Posts tagged "Quick Thought"

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The era of the augmented architect

Product managers are evolving from process coordinators to augmented architects: AI-powered builders who own strategy and commercial outcomes.

The product management landscape of this year is defined by convergence: pressure to build faster (Vibe Coding), generate cash (Revenue Accountability), and prove value (Founder Mode). The "Product Management is dead" narrative is hyperbolic, but the role is changing. The administrative, process-heavy layer is dying: automated by agents or eliminated by Founder Mode flattening. The traffic cop model doesn't survive when AI generates working prototypes in minutes. What survives is the core function: value creation....
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Your platform is either a tax or a multiplier

Internal platforms that slow teams down are taxes. Those that accelerate them are multipliers. The mandate trap hides which one you're building.

Internal product managers often believe a dangerous myth. They think they don't have to worry about churn. Since the company mandates the use of their API gateway, design system, or data warehouse, they assume their user base is guaranteed. They have a captive audience. But in platform product management, users don't churn. They rot. When users are forced to use a tool they hate, they engage in malicious compliance. They do the bare minimum. They...
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Gemini 3 Proves the NVIDIA Tax Is Optional

Google trained Gemini 3 entirely on TPUs, bypassing NVIDIA's tax. The margin war between vertical integration and the CUDA ecosystem begins.

Google's Gemini 3 landed last week with impressive reviews: frontier-class performance that beats OpenAI and Anthropic except for its agentic code. Conventional wisdom said Google was lagging behind OpenAI, which remains true in adoption. But on capability, they have a real chance to catch up. The tech press is focused on benchmarks and capabilities. They're missing the real headline: Google trained these models entirely on TPUs. Zero NVIDIA dependency. While competitors debate model quality, Google...
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Dead Time Is Story Time

Waiting isn't friction to eliminate. It's captive attention begging for engagement. The best products turn loading screens into learning moments.

I stumbled on David Maister's 1985 research on waiting psychology while thinking about loading screens. His foundational principle: occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. But he uncovered something deeper. Anxiety, uncertainty, and unexplained delays make waits feel exponentially longer. That got me thinking. Most product teams treat waiting as friction to eliminate. Load faster. Reduce checkout steps. Skip the queue. But you can't eliminate all dead time. Users will wait during loading, onboarding, checkout,...
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The Feature Factory Problem AI Amplifies

AI accelerates shipping but not learning. Teams build faster without validating if they're solving the right customer problems.

Your team just shipped three features this week. Last quarter, that would have taken a month. AI tools turned your engineers into feature factories. Your designers generate variants in minutes. Your PMs prototype without waiting for engineering resources. Everyone's celebrating velocity. Who's checking if you're solving the right problems? Creation velocity isn't validation velocity Recent research shows contradictory results on AI's impact. Some studies report significant productivity gains, others find developers actually slow down when...
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AI Commoditizes Entry-Level Work While Amplifying Senior Value

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

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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Infrastructure Redundancy Stops Before the CDN

Three major outages expose the gap between multi-cloud architecture and actual resilience when CDN infrastructure fails.

Azure, AWS, and Cloudflare all experienced significant outages in recent weeks. Different providers, same story: configuration changes triggering cascading failures across infrastructure that's supposed to be resilient. The interesting part isn't that infrastructure fails. It's what gets exposed about the gap between architected resilience and actual resilience. The multi-cloud gap Companies might use AWS for one application and Azure for another, but any given application typically runs on a single cloud. Redundancy within that provider...
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World Models Teach AI to See

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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AI Agents Multiply Work and Eliminate Jobs Simultaneously

AI agents boost output but multiply review work while threatening entry-level jobs. Two patterns reshaping knowledge work simultaneously.

Traditional automation follows a script. You map the steps, define the logic, and the system executes. If-then-else at scale. AI agents are different. They have decision-making authority. You give them a goal, and they figure out the path, making choices on the fly based on context. That shift from scripted execution to delegated judgment changes what happens to your workload. What the data shows A recent study from Faros AI analyzed over 10,000 developers across...
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Goal Clarity Without Strategy Clarity Is Just Noise

Enterprises repeat goals endlessly but skip strategy. In the AI era, that gap between knowing the destination and coordinating the route is existential.

