Blogs

Research and writing on AI agents, product management, and technology.

2026-08-13

The PRD Template Is Not the Problem. Here's How to Write One Engineers Actually Read.

Most PRDs fail before a single line of code gets written, not because the template was wrong, but because they answer the wrong questions in the wrong order. A practical, section-by-section guide to writing a PRD your engineering team will actually use.

2026-08-10

A Nuclear Startup Just Raised $1B to Power AI Data Centers. Here's Why That's a Roadmap Story, Not an Energy Story.

Valar Atomics closed a $1 billion round to mass-produce small reactors for AI data centers. The real signal for product teams isn't about nuclear power: compute capacity has become a multi-year planning constraint, and most roadmaps still assume it isn't.

2026-08-09

The Product Decision Memo: How to Make a Call People Can Actually Revisit

A practical template for product decision memos that makes assumptions, trade-offs, and follow-up work visible without turning every roadmap call into a meeting.

2026-08-08

Product Metrics Every PM Should Know (And How Each One Can Mislead You)

Most PMs can define retention, activation, and DAU/MAU. Far fewer can say how each one breaks. A practical guide to the metrics that matter and the specific way each one will lie to you if you let it.

2026-08-07

Four of Google's Most Senior AI Researchers Just Quit to Start Over. Here's Why That's a PM Story.

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le left Google DeepMind after decades combined to found Discovery Loop. The reason they gave has less to do with money and more to do with what happens to focus inside a company that's grown too big to move fast.

2026-08-06

Amazon Just Hit $3 Trillion. The Real Story Is the $220 Billion Bet Behind It.

Amazon's AWS numbers show enterprise AI spending is turning into real revenue, not just headlines. Here's what the capex bet means for product teams building on top of it.

2026-08-05

A Court Just Ruled Your Users' AI Agents Can Visit Your Product Without Asking You First

The Ninth Circuit sided with Perplexity over Amazon, ruling that it's the user, not the AI agent, who legally 'accesses' a website. For any PM building a product other companies' agents might visit, that's not a footnote, it's a roadmap input.

2026-08-04

How to Answer Guesstimate Questions in a PM Interview (Without Freezing Up)

A practical framework for market-sizing and estimation questions: how to structure the answer, which assumptions to state out loud, and how to sanity-check a number before you say it.

2026-08-03

The PMs Winning Right Now Aren't the Ones Worried About AI — They're the Ones Building With It

While the industry narrative fixates on AI replacing PMs, a quieter shift is happening: PMs who picked up AI-assisted building tools are shipping faster, getting heard in rooms they used to wait outside, and having more fun doing the job. Here's the practical case for joining them.

2026-08-02

Chime Cut 10% of Its Staff on the Same Week AI Startups Raised $510B — What the Split Means for PMs

Fintech Chime laid off 10% of its workforce citing AI-driven efficiency, the same week Crunchbase reported a record $510B in H1 2026 startup funding, 70% of it AI. Two sides of one trade, and PMs are the ones who have to make it real.

2026-08-01

Your RICE Score Isn't the Decision — It's the Excuse. Here's What Actually Prioritizes a Roadmap

RICE, ICE, and MoSCoW all promise to make prioritization objective. In practice they're theater layered on top of a decision that was already made politically. A practical look at why the frameworks fail and what replaces them.

2026-07-30

1,178 AI Workers Just Asked for the Off Switch. Here's Why That Should Change How You Build.

The 'Pacing the Frontier' letter, signed by staff at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta, isn't asking to stop AI today — it's asking to build the machinery to stop it later. For PMs building on frontier models, that machinery is a roadmap risk hiding in plain sight.

2026-07-29

Salesforce Cut Nearly 1,000 Roles Building the AI That's Cutting Roles Like Theirs — What the Trade Actually Says About PM Jobs

Salesforce laid off close to 1,000 people including product managers while Agentforce grew ARR 169% and closed 29,000 deals. That's not a contradiction — it's the clearest data point yet on which PM work AI agents actually replace, and which they don't.

