Posts tagged "Innovation"

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AI Commoditizes Entry-Level Work While Amplifying Senior Value

5 min read

AI isn't eliminating product roles wholesale. It's commoditizing entry-level work while amplifying senior value, hollowing out the career ladder.

Everyone's asking the wrong question about AI and product teams. The debate splits into two camps: one believes product managers will code their way to replacing engineers, the other thinks engineers will own strategy and eliminate PMs. Both narratives miss what's actually happening. AI isn't replacing entire functions. It's splitting each function into three tiers, and only one of them is shrinking. The same pattern across three functions Look at what's happening to engineers first....
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Why AI Agents Fail Today Despite the Hype

3 min read

AI agents excel at coding but fail at business tasks. The gap reveals what's missing: learning from experience and error recovery.

The agentic AI hype promises autonomous decision-makers that replace employees or dramatically boost efficiency. The reality, according to Maria Sukhareva (Principal AI Expert at Siemens) in "Why AI Agents Disappoint," is that general-purpose AI agents don't work for most real-world business use cases. The WebArena benchmark proves the gap quantitatively. Researchers created realistic web environments (e-commerce sites, forums, development platforms) and asked GPT-4-based agents to complete end-to-end tasks like "Find the cheapest phone case and...
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World Models Teach AI to See

3 min read

LLMs excel at language. World models learn by watching: understanding space, time, and physics. I'm tracking why this matters for product builders.

On Lenny's recent podcast, Fei-Fei Li called LLMs "wordsmiths in the dark": eloquent but ungrounded in physical reality. The phrase resonated because it captures exactly what language models can't do: understand space, navigate environments, predict physics, or reason about the 3D world we inhabit. I've been following world models with growing curiosity. The contrast with LLMs is stark. Where language models learn statistical patterns from text, world models learn by watching: absorbing spatial relationships, temporal...
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Why AI Platforms Are Testing User-Paid Sharing

6 min read

Anthropic's Artifacts tests user-paid sharing where creators pay nothing for distribution while users burn their own credits.

Most platforms face a brutal tradeoff when enabling sharing. Charge creators for hosting and you limit adoption. Charge end-users at the point of distribution and you create friction. Subsidize usage yourself and the costs don't scale. Each path blocks something you need: viral growth, sustainable economics, or both. For years, platforms have picked their poison. SaaS tools charge creators monthly fees, killing casual sharing. Consumer apps eat infrastructure costs to drive growth, then scramble to...
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The Tool Spectrum is Collapsing

3 min read

Prototyping tools like Claude Code now serve both discovery and production, narrowing the gap between build-to-learn and build-to-earn.

Marty Cagan's recent piece on prototyping tools draws a clean line: build-to-learn tools on one side, build-to-earn tools on the other. He's right about the hype problem: product managers confusing high-fidelity prototypes with production-ready systems. But the binary he describes is already dissolving. The categorization reflects tool architecture. Lovable and Bolt for prototyping, Claude Code, and Cursor for production. UI-first tools abstract complexity and accelerate visual validation. Terminal-based tools expose code and configuration, giving engineers...
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Don't Contain Innovation—Spread It

3 min read

Innovation labs fail when they isolate thinking. The companies winning are the ones where core business teams have built the innovation muscle.

Your innovation lab isn't the problem. Keeping innovation isolated there is. The pattern shows up in different forms—innovation labs, Centers of Excellence, digital transformation teams. The setup looks similar: bring in smart people, give them freedom to experiment, then wait for breakthroughs while the core business operates exactly as before. I've watched this play out at multiple Fortune 500 companies. The lab discovers what customers need. Core business teams keep building the same way they...
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The Gap Between AI Adoption and Enterprise Value

4 min read

Two-thirds of organizations are stuck in AI pilot phase. The gap between adoption and enterprise value isn't technology—it's redesigning workflows.

Two-thirds of organizations are stuck in the pilot phase with AI. They run experiments, they test use cases, they see promising results—then nothing scales. McKinsey's latest State of AI report (November 2025) reveals the pattern: 90% of organizations regularly use AI, but only 39% report enterprise-level EBIT impact. The gap between adoption and value isn't a mystery. It's a choice. What the data shows The survey of organizations reveals three distinct clusters: Most organizations (nearly...
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You're Not an AI User, You're an AI Manager

4 min read

AI agents transform knowledge work from execution to management. ICs need allocation and judgment skills, not just execution speed.