The dynamic is shifting. AI tools let startups go from idea to credible prototype in weeks, not quarters. Technical execution gaps are narrowing. For enterprises, this changes the calculus. The advantages used to be resources, data, distribution, and customer relationships. Those still matter. But only if you can deploy them before the market moves. The real enterprise problem isn't speed It's coordination. Everyone knows the goal. "AI transformation." "Double growth." "Modernize the platform." Leadership repeats...
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Fast Teams Don't Ship More, They Learn Faster

Velocity isn't about shipping more features. It's about running faster learning loops that turn uncertainty into validated decisions.

Two teams both ship every week. One is learning. The other is just busy. The difference isn't work ethic or talent. It's what they optimize for. Slow teams measure velocity by features shipped. Fast teams measure it by hypotheses validated. One counts outputs. The other measures learning rate. The Learning Rate Problem Shipping is easy. Learning is hard. Most teams can release code weekly but take months to figure out if it worked. They ship...
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Why Retention Starts at Onboarding, Not Growth

Retention problems are created in week one, not month six. Product decisions about time-to-value determine long-term stickiness.

Most products lose 80% of users within 30 days. Teams see this happening and hand the problem to growth. They add email campaigns, push notifications, re-engagement hooks. None of it moves the number because the retention problem wasn't created in month six. It was locked in during week one. This isn't about better onboarding flows or slicker tutorials. It's about product decisions made before launch that determine whether users stay or leave months later. By...
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The Tool Spectrum is Collapsing

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

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

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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Count Dependency, Not Customers

Your competitor added 10,000 customers. You added 200 developers. Who wins? Ecosystem dependency beats user acquisition every time.

Your competitor just announced 10,000 new customers. You added 200 developers to your API program. Who wins? Traditional B2B thinking says the customer count matters most. Ecosystem thinking says dependency beats scale every time. The moat has moved For decades, B2B competitive advantage meant user acquisition. More customers, more revenue, stronger position. Simple math. That math doesn't work anymore. The $420B business SaaS market is reorganizing around a different principle: the companies that provide infrastructure...
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Feature Factories Build AI Wrappers, Product Orgs Build Moats

Everyone's racing to add AI features. Few are building AI moats. The difference determines who's still competitive in 18 months.

Every company can call the OpenAI API. Every developer can wrap Claude in a decent UI. Every product team can ship "AI-powered" features in a sprint or two. The hard part isn't adding AI. It's building something users can't easily replicate elsewhere. The Wrapper Trap Integrating GPT-5 or Claude takes a weekend. Polish the UI, tune some prompts, add it to your feature list. Congratulations—you've built what a hundred competitors can build in the same...
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How to Build Product Sense

Product sense isn't magic—it's systematic practice. Learn how to build intuition through decision-making, user empathy, and pattern recognition.

Everyone agrees product sense separates good PMs from great ones. Nobody can define what it actually means. Here's the paradox: product sense feels like intuition, but it's built through systematic practice. It looks like magic, but it's earned through reflection, pattern recognition, and user empathy. The vagueness isn't because it's mystical—it's because it's contextual. What works in enterprise software fails in consumer apps. What matters in healthcare differs from fintech. But certain principles hold. Here's...
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You're Not an AI User, You're an AI Manager

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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Traffic Metrics Are Lying to You

Webflow's AI search data reveals why aggregate traffic is misleading and what product teams should measure instead.

Your traffic is down. Your growth team is panicking. And your product metrics might be telling you absolutely nothing useful. Kyle Poyar's 2025 State of B2B GTM report uncovered something fascinating: Webflow's aggregate traffic is declining while their business is accelerating. ChatGPT referrals convert at 24% compared to 4% from Google. Two-thirds convert within 7 days. This isn't a Webflow-specific anomaly. It's what happens when AI search reshapes discovery. The death of aggregate traffic as...
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45 Minutes with Claude Code: From Tag Chaos to Scalable Taxonomy

Daily publishing needs a scalable taxonomy. Claude Code built mine in 45 minutes: 63 tags → 40, three tiers, full automation.