2026-07-26

Uber's $14.8B Delivery Hero Deal Is the Last Consolidation Move — Here's What PMs Should Take From It

Uber's acquisition of Delivery Hero closes the food-delivery consolidation arc that started with the pandemic land grab. The real lesson for PMs isn't about food delivery — it's about what happens to your product once your market stops rewarding growth and starts rewarding scale.

2026-07-26

Everyone Outsourced Their Prototyping to AI. The PMs Who Didn't Outsource Their Judgment Are Winning.

AI made coding, writing, and prototyping cheap for every PM at once. That didn't make product management easier — it made the one skill AI can't do for you, deciding what should exist, the only thing that still separates a good PM from a replaceable one.

2026-07-25

The PM Interview Loop Quietly Changed in 2026 — Here's What's Different

AI product sense is now its own round at frontier teams, analytical interviews test conflicting metrics instead of funnel diagnosis, and behavioral rounds go deeper. A structural map of how the PM interview process shifted this year.

2026-07-17

Open-Weight AI Just Caught Up: What Kimi K3 and the Multi-Model Shift Mean for Product Roadmaps

China's Moonshot AI shipped a 2.8-trillion-parameter open model this week, and it's part of a bigger pattern — open-weight models are now volume leaders on inference, not just cheap alternatives. Here's what the closing gap means for how PMs should architect AI dependency.

2026-07-16

When Your AI Vendor Goes Public: What Anthropic's IPO Push Means for Every Product Team Built on Claude

Anthropic is lining up bankers for a possible October IPO at a $965B+ valuation. For PMs who've built products on Claude or any frontier model, going public changes the vendor relationship in ways worth planning for now.

2026-07-15

New York Just Banned New AI Data Centers — What It Means for Every Product Team's AI Roadmap

New York's one-year moratorium on hyperscale data centers is the first hard political-economy constraint on the AI buildout. Here's why compute capacity, not model capability, is about to become a roadmap risk for PMs.

2026-07-14

The Alignment Tax: Why Stakeholder Conflict Is the Real Job of Product Management

Roadmap fights aren't usually about data — they're about whose priorities win. A practical look at why stakeholder conflict is structural, not personal, and the playbook top PMs use to turn alignment into leverage.

2026-07-13

Why 'Scope,' Not Title, Is the Only Promotion Currency Left in 2026

PM management layers have been cut hardest in this downturn, which means the old title-ladder logic of promotion is broken. What's replacing it is scope — and most PMs are still optimizing for the wrong thing.

2026-07-12

Apple vs. OpenAI: What a Trade-Secret Lawsuit Between Two AI Giants Means for Product Teams

Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI over its incoming AI hardware device isn't just courtroom drama — it's a preview of the competitive and organizational fault lines every product team building near a platform giant needs to plan around.

2026-07-11

The PM Skill Nobody Interviews For: Saying No Without Burning Trust

Every PM knows they should say no more. Almost none are taught how to do it without damaging the relationship they'll need again next quarter. A practical breakdown of what actually works.

2026-07-09

Meta's $1.4 Trillion Trial Isn't About Meta — It's About Whether 'Engaging' Design Is Legally Deceptive

Four US states say Meta's feed design was addictive by intent and deceptively marketed as safe. The August trial could redefine what 'good engagement design' is allowed to mean for every PM building consumer products.

2026-07-09

Your AI Roadmap Now Has a Government Dependency: What GPT-5.6's Regulatory Clearance Means for Product Teams

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 sat behind a government review for weeks before its July 11 public release. For PMs building on frontier models, that's a new, non-engineering variable in the roadmap — and it's not going away.

2026-07-08

The AI Boom's Hidden Supply Chain: Why a $27B Chemicals Merger Matters More Than the Next Model Release

AI's economic center of gravity is quietly shifting from model labs to the physical supply chain underneath them — chemicals, helium, copper, and power. What the Solstice-Element Solutions merger and 2026's 'cut and redirect' layoffs reveal about where the real bottlenecks are.

2026-06-28