PRODUCTHEAD: Augmenting your thinking without delegating it

product rubber #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

---

tl;dr

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

---

hello

Last week was a good one: I had a chance to fanboi Martin Eriksson and Barry O’Reilly at their joint book launch event on Wednesday, while also meeting with a lovely crowd of people I’ve not seen in ages. Barry’s new book is Artificial Organizations; Martin’s is The Decision Stack.

I was also really pleased to finally finish and publish a long-read article on our apparent addiction to genAI, why it can trigger similar compulsive behaviour as gambling, and why – despite all that – we’re going to be okay. I think I started work on it in October last year, then became stuck and sulked at it for a while. Some readers have been kind enough to get in touch to tell me that it resonated for them, and one to say I was being overly harsh to tech bros in the introduction. Do have a read and judge for yourself when you have the chance.

For you this week #

In my recent article, I touched on why it can be more tempting for some than others to outsource their critical thinking to generative AI. If you’d like to delve deeper, Caroline Clark has written a two-part series about the psychology of strategic thinking and decision making, and her advice on how to use genAI to augment both more safely.

For those of you who care as I do about the UK government design principle, ‘Make things open: it makes things better’, Liam Proven highlights the negative response to the UK’s National Health Service’s plan to close its public code repositories. His article also links to the open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open, and to a petition to migrate the UK Civil Service to open source software, to which UK readers may also wish to add their names.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

---

---

what to think about this week

Use it or lose it: your brain in the age of AI / Are you still making your own decisions?

At CPO Connect last week, 70+ senior product leaders gathered at AKQA to do what product leaders do best: identify problems and solve them. I co-facilitated two breakout sessions with my friend James, exploring which cognitive skills are most at risk from over-reliance on AI. Across both groups — somewhere between 25 and 30 people in total — the same skills kept coming up: strategic thinking and decision making. The concern, though, was almost entirely directed at someone else.

Part 1: How to build and protect your strategic thinking

Part 2: The science of decision making and how to stop AI doing it all for you

[Caroline Clark / Liftoff with Caroline]

NHS code clampdown draws open source backlash

Negative reactions are mounting against the UK National Health Service’s plan to back away from open source – and you can add your voice.

Make things open: it makes things better

[Liam Proven / The Register]

---

---

recent posts

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?

Our brains love a shortcut

[I Manage Products]

Canary in the mine: AAA game developers are unionising

Product management has had its own fair share of problems over the last few years. Nevertheless, there are early warning signs from AAA game studios that there may be another storm brewing in tech for us to weather.

Union-busting just isn’t a good look

[I Manage Products]

Are developers vibe coding themselves out of a job?

And is the increasing reliance by junior developers on AI coding assistants storing up a generational skills shortage for the future – ‘professional debt’, if you will?

So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me

[I Manage Products]

PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from conceding that being sociable is okay sometimes.