Search the archive

THE EMOTIONAL COST OF FINDING PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

“TELL A STORY” IS NOT HELPFUL ADVICE

Effective storytelling pairs a clear challenge with a satisfying resolution, using a structure suited to the audience's attention span.

PLEASE STOP THE AI CONFIDENCE THEATER

AI hype creates anxiety and erodes trust. Real progress comes from honest expectations, measurable outcomes, and the sustained work required to make AI reliable.

GREAT PRODUCTS, BAD COMPANIES

Great products need strong governance. Without it, short-term financial interests can undermine a company's founders, culture, and mission.

EXECUTION PROBLEMS ARE OFTEN WORKFLOW PROBLEMS

Execution improves when workflows do not depend on perfect collaboration. Separate learning, debate, and decisions so progress can continue despite unreliable dependencies.

WHERE DOES PRODUCT GO WRONG IN PE-BACKED FIRMS? (57 MINUTE VIDEO)

HOW PRODUCT TEAMS CAN DEVELOP THEIR PRODUCT VISION COLLABORATIVELY

A strong product vision connects the team to a meaningful change for users and guides difficult decisions. It should be collaborative, grounded in customer insight, and tested through real scenarios.

HOW TO BE A SECURITY PERSON WHO DOESN'T SUCK AT PRODUCT

AI is turning security professionals from gatekeepers into builders. Success will require engineering skill, product judgment, and security experiences that developers want to use.

WE LIKE ANTHROPIC MORE THAN OPENAI. THE TROLLEY PROBLEM EXPLAINS WHY. (4 MINUTE VIDEO)

Visible deliberation builds trust. When making a difficult decision, explain the tradeoffs and show that you considered its impact carefully.

MOST AI WORK CAN WAIT

Build AI systems around intelligent routing, not a single model. Send each task to the cheapest reliable option and process nonurgent work asynchronously.

THE FUNDAMENTAL COGNITIVE BIAS OF PRODUCT BUILDERS

Many product builders blame weak marketing for failure while crediting competitors' success to distribution, all while assuming their own product is better.

WHEN SHOULD YOU KNOW THE POINT?

Clear goals can improve decisions, but not every valuable activity needs a precise purpose.

See Agent Accounts →

HOW TO WRITE OKRS FOR AN AI PRODUCT

Measure AI success through user behavior: whether people use outputs as written, verify them less, and trust the tool with important work.

CLAUDE CODE TURNED EVERY ENGINEER INTO THREE. NOW COMPANIES NEED MORE PRODUCT THINKERS

AI coding tools have shifted the software bottleneck from writing code to deciding what to build. As agents compress engineering output, teams need more product thinking and stronger fundamentals, not just more developer headcount or more trust in AI output.

“IT'S HARD TO EVAL” IS A PRODUCT SMELL

AI products should make their outputs easy to verify by showing their sources and breaking complex work into smaller, reviewable pieces.

GENERATIVE UI DOESN'T MAKE SENSE FOR STARTUPS

Generative UI is practical only for established companies, not early-stage startups. Since startups lack evidence of customer needs to encode correct interaction components, they should wait until product-market fit is established.

THE BOTTLENECK STRIKE AGAIN!

AI speeds up coding, but product development doesn't have just one bottleneck. Constraints constantly shift between judgment, coordination, incentives, and learning. Due to this complexity, it is too early to say exactly how AI will reshape work, and making bold claims can often be misleading.

BUILDING WITHOUT THE HANDOFFS

Builder.io helps teams ship faster by letting more people build directly with AI while keeping every change within trusted brand, security, and approval guardrails.

THE OPERATIONAL REALITY OF MARKETING INSIDE AN AI COMPANY

Treat marketing and growth in AI companies as a single operational system focused on compounding product adoption, rather than separate awareness and downstream funnels. Fal uses AI selectively for practical tasks to tighten feedback loops and accelerate decision-making, rather than fully automating marketing.

SOFTWARE IS BECOMING MARKETING

As AI lowers barriers to entry, software becomes more accessible and easier for outsiders to evaluate, which compresses pay and prestige. Product markets will likely shift toward services, with mid-market SaaS vendors declining, niche utilities rising, and a few aggregators dominating through trust and distribution.

THE NEW PRODUCT ROLES

As traditional functions converge, product roles may become defined by how people contribute.

DEFINING TASTE

As AI makes production abundant, taste becomes the differentiator.

THE AI ERA REQUIRES A DIFFERENT KIND OF EXPERIMENTATION

Product experimentation must evolve in the AI era, as traditional assumptions no longer apply. Shifts include collapsing UI surfaces, faster development cycles, diminished value in minor copy tweaks due to AI personalization, and increased inference costs that raise the stakes for monetization experiments.

