AI has made building easier.
But building the right thing is still hard.
Ten articles every week on what is happening across product, research, design and engineering. Curated by Rory Madden to help teams decide what to build.
Explore the editions ↓The archive
Many organizations believe they have cross-functional teams when they actually have "teams of functions" - groups where each member still reports to separate functional managers, follows distinct processes, and adheres to rigid role boundaries with formal handovers between discip
Read edition ↗Level 1 is task execution. Level 2 is choosing the right solution and trade-offs. Level 3 is deciding what problem is worth solving. Level 4 is setting direction under uncertainty.
Read edition ↗AI has made competent analysis cheap. What it cannot give you is the messy, human truth: what is actually happening, which assumptions are wrong, and what people are not saying out loud.
Read edition ↗Empowered, autonomous teams can design and build better products because they are closer to the customers and can get quicker feedback.
Read edition ↗When anyone can generate a solid PRD, a decent design direction, or a passable analysis in minutes, the edge is no longer how well you produce. It is whether you are working on the right thing, and whether it actually moves an outcome.
Read edition ↗AI will build whatever you ask for, quickly and confidently. That is exactly why it is dangerous. It will not challenge the brief, spot the long-term trade-offs, or warn you when a “reasonable” choice breaks your architecture, your design system, or your product strategy.
Read edition ↗When products fail to deliver expected business value, most organisations respond by tightening control through more detailed business cases, approval layers, and coordinators.
Read edition ↗The old workforce pyramid was built on a simple trade: junior hires did high-volume execution, and in return, they got repetition, proximity, and time to develop judgment. AI is removing the economic need for that base, and with it, the default training path most organisations re
Read edition ↗AI is making it radically easier to produce impressive work, but it is quietly removing the friction that used to build judgment.
Read edition ↗Job titles and years of experience are noisy signals now. A “senior” title can mean execution in one company and strategic judgment in another. A clearer way to understand your actual career stage is to examine the question you are answering most frequently each week.
Read edition ↗The Product Operating Model, which empowers teams to build solutions based on direct customer conversations, should improve product outcomes, but some key risks can derail your efforts.
Read edition ↗Dependencies remove autonomy, which kills accountability. Once you have handoffs, you allow people the wiggle room to throw up their hands and say, "I did my job".
Read edition ↗Brooks' Law showed us that adding people to a late project makes it later due to the exponential increase in communication overhead. But modern organizations face a more complex challenge: managing portfolios of interconnected products with dozens of teams sharing resources, infr
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