A year ago, an engineer typed code into an IDE. Maybe GitHub Copilot suggested lines. Maybe they asked ChatGPT for help. Today, that same engineer prompts an agent to write substantial chunks of code, then reviews what comes back. The work that used to take days now takes hours. The job didn't disappear. It became something fundamentally different. Aaron Levie, Box CEO, puts it directly: "The job of an individual contributor really begins to change...
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What Emerged: 99 Days of Product Thinking Journal

8 min read

99 posts in 100 days: patterns that emerged, AI's surprising dominance, and 5 posts to start with if you're new here. Reflection on daily writing.

One hundred posts. For me, writing is clarifying thinking. I built this entire site with Claude Code—designed it, deployed it, automated the Obsidian-to-Cloudflare publishing flow. Now, sixty percent of what I've written is about AI. The tool became the subject. That's either profound or obvious, depending on your tolerance for meta-commentary. Here's what I didn't expect: not the daily writing (I'm reading widely anyway, so ideas only compound), but the sheer pace at which AI...
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Early Experience: A Different Approach to Agent Training

4 min read

Meta's Early Experience research explores agents learning from their own rollouts. Early results look promising—here's what changes if it scales.

AI agents are currently in use, handling customer service interactions, automating research workflows, and navigating complex software environments. But training them remains resource-intensive: you either need comprehensive expert demonstrations or the ability to define clear rewards at every decision point. Meta's recent research explores a third path. Agent Learning via Early Experience proposes agents that learn from their own rollouts—without exhaustive expert coverage or explicit reward functions. It's early, but the direction is worth understanding....
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Agentic AI: It's the Readiness and Access Story

3 min read

The gap isn't whether AI agents work—it's who can deploy them. Infrastructure inequality is creating two types of organizations. Act now.

The gap between hype and reality isn't the story everyone's missing about agentic AI. The gap between who's positioned to deploy it and who's stuck waiting for infrastructure—that's the story. And that gap is widening every quarter. The technology is proven—access to it is not Nearly every senior enterprise developer is experimenting with AI agents right now. One in four enterprises is deploying them across teams this year. The question isn't whether autonomous AI systems...
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Anthropic’s Quiet Advantage in the AI Race

3 min read

Anthropic’s enterprise and life sciences focus shows how AI companies are testing different business paths: one broad, one deep toward sustainable growth.

“Anthropic’s growth path is a lot easier to understand than OpenAI’s. Corporate customers are devising a plethora of money-saving uses for AI in areas like coding, drafting legal documents, and expediting billing.” — The Wall Street Journal That line captures an important dynamic in today’s AI market: two companies building similar technology, but betting on very different ways to make it sustainable. OpenAI is chasing scale — hundreds of millions of users, a consumer-facing brand,...
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When the Cost of Delay Becomes Your Biggest Risk

3 min read

How product teams can avoid paralysis in the AI era by acting before the window closes and minimizing the cost of delay.

Blockbuster had every advantage—brand, reach, loyal customers. They saw Netflix coming and had the resources to compete. They waited too long. The window closed. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. They knew film was vulnerable. They protected margins instead of building the future. When they finally moved, others had already won. BlackBerry watched the iPhone launch and dismissed touchscreens as toys. They waited for validation. The window closed again. The pattern is clear: in...
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It's not a Search Problem, it's a Distribution Problem

4 min read

AI search consolidates power across three layers: intent capture, routing, and monetization. The market structure implications are explained.

Yesterday, I discussed how Atlas builds OpenAI's interface-to-platform flywheel through continuity of context. Today, it's an extension: the market structure implications of a company controlling all three layers of distribution. The conversation about AI search misses the real shift. This isn't about which tool delivers better results. It's about who controls the starting point for online activity and whether that control consolidates or fragments. Google has held that position for two decades. Chrome captures 65%...
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From Interface to Platform: What OpenAI’s Atlas Browser Might Really Signal

6 min read

OpenAI’s Atlas browser isn’t a surprise, but it might be a signal. This post explores how Atlas fits into OpenAI’s evolving ecosystem and why the interface-to-platform shift matters.

