PRODUCTHEAD: Moats and bridges
» When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
» Product, market, model and channel must all fit together to be successful
Tag: generative AI
PRODUCTHEAD: AI usage and the ‘bottleneck’
» In complex human systems the constraint is often policy, mindset, or coordination, not a single bottleneck
» Being the “human in the loop” means having genuine authority, time to think, and understanding the bigger picture well enough to question the system
PRODUCTHEAD: What AI really gives you is time back for the hard things
» AI frees you up for thinking, learning and judgement
» IKEA found €1.3B using AI as a growth lever, not a cost lever
» AI should not be a further excuse to avoid human collaboration
PRODUCTHEAD: The anatomy of a ‘no’
» Avoid ambiguity by speaking plainly
» Bring the data, not the verdict
» Articulate the cost and opportunity cost
» A ‘yes’ is only worth something if a ‘no’ is worth something
PRODUCTHEAD: Augmenting your thinking without delegating it
» Exclusive free giveaways for PRODUCTHEAD subscribers in May
» Use genAI to generate possibilities and identify blindspots in your thinking without incurring cognitive debt
» Backlash against the UK’s NHS closing public code repositories
Photo by Sanket Mishra on Pexels.com
We’re all addicted to AI, but it’s going to be okay
We seem to stuck in a contradiction in which we worry about AI’s effect on our critical thinking, while finding it equally hard to resist using. Why is that?
PRODUCTHEAD: Content design for humans and AI agents
» In a self-service world, good content design helps users do what they’re trying to do
» A content crit is a constructive, supportive peer review technique
» Poor content design diminishes the value of your product or service to users
PRODUCTHEAD: How work actually gets done
» Visible and invisible process both contribute to how work actually gets done
» Orgs should not rely on individual heroic efforts in place of designed-in capacity
» Accelerating the build reintroduces a bottleneck and results in wasteful overproduction
» Context comes from not just sharing information but engaging with it
PRODUCTHEAD: Reflections on the art and science of product management
» With appropriate context, those closest to the problem should make the product decisions
» Be outcome-focused and evidence-based regardless of what kind of product or service you work on
» Be careful not to automatically balance out a conflicting behaviour in others (such as a founder’s bias)
» “The obstacle is the way” – every setback is an opportunity to improve our condition
PRODUCTHEAD: The value of the human in the loop
» Semantic ablation is when language outliers and quirks are averaged away by genAI
» GenAI exposes the thresholds and grey areas in your service’s decision-making
» Being able to build fast necessitates more human selectivity, not less
