibility

Privacy, security, compliance (PII, PCI, Terms of Service), and AI ethics — before they become a crisis.

Outcome

A product built responsibly and ready to scale.

08

Find Your First 5–10 Real Users

Founder-Led GTM

Find early adopters, get them using it weekly, and turn real behavior into your first growth loop.

Outcome

Your first 5–10 weekly active users.

AI-native isn’t a toolset.
It’s a new way to decide, build, ship, measure and grow.
That’s the Playbook.
— The thesis
Alisha Outridge

Built by a builder. Designed to deliver like an executive.

Alisha Outridge is a 0→1 serial entrepreneur with exits, a C-suite product and technology operator, and former Brown University and Hunter College professor. She created the AI Founder Playbook to scale the methods she uses to build — with the latest AI tools.

Learn more about Alisha →
★ Fresh drops
New pro tips, frameworks & toolkits land every week. Get them the moment they’re built.
01 / Programs

Six ways to work together.

Every track runs on the same six frameworks — sized from a single live cohort to white-label curriculum for your whole org.

Flagship

The Cohort

3 week & 6 week formats, live online. Ship a real AI product by graduation — full framework set, weekly office hours, peer accountability, and a final pitch session with feedback from operators who've shipped at scale.

6 wks · cohort-basedApply →
Live workshops

The Workshop

A 2-hour live session where we work together on a framework from the AI Founder Playbook methodology — previously hosted at NY Tech Week 2026 and made possible by partners who invest in the people building with AI. Walk in with an AI idea, walk out with a pressure-tested concept brief, a defensible decision on where to focus next, and a call list.

2.5 hrs · ~30 seatsSee all Events →
Online · 2 courses

AEO & GEO Courses

Individual trackCompany track

Two focused courses on getting found in the age of AI search — Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization. Take them solo to level up, or run the company track to train your whole team on how AI surfaces (and skips) your brand.

Self-serve or teamEnroll →
1:1

Private Coaching

For founders, PMs, and senior operators with a specific decision in front of them. Personalized sessions built to create impactful outcomes & deliverables — offered in partnership with AnitaB.org and the Grace Hopper Celebration.

By applicationInquire →
Custom

For Organizations

White-label cohorts and custom AI literacy curricula for enterprises, foundations, and education partners. Currently delivering programs in partnership with Kyros AI, Brown University, and U.S. Department of Education (via USDR). Inquiries by introduction.

Custom · Multi-week · Enterprise
04 / About
Alisha Outridge

The operator behind the Playbook.

Alisha Outridge has spent 15+ years building AI/ML products at Meta, Reuters, TuneCore, and 2+ acquired startups. She founded Byte&Chord in 2024 to take that work directly to the people, schools, and organizations that need it.

Her career has been a run of building at the bleeding edge and shipping at scale. At Meta, she led product for Search and People Data across 500M+ daily users and co-invented privacy-smart personalization technology (US10467282B2), prototyped at a Facebook Hackathon. As CTO & Chief Product Officer of TuneCore, she led AI personalization that drove +25% revenue and +30% engagement across 500K+ creators. Before that, as CPO of FlyBy, she and her team shipped the computer vision and AR work that seeded Apple's ARKit, and as CPO of WHIM, she scaled a $1B personalized, art-forward smart-screen platform to 3.3M+ daily viewers across NYC Transit.

Today she teaches at universities, including Brown University and Hunter College CUNY, advises the U.S. Government on select AI governance projects, and runs her own curriculum through the AI Founder Playbook, a cohort and masterclass program that's trained hundreds of founders, operators, students, executives, and PMs on practical systems thinking and execution, whether in their jobs or as entrepreneurs building their own companies. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, CNN, and Business Insider, and on stages worldwide from SXSW to NY Tech Week to All That Matters Singapore.

A proud native New Yorker, she's an oil painter, standup comedian, and avid swimmer (mermaid tail included). At heart, she's an artist who does deep tech, a builder of both AI and HI, Human Intelligence.

Get on the list.

Cohort applications, masterclass dates, and a weekly note on building real AI products. No "10 prompts that will change your life." No hustle bullshit.

No spam · confirm via email · ~1 email/week