Everyone saw this one coming: Open AI's Atlas browser. Rumors of an OpenAI browser had been circulating for months, alongside steady hints in partnerships, SDK updates, and app integrations. When Atlas finally arrived, it didn’t feel like a shock. The surprise isn’t that OpenAI built a browser. It’s why they built one, and what that might unlock. Because Atlas isn’t just another entry in the growing list of “AI browsers.” It’s the latest move in...
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Claude Skills Might Be Anthropic’s Most Exciting Update Yet

3 min read

Claude Skills let users package reusable workflows that make Claude adaptable and modular: a practical leap in how AI assistants work.

I just tested Claude Skills, and it’s awesome. Anthropic is on a roll here with disruptive innovation. If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s a quick rundown of why it matters, and why it could reshape how we work with AI assistants. What Claude Skills are Skills are like snap-on capabilities for Claude. Instead of rewriting prompts or uploading instructions every time, you can package reusable logic, scripts, and guidelines into a small folder. Claude...
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AI Isn’t Replacing Human Help, It’s Redefining It

3 min read

AI isn’t replacing human help—it’s redefining it. History shows that every new technology first sparks fear, then expands what humans can do.

“AI will be the greatest source of empowerment for all.” - OpenAI’s Fidji Simo It’s a bold vision, one that suggests anyone, anywhere, could find help for whatever they need: a business idea, a mental block, or even emotional support. The promise sounds inspiring, but it also sparks a familiar unease. We’ve heard versions of this before. Every major wave of technology begins with the same fear: that something deeply human will be lost. When...
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Getting AI Right in Established Companies

8 min read

Established companies can balance today’s business with tomorrow’s AI potential by sequencing AI-enabled and AI-native strategies.

Your product works. Customers rely on it. Revenue depends on it. Now everyone’s telling you to “go AI.” But what does that actually mean? Most established companies misunderstand the choice in front of them. They treat AI as binary. Either bolt on AI features to what they already have or tear it all down and start from scratch. Both approaches miss the real opportunity. The real strategy is knowing the difference between AI-enabled and AI-native...
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AI Agents Grow Work Instead of Replacing It

3 min read

AI agents don’t replace jobs—they expand what teams can achieve. Learn how product leaders can turn automation gains into growth opportunities.

When a new technology shows up, most people ask, “Whose job will this replace?” A better question is, “What new work will this create?” In a recent interview with Every, Box CEO Aaron Levie shared a useful way to think about AI. He said AI agents don’t shrink human work. They expand it. By taking care of repetitive coordination, AI gives teams more room for creative thinking and faster experimentation. This idea matters for any...
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Rethinking Leadership Decisions through the Lens of Spotify’s Bets Board

3 min read

Spotify’s “bets board” shows how leaders can treat decisions as experiments. Here’s how to explore that mindset without copying the model.

I came across something recently that caught my attention. Spotify’s executives have banned the words “offline” and “later” in leadership meetings. At first, it sounds like a linguistic tweak. But it connects to a deeper idea about how they make decisions — through what they call bets. Twice a year, Spotify’s senior leaders hold a “bet pitch” cycle. Each executive brings a small number of proposals backed by data and conviction. They pitch them to...
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Evals in AI Product Development

3 min read

Evals make AI products measurable. Traces, annotations, and layered tests turn evaluation into a practical loop for reliability.

AI models don’t break like code, but they can drift, hallucinate, or mislead — which is why teams are turning to evals. The debate over whether every team needs them signals that we’re still learning how to measure quality in systems that learn on their own. What Evals Are For someone not familiar with evals, here’s a quick overview. Evals are structured tests that measure how well a model performs on real-world tasks. Unlike conventional...
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Planning Better with Claude Sonnet 4.5

2 min read

Claude Sonnet 4.5 introduces usage tracking and thinking mode enhancements that streamline AI planning and session management.

I’ve been using Claude Sonnet 4.5 (in Claude Code) for a couple of weeks, and two small updates changed how I plan my sessions. The first is usage tracking. There’s now a simple command (/usage) that shows how much I’ve used Claude Code—both per session and across the week. It sounds minor, but it’s a big deal if you use Claude as a daily coding or research companion. Before this, I had no sense of...
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ChatGPT Is Becoming the Interface

3 min read

Sam Altman outlines how OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into the internet’s next interface, powered by apps, commerce, and global infrastructure growth.

