Product managers keep coming back to Aha! with the same request: "This prototype is great—now I want it to actually integrate with other systems and do real things." Chris (Aha!) explains how that moment—prototype meets production—reshaped their roadmap. Instead of handing the app to an engineer…
Inspired by Git diff, Teresa Torres started simple: compare the input tree to the output tree and generate a change set. Then she learned the same pair of trees can produce multiple change sets—and only one tells the real story. A semantic merge means something very different from a delete plus…
This week on the podcast, @vlaurenlee from @Shopify shared how her team is using AI to solve AI problems, instead of waiting years for interaction data. "You're basically imparting all of your product intuition into an LLM to then shape yet another LLM." /2
Lenny Rachitsky reports results from his second annual tech worker sentiment survey, finding the workforce splitting into those amplified by AI and those destabilized by it. Burnout has risen sharply, career optimism…
The first thing I want from AI doing product marketing is the ability to say "I don’t know." If it can’t verify a competitor change, that uncertainty belongs in the answer. If a recommendation needs evidence it doesn’t have, the system should stop there. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m
Julie Zhuo reflects on Muse, a consumer AI agent she believes could actually change people's everyday habits. The essay, which is paywalled, argues that a few specific design choices explain why personal AI might…
Lenny Rachitsky and survey partner Noam Segal report results from a survey of 6,500+ tech professionals on the tools they use, love, and want to replace. The clearest shift since 2020 and 2022 is AI assistants, led by…
The supermarket shelf used to hold maybe 1,000 SKUs. Now it can hold 10,000, because AI makes it just as easy to build the wrong thing as the right one. Brian (Aha!) argues this is exactly where product managers earn their keep: strategy and discovery decide what deserves a spot on the shelf…
“I’m just guessing here, but I’d say over the years I’ve seen at least one hundred different definitions of the product role (i.e. product manager/product owner). I’m pretty sure that anyone reading this would have seen at least several. Part of the problem is that there are different operating models that require different responsibilities and... The post A Fresh Definition…”
Teresa Torres announces an expanded partnership with Vistaly to bring AI-assisted discovery tools into its opportunity solution tree platform. The core problem she describes is that many teams conduct customer…
Lenny Rachitsky's year-end roundup collects the most popular posts from his newsletter, grouped by theme such as AI, career, strategy, growth, and execution, plus a few all-time classics. He also reviews his 2025 goals…
Marty Cagan argues that product work has two distinct modes: the project model, focused on output from predefined roadmaps, and the product model, focused on outcomes. As delivery costs have collapsed with AI, the…
Jason Fried argues that the excitement around AI agents comes less from the technology itself and more from the psychological experience they create: delegating a task to someone fully competent. He notes that most…
Colin Matthews explains that ChatGPT apps let third-party tools surface interactive widgets inside conversations, creating a potentially major distribution channel. The post covers how users discover apps contextually…
John Cutler reflects on his early product career, when a single product manager bundled research, analysis, design sketching, requirements writing, release coordination, support, and even coding into one role. He notes…
Julie Zhuo's paid essay argues that an AI transformation cannot be ordered into existence from the top down. It presents a ten-step guide to leading an AI shift in a way that preserves care for people and their sense of…
“If we truly believe that AI is changing how we work, then ICs should get paid more than managers, because an IC can drive more impact than a manager could in the pre-AI system.” — @ElenaVerna
If you use AI for competitor research, steal this rule. Every claim gets a date. Last week Claude answered a simple question about Linear’s competitors using an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. The skill forced the answer to show the dates,
If a customer conversation has ever changed how you explain the product, you’ve already done product marketing. Friday at 10 AM PT I’m taking one B2B product through 16 jobs like that with AI. I’ll run the same work with and without the matching skill and see which version I’d
This is what separates teams that accelerate with AI from those that get stuck. You don't find perfect data lying around. You create it using the deep product intuition you already have. /end Check out the whole episode with @vlaurenlee here:
Marty Cagan argues that the current trend of cutting managers in favor of pure individual-contributor builders is a temporary phase rather than the future. He restates the principle that experts lead experts: effective…