More People Who Know Less Can Now Make More
The arrival of AI as a creative partner and co-author means we’re entering an era where the cost of building a product approaches zero. That doesn’t make building irrelevant. It makes it foundational: a necessary but in and of itself insufficient step. The winners will be the ones who pair that speed with thoughtfulness. Who use the time saved by automation not to crank out more features, but to get closer to the user, to test better hypotheses, to sweat the details that AI can’t see.
The Illusion of Mastery
When organizations flatten hierarchies and outsource key decision-making to AI, they create PMs who look like they know what they’re doing but lack the deep, nuanced understanding required for long-term success. AI-driven tools promise to exacerbate this further by making execution easier, reinforcing a cycle where PMs remain stuck in the mechanics of the role rather than engaging in deeper strategic thinking.
Why Goals Fail (And How to Fix Them)
A company sets a goal to “onboard 100 customers by the end of Q2.” On paper, it’s a textbook example of a SMART goal: specific, measurable, and time-bound. But as the quarter progresses, cracks emerge. Teams scramble to hit the target at all costs, sacrificing quality, innovation, and sustainability. Customers are onboarded, but many have a poor experience, disengage quickly, or fail to adopt the platform effectively.
What went wrong? The problem isn’t the ambition, it’s the framing. Rigid, number-driven goals often backfire, creating tunnel vision, short-term thinking, and even unethical behavior. The solution is to pair goals with meaningful constraints: parameters that balance quantity with quality and short-term wins with long-term success.
From Physics to Product: The Importance of First Principles
How many of us have joined a new company and proposed a promising solution to a problem only to have it rejected with “we tried that n years ago and it didn’t work”? Or conversely, had a new executive join your company and repeat “here’s how we did things at my last company” ad nauseum? (I may or may not have been guilty of the latter in the past.) These are telltale signs of a surface level understanding. As Product Managers, and particularly as executives, we must be able to evaluate and convey the validity of ideas from first principles if we hope to maintain success across companies and over time.
Even in this world, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.