When Sam Altman spoke with Stratechery this week, one idea stood out from the flurry of announcements and partnerships. OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be the single interface that connects people to everything else they do online. Altman described a clear vision. OpenAI aims to build one capable system that people can use across their entire lives, from work to learning to entertainment. That mission explains the company’s focus on three fronts: research, product, and infrastructure....
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OpenAI’s App Store Moment and the Future of Product Boundaries

2 min read

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT app store redefines how users interact with products — shifting from interfaces to intent.

Yesterday, OpenAI launched its own app store — a full ecosystem for third-party apps that live inside ChatGPT. Spotify, Canva, Figma, Zillow, and Coursera are already in. At first glance, this might feel like another platform milestone. But if you zoom out, it’s something deeper: a redefinition of where products “live” and how users experience them. The interface is dissolving For years, we’ve built products around distinct interfaces — apps, dashboards, websites—each one with its...
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The Shift from SEO to AEO Is Redefining Visibility Online

3 min read

The rise of answer engine optimization (AEO) marks a shift from SEO. Visibility in AI-driven answers is now the key to discovery.

When Reddit’s stock tumbled this week on concerns about traffic and AI exposure, headlines focused on the numbers. Stock prices fluctuate all the time. But the more interesting story is not Reddit’s market cap. It is the shifting landscape of how people and platforms connect to knowledge in the age of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). >Promptwatch reportedly showed that on September 30, Reddit content was cited in just 2 % of ChatGPT responses — down...
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Sora 2 Changes the Video Play

3 min read

Sora 2 pushes AI video into mainstream use. Here’s what it enables now, who gets disrupted, and why B2B teams should pay attention.

OpenAI’s Sora 2 is not just a model upgrade. It’s text-to-video with sound, physics that make sense, and a social app where anyone can remix clips. That shifts AI video from a lab demo to something that can spread in the wild. The following screenshot is from the video generated realistically with this prompt (shared by the Sora team): "A person is standing on 2 horses with legs spread. make it not slowmo also realistic....
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Rethinking Product, Market, Channel, and Model for AI Era

6 min read

How Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework has been updated for the AI era, and what product leaders can learn from the shift.

Frameworks that endure disruption are rare. Brian Balfour’s original Four Fits framework has long been a foundational lens for growth strategy. He recently released The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era to capture how AI is shifting the constraints inside each dimension. The Four Fits have always been about scaling companies to $100M+ revenue at venture speed. To succeed, all four fits must align simultaneously. In this article, I explore the evolution...
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What a Gigawatt of AI Really Means

3 min read

What a gigawatt of AI really means, and how abundant intelligence could reshape technology, healthcare, and society.

Sam Altman wrote yesterday about a future of abundant intelligence, imagining a world where we add a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week. This week, we already saw their partnerships with Nvidia and Oracle. He teased about more partnerships and details coming soon: >"If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer....
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From Product-Led to Product-Agentic Growth in B2B

7 min read

Product-Agentic Growth reframes how B2B software must evolve: AI agents doing work for users, reshaping PLG with autonomous workflows, predictive expansion, and real ROI.

Picture this: A procurement manager signs up for your B2B marketplace. Within 30 minutes, your product has analyzed their company's spending patterns, identified $2M in potential savings, and pre-vetted 15 suppliers that match their compliance requirements. It drafted three RFPs based on their historical templates and scheduled demos with the right stakeholders. The procurement manager didn't do any of this. The product did. This isn't just good onboarding. It's not even personalization in the traditional...
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The Massive AI Opportunity Hiding on Your Home Screen

7 min read

Most 'AI products' aren't AI-native. Use the Home Screen Test to spot the billion-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Right now, stop reading and look at your phone's home screen. Count how many apps are built specifically for AI—not regular apps that added AI features, but products designed from the ground up for the AI era. ChatGPT probably makes the list. Maybe a few others. But for most of us, the answer is surprisingly close to zero. This observation comes from Andrew Chen's recent piece on how AI will change startup building, where he...
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Platform vs Product: The AI Era Convergence

4 min read

AI is collapsing the line between platforms and products. The winners will master both, balancing ecosystems and user experiences.

“In technology, whoever controls the platform controls the narrative,” as several strategic analysts have observed. The rise of AI is testing that maxim in new ways. A single large language model can be both the underlying platform that developers build on and the end-user product millions adopt directly. For companies in the AI era, the question is no longer whether to be a platform or a product, but how to navigate being both at once....
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Atlassian's Browser Move

3 min read

Atlassian’s $610M bet on The Browser Company is bold. Here’s why it makes sense, and the big risks that could derail it.