I publish daily. Over 100 posts already live. The tag problem emerged quickly—60-ish unique tags across 101 posts. Twenty-one used exactly once. Tags like AI and ai coexisting. go-to-market-strategy next to go-to-market. moat, paradigm-shift, outcome-oriented, scattered everywhere. Navigation was becoming noise. The Real Problem Isn't Tags It's what happens when you don't design for scale from day one. Most blogs start small. A handful of posts. A few obvious tags. Everything feels manageable because the...
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When Your Reports Become Your Customers

Managers must add more value than they cost. Apply customer-thinking to direct reports: justify your existence through real services.

You call a meeting to "align on priorities." Your team spends two hours in a conference room. Decisions get deferred pending "more data." Everyone leaves to update their status decks for next week's follow-up. You just cost your team 10 hours of productive work. What did they get in return? If the answer isn't something concrete and valuable, you're net negative. And most managers are. I've been testing a framework inspired by Roger Martin's A...
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Two GTM Insights Product Managers Can Actually Use

Exploring a B2B GTM survey through a PM lens: two data points that might change how you think about pricing and AI features.

I've been digging through the 2025 State of B2B GTM Report from Growth Unhinged, and while most of it focuses on channel strategy and GTM execution, two findings stood out for their direct relevance to product work. These aren't prescriptions—they're observations from one dataset that might be useful as you think about your own product decisions. Your pricing tier predicts your GTM motion (not the other way around) The survey shows clear patterns between product...
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Early Experience: A Different Approach to Agent Training

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

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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The Impact Scorecard

A simple framework to evaluate product impact: map your work by customer value and business value to focus on what matters most.

It's surprisingly easy to stay busy without making much of an impact. A team ships features, hits sprint goals, and sees metrics move—but six months later, it's unclear what actually mattered. Not because the team wasn't working hard, but because "impact" is slippery to define. I've found it helpful to think about impact along two dimensions: customer value and business value. When you map your work on both axes, patterns start to emerge about what's...
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Anthropic’s Quiet Advantage in the AI Race

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

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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AI Commoditization and Three Strategic Paths

AI is commoditizing your competitive advantage. Three strategic paths exist: race to the top, bottom, or adjacent. Choose deliberately or fail.

AI makes your differentiator table stakes. Your competitive advantage is evaporating. The junior employee with AI tools matches the senior expert's output. The expertise that took years to build becomes a commodity. What do you do when your moat becomes a puddle? The framework Three strategic paths exist. Each works. Each requires different capabilities. Race to the top: Invest in capabilities AI can't commoditize. This works when you can build compounding advantages, such as proprietary...
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It's not a Search Problem, it's a Distribution Problem

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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Claude Skills Might Be Anthropic’s Most Exciting Update Yet

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

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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The New Rythm of Product, Design, and Engineering

AI-assisted prototyping is reshaping collaboration across product, design, and engineering—accelerating discovery and demanding the best from each discipline.

The lines between product, design, and engineering have always been fluid, but AI-assisted development is making that overlap more productive than ever. Today, product managers can spin up interactive prototypes in hours, not weeks. What used to require multiple handoffs between PMs, UX designers, and developers can now start as a shared experiment. This shift isn’t about replacing roles. It’s about accelerating discovery. Prototyping as a Discovery Tool There’s growing tension in some teams: product...
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AI Agents Grow Work Instead of Replacing It

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

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

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

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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The PM as Builder Era

AI makes building faster, but not smarter. The new PM advantage is clarity, knowing what to test, why it matters, and how to learn fast.

The best product managers I know are not writing more specs. They are writing code. AI is changing what it means to build, not by replacing PMs but by removing the constraints around what they can try. When the cost of testing an idea approaches zero, the right move is not to plan more. It is to prototype more. Today, you can build five versions of a concept before lunch. You can wire up a...
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ChatGPT Is Becoming the Interface

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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Notes on the Modern Product Leader’s Playbook

Notes on strategy, speed, and why modern product leadership is a leverage game.

