Tagged product
8 essays
- When code gets cheap, the mockup loses its job Design tools earned their place by making expensive decisions cheap before anyone wrote code. Code is cheap now, so there is less reason to decide anywhere else, and Figma's market moved even while its product got better.
- AI is an interface Every system makes you learn its menus and its query language before it will help you. The useful thing AI does is remove that step: you say what you want, and it works out which buttons to press.
- Cancel the meeting Ten minutes before a readout, the numbers aren't right. You can present them anyway or you can cancel. Presenting them is worse, and it stays worse for weeks, because people remember the first figure they hear.
- Stated versus revealed preference, in booking data Ask people what holiday they want and they'll describe something longer and fancier than the one they book. I had the survey answers and the transactions for the same customers, so I could measure the gap. It's large and predictable.
- Not every AI feature should be a chat Companies happily let AI sort a million records unsupervised, then refuse to let it nudge a box five pixels because you have to ask for it in a sentence. Typing a request to do something you could have done by dragging it is worse.
- Why I still write code as a product leader I still ship production code, which people tell me is a poor use of a product leader's time. It means I can answer 'is that hard?' myself in ten minutes, instead of asking three people and waiting a day.
- The four-mode product manager Product work used to be four jobs held by four people who met on Thursdays. Doing all four myself costs me some depth in each, and it's still faster, because the handoffs cost more than the expertise did.
- Most problems are information problems Go back far enough in most failures and you find someone who didn't know something they needed to know. Once you start seeing it that way, you end up fixing different problems than you used to.