Atlassian, the company behind Jira and Confluence, is spending $610 million to acquire The Browser Company, the maker of Arc and the newer AI-forward browser, Dia. That sounds strange at first. Atlassian makes collaboration software, not browsers. Chrome and Edge dominate the market. Why on earth would they want to own a browser? But once you look closer, it starts to make sense. The browser as a starting point Brian Balfour puts it well in...
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AEO is the New SEO?

3 min read

A quick look at Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), why it matters for both consumers and businesses, and how it differs from SEO.

Most product and marketing teams already know SEO. Search engine optimization has been the backbone of digital visibility for decades. But a new acronym is creeping into conversations: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. I’m still digging into it, but here’s what I’ve learned so far—and why it matters. From Search Engines to Answer Engines SEO is about ranking high in search engine results. When a buyer types a question into Google, the goal is to...
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The Limit of Metrics

4 min read

Metrics measure the present, but intuition imagines the future. Here’s why great product managers need both — and how to define intuition.

Product managers love metrics. Dashboards, OKRs, funnel charts — these tools are everywhere. They give us a sense of control, objectivity, and accountability. But metrics have limits. They can only measure what already exists. They tell you how a current feature is performing, but they can’t tell you what to build next. This is where intuition comes in. What Intuition Really Means in Product Work In product management, “intuition” often gets dismissed as gut feel....
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Apple’s Sugar Water Trap

4 min read

Apple’s iPhone 17 shows the sugar water trap risk as AI reshapes tech. A lesson for product managers on balancing incremental progress with bold bets.

Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” That question pushed Sculley to leave Pepsi for Apple, and it has lingered ever since as a reminder of the difference between comfortable success and transformative ambition. The launch of the iPhone 17 makes the metaphor newly relevant. On paper, Apple delivered a strong upgrade: a Promotion display...
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Learning How to Learn Is Your Real Superpower

5 min read

Learning how to learn is the real superpower for product managers. It’s not about speed, but reinvention, adaptability, and enjoying the process.

“It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week by week. The only thing you can say for certain is that huge change is coming.” Demis Hassabis, speaking at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, in the same context, said the most important skill of the future isn’t coding, design, or even...
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Claude Now Builds Spreadsheets and Documents

3 min read

Claude now generates real files—Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs—from prompts.

Claude just got a big upgrade. According to Anthropic’s announcement, it can now create real files: Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, even PDFs—straight from your prompts (whether you're working in Claude.ai or the desktop app). Here's how Anthropic puts it: Turn data into insights: Give Claude raw data and get back polished outputs with cleaned data, statistical analysis, charts, and written insights explaining what matters. Build spreadsheets: Describe what you need—financial models with scenario...
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GTM Playbook for Feature Products in the Platform and AI Era

9 min read

A GTM playbook for feature products competing with platforms in the AI era, focused on delight, speed, and switching costs before the bundle arrives.

Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Dropbox and Google Drive. The pattern is not about who shipped first or who had the clever feature. The pattern is that platforms with native distribution absorb features, then win on adoption. In 2025, AI accelerates that cycle. Features can be cloned in months, not years, and updates land on millions of seats overnight. This is not a reason to stop innovating. It is a call to...
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APIs are the Strategic Foundation for Agentic AI and Beyond

7 min read

APIs are not small. They are the backbone of digital growth and the foundation of agentic AI and MCP orchestration.

(Expanding on my earlier quick-thought piece on APIs) APIs Hidden in Plain Sight APIs are often dismissed as “technical plumbing,” invisible to most business leaders. Yet they quietly power nearly every digital interaction, from mobile payments to streaming recommendations. Some of the most valuable companies in the world—Amazon, Stripe, Twilio—built their fortunes by turning APIs into products. Now, APIs are entering an even more strategic chapter. They are becoming the backbone of agentic AI and...
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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

3 min read

OpenAI’s GPT-realtime unifies voice AI into a single model. See why its technical leap and early adopters make this the moment voice AI goes mainstream.

