Posts tagged "Systems Thinking"

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Infrastructure Redundancy Stops Before the CDN

3 min read

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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Context Engineering Turns AI Agents From Goldfish Into Assistants

7 min read

Google's whitepaper shows why stateful AI requires engineering context with Sessions and Memory, not just better prompts.

Your AI agent is brilliant. It can write code, analyze documents, and answer complex questions with remarkable sophistication. It is also a goldfish. Every conversation starts from scratch. Every user is a stranger. Every context is new. Google just released a whitepaper on context engineering that tackles this fundamental problem. The paper introduces a systematic framework for making LLM agents stateful using two core primitives: Sessions and Memory. The framework formalizes the architectural patterns that...
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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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Count Dependency, Not Customers

3 min read

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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From Project to Product Thinking

8 min read

A practical, no-hype guide for project managers moving into product roles — how to shift from delivery to discovery, unlearn old habits, and build learning loops that compound insight.

We shipped on time. Every dependency cleared, every stakeholder satisfied. The dashboards lit green. And then—nothing. Usage flatlined. The “big release” landed quietly, with customers politely ignoring it. This was several moons ago, early in my career. That was the moment it clicked for me: we had delivered perfectly, but we hadn’t delivered value. Scope, schedule, and cost were all managed flawlessly. But none of that mattered if the product didn’t change user behavior. That’s...
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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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The Feedback Loop Fallacy in AI Products

2 min read

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

3 min read

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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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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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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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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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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Jobs-to-be-Done - Demand Reducers and Systems Thinking

5 min read

Explore the demand reducers in Jobs-to-be-Done—Inertia and Anxiety—and how systems thinking helps overcome hidden barriers to product adoption.

In Part 1, we explored the forces that generate demand: the push of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the pull of a better future. Together, they explain why customers look for change and what attracts them to a solution. But even when push and pull are strong, adoption isn’t guaranteed. Hidden forces often prevent products from being hired. These are the demand reducers: Inertia and Anxiety. As Alan Klement describes, these forces are as...
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