HOW TO MEASURE DEVELOPMENT PRODUCTIVITY?

Developer activity metrics like code, commits, tokens, and features measure output, not value. Measure cross-functional teams by the business and user outcomes they create instead.

WHAT BEING "INSPIRING" ACTUALLY MEANS

Inspiring at work means presenting a clear point of view and showing people, concretely, why taking action will make their work better.

THE NEW INNER GAME

As AI makes knowledge and execution abundant, emotional clarity becomes a critical advantage. The people and teams that thrive will make discerning decisions, confront conflict, embrace failure, and manage fear without letting it dictate their actions.

IS AI FOOLING YOU?

AI accelerates execution, but without shared vision and collaboration, it only magnifies misalignment. Strong product teams use AI to speed up iteration while keeping humans focused on judgment, alignment, and solving problems that matter.

STOP WRITING BLOG POSTS AND CALLING IT SEO

Publishing blog posts for SEO is often just content marketing masquerading as SEO, which frequently fails to drive business outcomes. A true product-led SEO strategy prioritizes making your product discoverable at the moment of intent, routing users directly into action-oriented conversion flows rather than passive reading.

BUILD THE AGENT OR POWER THE AGENT?

Founders must choose between "building the agent" and "powering the agent”. This decision hinges on where the customer works, whether the company owns the full workflow or a slice, and where the product's value resides: in data/context or capabilities/actions.

RICK AND MORTY'S STORYTELLING SECRET TO HOOK ANY READER

Dan Harmon's Story Circle turns the Hero's Journey into eight repeatable steps that move a character from comfort through conflict, transformation, and consequences. Its strict structure creates room for creativity, helping writers turn absurd ideas into accessible stories rooted in meaningful human struggles.

QUARTERLY PLANNING IS A SCARCITY RITUAL

Quarterly planning is an outdated 'scarcity ritual.'

PRODUCT MANAGER IS THE OLD TITLE

As AI reduces shipping costs, the traditional PM role is shifting toward Complexity Management: prioritizing strategic restraint, value clarity, ecosystem-level thinking, and the judgment to recalibrate.

Step into your user's shoes and test it out yourself

THE MOST DEMANDING ROLE IN PRODUCT

Platform PMs manage multiple audiences, invisible work, delayed outcomes, and complex dependencies. Success requires strong storytelling, adoption, measurement, and stakeholder management.

HOW TO WIN A SPACE WAR

Winning in space requires resilient satellites, unmatched launch capacity, and credible deterrence. America must defend its orbital advantage without destroying the environment it depends on.

LOST CONFIDENCE

Confidence scores create false precision and favor safe ideas. Prioritize observable impact and bounded bets with meaningful upside.

HOW TO DESIGN AI AGENT LOOPS (29 MINUTE VIDEO)

Effective AI agents need clear goals, rigorous verification, and human oversight. Mozilla used this approach to find and fix hundreds of Firefox security bugs.

the Orb team →

HOW PRODUCT MANAGEMENT CAN FIX YOUR AI INTEGRATION PROBLEMS

Most enterprise AI pilots fail to produce ROI by focusing on tool deployment rather than redesigning workflows. Since pilot teams often lack the authority to change work processes, these integrations often become expensive demos. Instead, teams should have the autonomy to redesign workflows and measure success based on outcomes.

TIMESCALES OF PLAY

Effective product collaboration requires recognizing that different stakeholders perceive the same situation through different “backgrounds,” which are shaped by timescales. This piece proposes three timescales to consider and recommends using visual models to expose shared context and bridge timescale barriers.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE REASON YOU KEEP SELF-SABOTAGING

Self-sabotage often hides an emotional reward. Change begins when we face reality, take meaningful action, and stop mistaking the appearance of living for life itself.

CAN AI MAKE AN IPHONE?

AI can generate ideas, but great products require judgment and restraint. Taste is the discipline to protect a clear vision by repeatedly saying no.

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT DIES WHEN THE PROJECT GOES LIVE

Project documentation often goes stale by production, trapping the “why” behind system behavior in an architect's head.

OWNING VS. RENTING INTELLIGENCE

Companies that rent intelligence remain vulnerable to decisions beyond their control.

THE MOM-AND-POP SAAS ERA HAS ARRIVED

AI reduces the cost of building software, democratizing product creation. As software becomes viable for more niches, "mom-and-pop SaaS" will emerge from domain experts and local operators, expanding the market rather than simply shifting existing demand.

WHAT WILL STARTUPS DO IN 2030?

As AI democratizes technical execution, building ability is no longer a competitive advantage. The real challenge for future founders will be deciding what to create when technical expertise is universally accessible.