For years, voice AI has felt like a half-step behind its text-based counterpart. The standard architecture relied on a clunky chain: speech-to-text, a language model for reasoning, then text-to-speech. The result was often laggy, robotic, and disconnected from the flow of natural conversation. OpenAI’s new GPT-realtime changes that dynamic. By unifying speech recognition, reasoning, and speech synthesis into a single model, it eliminates the pauses and disconnects that made past systems frustrating. The model not...
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The Token Squeeze is Real

3 min read

AI isn’t getting cheaper. Token demand is exploding, and flat-rate subscriptions are doomed. What pricing models can survive the squeeze?

AI should feel like it's getting cheaper. After all, compute costs fall, models get optimized, and every year brings new claims of a 10x drop in inference prices. But as Ethan Ding argues in Tokens Are Getting More Expensive, the opposite is true: the economics of AI subscriptions are in a squeeze. Ding’s Core Argument The paradox is simple. While yesterday’s models do get cheaper, users don’t want them. Demand instantly shifts to the latest...
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When AI Bots Rule the Web

2 min read

AI crawlers dominate web traffic, but most don’t send users back. Here’s what product managers need to know about training bots, referrals, and strategy.

Most of the traffic hitting websites today is no longer human. Cloudflare’s AI Insights dashboard makes this clear: the majority of crawling comes from AI bots, and the balance of power among those bots is shifting fast. For product managers, that reality changes how we think about traffic, attribution, and strategy. !AI Insights Cloudflare Training bots dominate Close to 80% of AI crawler traffic serves training purposes. These bots pull content to feed large language...
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Nano Banana and the Future of AI Image Editing

4 min read

Google’s Nano Banana is redefining AI image editing. Here’s what it means for creativity, platforms, and trust in the digital age.

When Google teased three bananas in a post from CEO Sundar Pichai, the internet buzzed with curiosity. The reveal—Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), a new AI image editing model. It was more than a quirky codename. It signals a shift in how we think about digital creativity. Unlike earlier AI tools that struggled to maintain consistency or required heavy post-editing, Nano Banana delivers precise, natural-language edits while keeping subjects unmistakably themselves. This is...
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What Makes a Real Data Moat

4 min read

Data moats are the key to AI defensibility. Tesla and Stripe show what makes them real and how product teams can build them.

The age of generative AI has created a strange paradox. On one hand, anyone can plug into models like GPT and build features quickly. On the other hand, defensibility has never been more elusive. If everyone has access to the same foundation models, what stops a competitor from copying your product? The strongest answer is the data moat. Done right, it’s the most durable form of AI advantage a company can build. Done wrong, it’s...
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Product Culture Is Your Real Operating System

3 min read

Strong product culture drives better decisions, innovation, and outcomes. Leaders shape it daily through hiring, rituals, and behaviors.

The most important product decision you make is not the roadmap. It’s not the features you prioritize or the markets you enter. It is the culture you build. Culture is not a poster on the wall or a slide in a town hall. It is how decisions get made when nobody is looking. It is how teams respond to setbacks, how they argue about priorities, how they treat customers when tradeoffs get hard. Culture is...
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The Big Squeeze in B2B and the Challenge of Lasting Defensibility

5 min read

In B2B, escape velocity isn’t enough. Startups must turn rapid distribution into lasting defensibility before incumbents close the window.

AI has created the fastest-scaling companies we’ve ever seen. Lovable, for instance, hit $100 million ARR just eight months after launch. As Brian Balfour observes in The Big Squeeze, “Escape velocity elevated Lovable from obscurity to household name. And now the company has a real chance to build a large and successful business. But there’s no guarantee they’ve found long-term defensibility or can turn this wave of interest into a sustainable business.” That tension—between speed...
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Agentic AI Needs APIs to Act

2 min read

Agentic AI can reason, but it needs APIs to act. APIs are the execution layer that makes AI autonomy real.

APIs are often seen as back-office plumbing, but in the emerging world of agentic AI, they are the execution layer that makes autonomy possible. Without APIs, AI remains stranded in theory—able to reason, but unable to act. From Copilots to Agents The last wave of AI adoption has been copilots—tools that help users write emails, summarize documents, or draft code. These copilots assist, but they don’t take initiative. Agentic AI is different. Agents can plan,...
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No New Ideas in AI? The Power and Limits of Data

2 min read

A critique of the idea that AI progress is only about data, exploring the role of algorithms and human creativity alongside new datasets.

