PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
meeting in the product #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
In time our use of genAI will balance out with the human touch
Learn what genAI can and can’t do, and how far it can be trusted
LLMs will most likely take over the routine writing that holds organisations together
hello
This week I’ve been worrying about whether the latest shots fired in the ongoing WordPress-WP Engine spat mean I need to start thinking about migrating my blog, and wondering whether former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has heard of the Streisand effect. I’ve also been trying to figure out how to characterise our relationship with generative AI. Angel Delight is what sprang to mind.
I grew up in the 1980s. Although it didn’t seem so at the time, particularly to a kid with a limited grasp of well, anything, that decade seemed to trade off a fair amount of depth and authenticity in favour of cheapness and convenience. Everything natural seemed to be horrifically expensive and immensely time-consuming to make, so we wore velour tracksuits and later nylon shell suits despite the inherent fire risk and almost continuous jolts of static electricity discharge. We thrived on frozen ready meals like Findus Crispy Pancakes and Birds Eye Potato Waffles despite their lack of any nutritional value because they were available, affordable and parents knew kids would eat them.
In a similar vein, Angel Delight was a hugely popular dessert in the UK in the ‘70s and ‘80s because it was cheap, brightly coloured, easy to prepare and strangely addictive. It’s still around today, although I’m certain that the original version relied more on artificial colours, flavours and sugar than its modern incarnation. Like most food and drink from my childhood, Angel Delight was enticing, easy to make but devoid of substance. It looked like food, tasted like food, but barely delivered any of the benefits of food.
Generative AI is our generation’s Angel Delight. It creates stuff that looks and sounds plausible but is ultimately a facsimile of the real thing. Whether it delivers any value depends on your perspective. If you don’t have the luxury of time or money, then the lure of cheap, convenient, plausible-looking solutions to whatever problem you’re trying to solve with genAI is undeniable. It may be a compromise, but it may also be the only practical choice available.
However, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, delegating work to genAI is a tacit trade-off of artificial over natural, superficial over profound. Thought and manual effort may be harder and take longer for some tasks, but assuming you have the capability and luxury of time to carry out the task, the results will have greater substance.
A lot of the commentary on genAI boils down to a binary choice between being all-in or a complete refusenik. This is a bit like asserting that pop music in the ‘80s was either a golden age or dead zone. For every Eurythmics and Madonna there was a Jive Bunny and a Birdie Song. GenAI is here to stay, whether we like it or not. I just don’t think it will become the only option, or even the default option.
Despite our myriad poor choices in the 1980s, we broadly managed to make it through*. When circumstances permitted us, we fell back in love with cooking real food again, even if we still occasionally reach for a frozen ready meal. Just so, I’m confident we will rediscover the value of human thought and creativity, and will occasionally reach for genAI when we don’t have the luxury of time or simply can’t be bothered. There’s space for both.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
* In retrospect, more by blind luck than design
what to think about this week
Hype-y New Year — How to cut through the AI noise as a product manager
Ever since I started back on LinkedIn after Christmas, the AI hype has been strong. I don’t know if it’s because the algorithm is showing me different stuff, or because people are talking about it more, but it’s getting exhausting.
GenAI is going to kill everything off. Or not.
[Jason Knight / One Knight In Product]
The management singularity
In 1965 — a little under 60 years ago — Herbert Simon assembled a few essays about AI into a little book, The Shape of Automation for Men and Management. It has three extremely useful lessons.
The first is how easy it is for people to get the future wrong, even when they are ridiculously brilliant. Simon was convinced that computers — 1960s computers! — could already “read, think, learn, create,” and that they would be able to do this at human level or better in just a few years. In his words: “duplicating the problem-solving and information-handling capabilities of the brain is not far off; it would be surprising if it were not accomplished in the next decade.” Obviously, that didn’t happen.
The genAI revolution will be more boring than we think
[Henry Farrell / Programmable Mutter]
recent posts
What freelance product management is really like with Jock Busuttil
Off the back of his recent article for Mind The Product, Liam Smith interviewed me about my experiences in freelance product management.
We cover topics including:
» Should you hire freelancers in your product team?
» How to be successful as an external hire
+ more :-)
If this doesn’t put you off, nothing will
[I Manage Products]
Is coding in the open right for your organisation?
One of the design principles that underpinned the digital renaissance in UK government was — and still is — ‘Make things open: it makes things better’.
For this article, I’ve focused specifically on the ‘coding in the open’ part. I’ll cover how it benefits public sector organisations, and how — in the right circumstances — it can yield a strategic advantage to commercial organisations also.
Increased scrutiny keeps us all a bit more honest
[I Manage Products]
DevRel and Product Management with Jock Busuttil on the Voxgig podcast
I’m chatting with Voxgig’s Richard Rodger about common challenges in product management and DevRel:
» Why learning by soundbite gives a superficial understanding of the craft
» Why we’re finding it hard to communicate value to our bosses
+ more :-)
Other professions find ‘people stuff’ hard as well
[I Manage Products]
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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from cronchy frozen grass.