Watched Jiaona Zhang’s Reforge talk on product leadership. It’s a dense one — part philosophy, part tactical operating manual. These are the notes (and reactions) I don’t want to forget. We’re in an in-between moment where PMs are both strategists and builders again. Jiaona calls it a new playbook, but it’s really a reminder that our leverage has changed. Mindset: From Managing to Skating Where the Puck Is The core shift is from execution to...
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OpenAI’s App Store Moment and the Future of Product Boundaries

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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From Competitive Moats to Collaborative Bridges

In the AI era, the strongest products don’t build walls — they build bridges. Here’s why connectivity, not isolation, defines modern defensibility.

The AI ecosystem is moving too fast for moats. Every closed advantage leaks. Every walled garden gets mapped. What used to protect you now isolates you. The defensible position today isn’t the highest wall — it’s the bridge everyone else depends on to cross. For years, defensibility meant isolation. Own the data. Control the stack. Lock down the ecosystem. Those strategies worked when products were discrete and distribution was finite. You could draw boundaries around...
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The Feedback Loop Fallacy in AI Products

AI feedback loops can lie. Learn why engagement metrics fail and how product managers can rebuild truth-centered measurement systems.

For years, product managers have lived by a simple gospel: ship, measure, learn. The faster your feedback loop, the quicker your product improves. But AI is quietly breaking this law of motion. The feedback loops we’ve trusted for decades no longer tell the truth. When feedback starts lying In traditional software, user behavior is a reliable proxy for value. If conversion rates increase or churn decreases, the product has likely improved. With AI, that assumption...
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Thinking Through Agentic Loops

Exploring how agentic loops extend feedback loops by adding autonomy, iteration, and goal-directed action in systems and AI.

I’ve long been fond of feedback loops. Systems thinking taught me to look for them everywhere: how a fitness tracker nudges you to walk more, how customer signals shape a product roadmap, how our habits form through repeated cues and responses. Feedback loops are elegant in their simplicity: an action produces an effect, which feeds back to influence the next action. Recently, I came across the phrase agentic loops. At first, it sounded like another...
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The Shift from SEO to AEO Is Redefining Visibility Online

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

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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Adaptability, Creativity, Tech Fluency: The Skills Defining Work Now

The core skills once seen as future-ready—adaptability, creativity, and tech fluency—are already defining how work gets done today.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report offers a clear signal for product managers, technologists, and business leaders: the skills that matter most in the coming decade are not the same as those that powered the past. Well, the report is confirming what we are already seeing in full force: By 2030, success will hinge less on manual or routine capabilities and far more on adaptability, creativity, and fluency in technology. !Core Skills 2030...
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AI Platforms as the New Distribution Layer

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout turns ChatGPT into a commerce channel. Here’s what product managers need to know about AI-native distribution.

Seven hundred million people use ChatGPT every week. That’s not just a user base, that’s a distribution channel that makes traditional retail look small. With its new Instant Checkout feature, OpenAI isn’t just adding payments. It’s signaling that AI platforms are on their way to becoming full-blown storefronts. For product strategists, this marks a shift as significant as the arrival of the App Store. Distribution itself is being rebuilt inside AI platforms. From Infrastructure to...
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Level Up or Get Left Behind by AI

Walmart and Accenture show why AI is an existential risk for workers who don’t adapt, but also a chance to reinvent work for the better.

The sugarcoating is over. Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon says, “AI is going to change literally every job.” Accenture’s CEO Julie Sweet is blunt too — some employees will be retrained, others will be exited. The world’s biggest employers are making it clear: if workers don’t adapt, they risk being left behind. The Existential Risk The risk is not just about losing jobs, but about jobs losing relevance. At Walmart, warehouse automation is already cutting some...
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From Architect to Gardener to Orchestrator in the AI Era

How AI transforms product leadership from building to conducting. The rise of the Orchestrator mindset in product management.

Last year, I wrote about two product management mindsets: the Architect who blueprints everything upfront, and the Gardener who plants seeds and discovers what grows. That framework made sense when humans did all the work. Not anymore (or not very soon). AI is changing the game. It can architect better than architects (generating requirements, writing specs, and creating test cases). It can garden better than gardeners (running thousands of experiments, adapting in real-time, finding patterns...
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What a Gigawatt of AI Really Means

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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When Work Becomes the Practice

Moving beyond the search for meaning to the practice of creating it. A product manager's reflection on making work matter, one sprint at a time.