The claim that there are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets, is both provocative and partly true. As Jack Morris argued in his recent post, many of the most important AI milestones have been driven not by theoretical leaps, but by new sources of data. He puts it succinctly: “The breakthroughs weren’t big ideas; they were new ways to learn from new kinds of data.” from blog.jxmo.io That framing resonates with history. The...
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Fixing Google SEO Indexing Issues with ClaudeCode

3 min read

Fixed Google SEO indexing issues using ClaudeCode by adding canonicals, updating the sitemap, and cleaning redirects—no SEO expertise required.

Most SEO problems look scarier in Google Search Console than they really are. Recently, I ran into one of those situations. Google flagged 17 indexing issues across my site: 16 pages marked as “Page with redirect” 1 page flagged as “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” At first glance, this looked like something I’d need SEO expertise to fix. But a quick debugging session with ClaudeCode showed me it was manageable with a bit of structured troubleshooting....
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How Product Leaders Can Adapt and Thrive in the AI Era

5 min read

Practical playbooks for product leaders to adapt and thrive in the AI era using wedge expansion, jobs-to-be-done, and dual transformation.

In the first post of this series, we looked at why AI disruption affects startups, giants, and companies with product-market fit differently. We saw that structural forces—like scale economies, network effects, and capability stacks—shape who adapts and who stalls. This post turns from why to how. The real challenge for product leaders is not predicting disruption but navigating it. While AI is reshaping every industry, companies that apply structured playbooks are better positioned to adapt...
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Why Startups Struggle and Giants Stall in the AI Era

7 min read

Why AI disruption challenges startups and giants while firms with product market fit adapt faster, explained through proven strategy frameworks.

Sam Altman has observed that both startups and large companies face unique struggles during the current wave of AI disruption, while firms that already have product-market fit often adapt more effectively (OfficeChai). Startups, despite their speed, often lack the foundation to scale. Giants, despite their resources, get trapped in bureaucracy. Companies with strong user adoption and proven fit, on the other hand, can use AI to deepen their advantage. This raises an important question for...
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Making Product Decisions with a Bets Mindset

3 min read

How leading product teams use betting principles to make smarter decisions, test ideas fast, and adapt quickly to real-world results.

When you build products, you’re making bets — not certainties. The best product teams don’t pretend to know the answer or wait until all data clears the fog. Instead, they “think in bets.” That means approaching each decision like a poker player, not a chess grandmaster. Most people treat product roadmaps as if they’re a set of sure things: follow steps A, B, and C, and you’ll win. But real product work faces incomplete data...
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Start with Product and Target for Effective Distribution, Not Channel

3 min read

Learn why smart product managers match channels to product and target, not trends, with a simple hospital software example.

When it comes to getting your product into the hands of customers, many new product managers start with the channel. They ask, “Should we sell through partners, go viral, or build a sales team?” Ben Horowitz puts it simply: “A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target … that you wish to pursue.” In other words, the product and the target market come first. The...
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AI Risks to SaaS Companies

3 min read

Generative + Agentic AI is accelerating feature commoditization; read the room and adapt.

The press around AI putting pressure on well-established SaaS companies is gaining some momentum. Note: We are not discussing specific stocks and valuations. Our focus is on the impact of AI on software companies. Analyst Ratings Published 08/11/2025… "Melius Research downgraded Adobe… warns of ongoing multiple compression for software-as-a-service companies… ‘AI is eating software’ …” AI isn’t a shiny add-on anymore. It’s like a sneaky wave that’s pushing SaaS valuations lower. Investors see that and...
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Product Managers Who Think in Systems Will Survive the AI Era

7 min read

AI is reshaping product management. Learn how to map, optimize, and automate your systems before someone else does it for you.

AI is not a side trend. It is changing the work of product managers right now. Elena Verna wrote about eliminating her own job in Growth by automating 101. Read it in full. Her point was simple. If you automate yourself, you survive. If you do not, you are replaced. She was right on. But for product managers, this is not only about using a few AI tools. It is about thinking in systems. Your...
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The Power of an Anchor - Warby Parker's Pricing Strategy

3 min read

Warby Parker's playbook for product managers. Learn how the company uses pricing strategy, vertical integration, and innovation to grow.

