PRODUCTHEAD: Speed means nothing without expert judgement

coke products #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Traditional SaaS companies will struggle if they believe they’ll control their UI for ever

Some org leaders think that AI can replace their “glue people”

The glue person’s work is often invisible because they were good at it

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hello

When people saw the iPhone for the first time*, one of the many things that blew their tiny minds was that the whole face of the device was a touchscreen UI that adapted to whatever task you happened to be performing. (It is entirely conceivable that some of you reading this have no experience of a world in which this was not the case.) This actual paradigm shift redefined how we interact with physical devices.

In one of my chats this week, the lovely person I was speaking to posed the question: what if generative and agentic AI has made interaction with any technology malleable? What if the human-machine interface becomes whatever you need it to be in that moment to achieve your desired outcome?

No more unwieldy tapping around, form-filling and clicking submit, you just describe what your desired outcome is, AI does stuff, and you get the intended result. In that ‘AI does stuff’ step, entire software markets will emerge or be rendered obsolete.

For you this week #

Last week’s PRODUCTHEAD made the point that generative AI effectively levels the playing field when it comes to speed to market. This week’s edition provides a counterpoint: speed is irrelevant (if not actively damaging) unless expert judgement plays a part.

I’d like to share two takes on this with you. In Leah Tharin’s astute article, her main point is that “AI amplifies what you already know. It doesn’t replace knowing. … The people who are going to be okay are not the ones who used AI to do a different job [to their area of expertise]. They’re the ones who used it to become significantly better at the job they already had.”

In other words, people who are already using AI daily are more able to focus on what it was they were always trying to achieve. Before AI, they had to jump through the hoops the software tooling forced them to. If SaaS software companies want to survive, they probably need to be asking how they will help users achieve what they’re trying to do within the user’s existing AI workflow, not by pulling them out to a separate UI.

John Cutler’s expansive piece this week is equally excellent. Again, riffing on the theme of ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’, he highlights that there’s more to consider than simply letting AI do all the time-consuming tasks we typically struggle to get around to.

He argues that organisation leaders are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, the visible outputs and artefacts people create, and assume that is all there is. Thus, they deploy genAI to churn out similar artefacts and fire the people who used to create them. What they’re not seeing is all the invisible work, judgement and social navigation that went on behind the scenes to allow the valuable work to happen, all of which made the resulting artefact useful in the first place. In other words, AI’s outputs are superficial and performative if there is no human expertise behind them.

Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

* <iPhone in product management article klaxon>

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what to think about this week

Why SaaS got priced out

HubSpot is up 141%. The market doesn’t care.

Classical B2B SaaS is not doing that well anymore. Not because the businesses are broken, but because the market has already decided the future isn’t there.

The services that will win won’t necessarily have traditional interfaces

[Leah Tharin / Leah’s ProducTea]

Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI

The hardest part of figuring out how to use AI at work is that our heuristics are right often enough to feel reliable, and wrong often enough to cause real damage.

We develop mental models for where AI fits. Those models work in some contexts. Then we carry them into contexts where they don’t work, and because the logic sounds the same, we don’t notice the difference until it’s too late.

Think about what “glue people” are actually doing in your org

[John Cutler / The Beautiful Mess]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from overly complex calendar software.