A colleague and an inspiring leader, Puneet Maheshwari, recently wrote something about work and meaning that stopped me in my tracks. He talked about growing up around people who never had the luxury of romanticizing "meaning" in work. For them, work was survival and dignity. Nothing more, nothing less. His insight? The question isn't whether work is a means to an end, but which ends make the means worth it. When Time Disappears For me,...
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Platform vs Product: The AI Era Convergence

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

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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When to Trust Intuition vs. Metrics

Intuition is a compass, metrics are a map. Here’s how product managers can decide which to trust, depending on the product stage.

This is a follow-up from an earlier post on the limit of metrics. Product managers often wrestle with a familiar question: Should I trust the numbers, or should I trust my instincts? The truth is, both matter — but their weight changes depending on where your product is in its lifecycle. Intuition plays a bigger role early, while metrics take over later. Knowing when to lean on which can be the difference between chasing noise...
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AEO is the New SEO?

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

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

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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Treat Your Job Like a Product and Protect Maker Time

Product leaders must treat their job like a product and protect maker time, or risk getting stuck in execution and missing leadership growth.

Product leaders know what happens to a product without a strategy. It becomes a treadmill of backlog items, bug fixes, and reactive feature requests. The same thing happens to your career if you treat your job as nothing more than a stream of execution tasks. Just like a product needs vision, prioritization, and trade-offs, so does your work. But here’s the challenge: execution will always crowd out strategy unless you intentionally design for it. Execution...
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The Hidden Cost of UX Friction in Enterprise Systems

Enterprise systems often rely on mandates, not UX. But small friction compounds into real business risk. Here’s why PMs can’t ignore it.

Following up on my earlier piece: Build, Buy, or AI-Build, in which I noted Marty Cagan's view that AI will not easily replace enterprise solutions, even in the age of “vibe coding.” His reasoning is sound: enterprise products are deeply embedded in intricate workflows, with business rules and integrations that can’t be swapped out overnight. Today, tools like Copilot or low-code builders tend to play a helper role rather than a wholesale replacement. But this...
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Claude Now Builds Spreadsheets and Documents

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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One Question Every Product Manager Should Ask in Roadmap Reviews

A simple question can sharpen roadmap reviews: what will this feature replace in the user’s life? Here’s why the replacement lens matters.

Roadmap reviews tend to focus on timelines, dependencies, and long lists of features. These discussions are important, but they often miss a single clarifying question that can cut through the noise: What will this feature replace in the user’s life? Asking this question changes the framing. Instead of thinking about what a feature adds, the conversation shifts to what it displaces. Users don’t have unlimited time or attention. Every new feature competes with something they...
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What Leadership Really Looks Like

Leadership for product managers isn’t about titles. It’s about daily choices—small acts of influence, initiative, empowerment, and courage.

In the product culture series, I want to delve into who the leader is. In corporate life, “leader” is a word that gets stretched in too many directions. Sometimes it refers to someone with direct reports. Sometimes it points only to the highest rung of the ladder. But the truth is simpler: leadership is not about job level or headcount. Leadership is about how you show up. It’s about whether you create momentum, clarity, and...
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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

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

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

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

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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AI in Product Management

AI is moving fast in product management, from PRDs to prototypes. Here’s what research shows, what’s missing, and how PMs can lead.

AI in product management is no longer a question of if. It is a when. And when we say 'when,' we are not talking about years. We are talking months, given the pace of innovation and adoption. A new study in Management Review Quarterly, “Where does AI play a major role in the new product development and product management process?” by Aron Witkowski and Andrzej Wodecki, maps out the current state of AI in product...
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Agentic Browsers Meet Their Hardest Test: Security

Agentic browsers face significant security risks, such as prompt injection, but early defenses demonstrate why security will be the true differentiator.

Claude for Chrome (now in pilot), Perplexity’s Comet, and Dia are all pushing the idea of a browser that doesn’t just display pages but acts within them. But as soon as you let an AI click, type, and execute, the hardest problem comes into view: security. The quiet threat of prompt injection Anthropic deserves credit for going deep on vulnerabilities in its Claude for Chrome pilot. “Some vulnerabilities remain to be fixed before we can...
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Product Culture Is Your Real Operating System

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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Curiosity Beats Tenure in the Age of AI

Junior developers’ curiosity and adaptability make them the most AI-native talent. Cutting them now risks weakening future innovation.