From WSJ piece on Warby Parker: >Many things have gotten pricier in the past 15 years. Not Warby Parker's most affordable glasses, which have cost $95 since the brand’s inception in 2010. Warby Parker grew 14% last year. It did this while keeping its hero $95 price point. This shows that a focused value proposition can thrive even with inflation. The company used a few key strategies. It controlled its supply chain. It created a...
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From Promise to Practice - AI's Real Impact on Medicine

3 min read

Real-world data on AI in medicine. Where it works (imaging, drug discovery), why it fails (data, integration), and what actually drives adoption.

Yesterday, we explored how AI transforms medical understanding, informing patients. Today, let's examine where AI actually delivers results in clinical practice. New research from the Journal of Clinical Medicine maps the gap between hype and reality. Resonates well with my personal experience. >"The central challenge is evident: as AI tools become more sophisticated, our capacity to integrate them ethically, equitably, and effectively into clinical practice must evolve in tandem. This editorial explores the remarkable progress...
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When AI Becomes Your Medical Translator

8 min read

How AI LLMs are transforming healthcare by empowering patients with PhD-level medical knowledge and reshaping the entire industry ecosystem.

Picture this: You receive an email from your doctor with three different cancer diagnoses. Your heart stops. The medical jargon feels like it's written in a foreign language. But instead of spiraling into a Google rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios, you take a screenshot and upload it to ChatGPT. Within seconds, you have a clear, understandable explanation of what you're facing. This isn't a hypothetical scenario—it's exactly what happened to Carolina, one of the patients...
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The Winner's Curse: Rhyming History in the AI Era

3 min read

Why AI disruption differs from past paradigm shifts: faster cycles, probabilistic computing, and why today's tech winners face an accelerating curse.

Ben Thompson's latest piece hits on something crucial: when computing paradigms shift, yesterday's winners often become tomorrow's strugglers. >The risk both companies are taking is the implicit assumption that AI is not a paradigm shift like mobile was. In Apple’s case, they assume that users want an iPhone first, and will ultimately be satisfied with good-enough local AI; in AWS’s case, they assume that AI is just another primitive like compute or storage that enterprises...
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Vibe Coding and Test-driven Development

2 min read

Vibe-coding coolness

TDD I've been playing around with various vibe-coding tools. While working on building this blog using Astro, I asked Claude Code to use a test-driven development (TDD) approach. Bingo! It just built a whole test bed and followed the TDD approach for every new feature that's built. I liked Bolt.dev, but since I started using Claude Code, it's a completely different experience. Bolt can still provide compelling prototypes. That, along with Claude Code, takes it...
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How to Make OKRs Work

3 min read

Practical tips to make OKRs work: writing strong objectives, measurable key results, and avoiding common pitfalls in execution.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on OKRs inspired by John Doerr’s book Measuring What Matters. You can read Part 1 here: Why OKRs Matter. OKRs are simple to understand, but deceptively hard to get right. Many teams write OKRs once, post them in a slide deck, and never look back. Others confuse them with KPIs or use them as a laundry list of tasks. The result is disappointment: OKRs become busywork rather...
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Why OKRs Matter

3 min read

Learn why OKRs matter, how they align teams, and the four superpowers that make them a proven framework for execution.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on OKRs inspired by John Doerr’s book Measuring What Matters. In Part 2, we’ll explore how to make OKRs work in practice. Most organizations don’t fail because of a lack of effort. They fail because energy is scattered across too many priorities. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, provide a way to channel focus toward what truly matters. An OKR has two parts: Objective: a clear, inspiring...
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Beyond the Deliverable - The Strategic Product Mindset

4 min read

Learn how to move beyond delivery and adopt a strategic product mindset with practical steps, proven frameworks, and customer-first thinking.

"Strategic thinking." Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The kind of thing we expect from leaders, not just order-takers. But here’s the truth: it’s not an inborn talent. It’s a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Like learning to ride a bike, or in our world, learning to ship something that truly matters. Too often, what gets labeled as “strategy” is really just a diagnosis or a broad policy statement. What’s missing are the coherent...
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The Questions Great Product Leaders Ask

2 min read

Great product leaders don’t rely on perfect foresight. They ask sharper questions that cut through ambiguity and lead to better decisions.

Great leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions matter. Nowhere is this truer than in product decision-making. When facing ambiguity, strong product leaders resist the urge to rush into solutions. Instead, they slow down just enough to ask sharper questions that cut through noise. A few that consistently elevate decision quality: Do we have the expertise to make this decision? If not, who needs to be in...
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