Writing
Notes on product, AI and building.
Working notes rather than content marketing: what I am learning while building products, and the decisions that turned out to matter.
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What AI-native product management actually means
**Not a PM who uses ChatGPT, and not a PM who works at an AI company** Most people using the phrase "AI-native product manager" mean one of two things, and both are wrong. Either they mean a product manager who has adopted AI tools for their own work
Designing products when AI is part of the interface
**Three guarantees your users relied on, and what to do now that you cannot make them** Put a model inside a product and you break three promises that every interface before it made implicitly. **Determinism.** The same action produces the same resul
Build in public, publish artifacts not intentions
**The part everyone does is the part with evidence against it** A counter on a site I built reads `00 / 30 PRODUCTS BUILT`, `PHASE 01: DISCOVERY`, `0% COMPLETE`. It has read that since launch. In the same period, on the same GitHub account, seventeen
AI features and AI-native products are not the same thing
**"Thin wrapper" is a bad criticism made on the wrong axis** The wrapper insult has been the laziest argument in software for three years, and the people making it are pointing at the wrong thing. They point at code volume: how little of this product
Designing under uncertainty
**You cannot guess better, but you can decide in a better order** Here is the actual situation, most weeks. You are designing a screen. You have spoken to four people, two of whom were being polite. You do not know what the primary action is, you are
Latency, trust and the two variables everyone conflates
**Slower can be more trusted, and there is research on why** In 2011, Ryan Buell and Michael Norton ran a study on travel search. They built versions of a search tool that showed their work: the sites the engine was querying, the results being filter
Shipping MVPs with AI coding tools
**When building gets cheap, the expensive thing is deciding what not to keep** The constraint has moved, and almost nobody has adjusted their behaviour to where it went. For most of software's history, building was the expensive step. Product method
Activation before growth
**Acquisition is rented. Activation is owned.** Some arithmetic, with round invented numbers chosen to show a structure rather than to describe anything real. A thousand visitors arrive. Two hundred sign up. Fifty reach the point where the product ha
Many small products, and whether that is a strategy
**Exploration is only worth doing if something gets exploited** I want to make the case for a strategy I have followed, and then be honest about the condition under which it fails, because I have failed that condition. Building many small products in
The generalist product builder
**The advantage is not breadth. It is owning the seams.** Picture the person reading your résumé. It says product management, design and growth. They have thirty seconds and a pile of applications, and they think: no depth anywhere. That reaction is
Cognitive load is the real SaaS design problem
**Three kinds of load, and teams keep cutting the wrong one** Working memory holds about four items. Your settings page has forty toggles. That comparison gets used to justify a lot of bad design work, and the reason it produces bad work is that it t
What seventeen products in five months actually taught me
**Your build log knows more about you than you do** Ask a builder what they are good at and what they care about, and you get an answer. The answer is a hypothesis, assembled partly from memory and partly from who they would like to be, and there is
Agents, autonomy and the human in the loop
**Four positions, and three of them are usually theatre** "Human in the loop" has become the phrase teams reach for when asked how their agent is safe, and it has stopped carrying information. It appears in launch posts, in procurement answers and in
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