Key Takeaway The jury is still out on whether AI will replace or empower software developers, but dismissing junior talent is a short-sighted approach. Their curiosity and adaptability make them the best positioned to thrive in an AI-driven future—qualities that matter more than years of experience. Why This Matters AI is reshaping the nature of engineering work. Leaders face pressure to cut costs and experiment with automation. Some argue junior developers are the most “replaceable”...
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Agentic AI Needs APIs to Act

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

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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Observability Now Includes Watching AI

AI observability means monitoring accuracy, drift, and hallucinations, not just uptime. PMs must treat it as a core product feature.

When product managers think of observability, they usually mean uptime, latency, or error rates. But as AI becomes central to user experiences, that definition must expand. Observability now includes monitoring model accuracy, hallucinations, prompt injection, and real-time behavior. As Datadog’s CPO Yanbing Li notes, AI systems add a new layer of complexity to enterprise monitoring. Why AI demands a new observability lens Traditional software is deterministic. If a server or a function fails, you can...
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Fixing Google SEO Indexing Issues with ClaudeCode

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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Why Empathy, Not IQ, Defines Success in the AI Age

Empathy and critical thinking—not IQ—are the keys to thriving as a product leader in the AI era.

Walk into any workplace today, and you’ll see AI embedded in daily tools and workflows. It drafts emails, generates reports, and even proposes design ideas. What it can’t do is sit across from someone, understand their frustration, and respond with care. That distinctly human capacity is becoming the true differentiator. Carnegie Mellon professor Po-Shen Loh puts it bluntly (video): “The only sustainable trait in the age of AI is the ability to care about people...
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Build, Buy, or AI-Build

Vibe-coding opens a new AI-build path, but Marty Cagan’s point on business rules shows its limits. Can AI ever capture this hidden and complex logic?

In my recent post on build vs buy in the age of vibe-coding, I argued that the classic binary is breaking down. Thanks to generative AI tools, teams now face a third option: AI-build. Instead of waiting for engineering capacity or relying entirely on vendors, product managers can prototype, test, and even wire together solutions themselves using natural language. Marty Cagan just published a piece on build vs buy in the age of AI. He...
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Vibe-Coding Is Early But Already Changing SaaS

Vibe-coding is still early, but already empowers non-technical builders while pressuring SaaS vendors to deliver leverage beyond features.

In a recent Every article, Dan Shipper highlights people who replaced expensive SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives. The stories aren’t just about cost-cutting. They show how quickly software creation is becoming accessible to people who never considered themselves builders. This is still early days. Vibe-coding — natural language prompting to generate working tools — is in the first phase of its maturity curve. It often takes a few iterations to get things right, as Shipper’s...
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The Informal Committees Behind B2B Buying

B2B buying isn’t decided by end users alone. Informal committees shape decisions, and product managers must map their jobs-to-be-done.

When we think about product adoption, the focus usually falls on the end user. Product managers map user needs with frameworks like jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), ensuring the product fits a real workflow. But in B2B, adoption doesn't always equal purchase. Deals often hinge on an informal buying committee — a shifting group of individuals who influence or approve decisions, even if they never use the product directly. This isn’t a boardroom-style committee. It’s a loose network...
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Making Product Decisions with a Bets Mindset

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

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

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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The Power of an Anchor - Warby Parker's Pricing Strategy

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

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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The Winner's Curse: Rhyming History in the AI Era

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

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

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

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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Making Better Product Decisions

Great product leaders know not all decisions are equal. Learn how to apply the one-way vs. two-way door lens to improve decision speed and quality.

Great product leaders aren’t defined by their roadmaps, but by the decisions that shape them. Roadmaps shift. Markets change. But decision quality compounds over time. One useful lens comes from Jeff Bezos: the idea of one-way vs. two-way doors. One-way doors are irreversible. Once you step through, it’s costly to turn back. These require deliberation, diverse perspectives, and often leadership involvement. Two-way doors are reversible. If the decision doesn’t work out, you can step back...
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The Questions Great Product Leaders Ask

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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