Product Management

(33)
The Labels Came Off the Pyramid

The Labels Came Off the Pyramid

A new paper rebuilds the DIKW pyramid for medicine and shows where AI actually breaks. Strong on the arrows nobody worried about, weak on the one the structure depends on. The pyramid always assumed you could tell which layer you were standing on. That assumption is gone.

Your Engineers Are Writing the Policy Now

Your Engineers Are Writing the Policy Now

Engineering changed its unit of work to intent, policy, and boundaries. Product and design mostly still ship user stories and screens. So the policy gets written by the last person to touch the ticket, in a prompt, at midnight. The control plane has inputs, and nobody upstream owns them.

The Sixth Archetype Anthropic Forgot

The Sixth Archetype Anthropic Forgot

Anthropic mapped product work into five archetypes: Prototyper, Builder, Sweeper, Grower, Maintainer. All five stop the moment the thing ships. But an agent keeps deciding after you let go of it, and there is a sixth archetype no one drew: the one who watches it decide.

A Skill Is a Template, Not a Macro

A Skill Is a Template, Not a Macro

Six people sent me their skills this week. The feed is full of them. But everyone is treating a skill like a macro, a way to go faster. It isn't. A skill is a template, and templates were never about speed. They were about everyone doing the work the same way. That changes who should build them.

The Skills Are Not the Job

The Skills Are Not the Job

Every PM team I know is busy automating the wrong things. Skills, MCP servers, vibe coding prototypes. The demos are impressive. But if AI is handling your roadmap research, your status updates, and your PRD drafts, what are you doing with the time you got back?

Use AI Everywhere, Then Use It Carefully

Use AI Everywhere, Then Use It Carefully

You cannot build judgment about a probabilistic system by reading about it. You build it by living with one, daily, until its behavior stops surprising you. Then you fix the habit that makes it dangerous: it agrees with you too fast. The browser agent and the roadmap agent are the same system.

The Brief Is Now Two Documents

The Brief Is Now Two Documents

The PRD was built for software that does what it's told. An agent exercises judgment, and the moment it crosses from suggestion to decision, the old brief breaks. It splits in two: one document to decide, one to build. The new AI tools can write the second. The first is still yours.

What I Did With Two LLMs and a Catalog: An Active-Learning Pattern

What I Did With Two LLMs and a Catalog: An Active-Learning Pattern

I had undiagnosed ADHD for most of my life. Lecture halls were the wrong delivery mechanism for me. So I went to the library, ran my own research, built my own curriculum. Six months ago, the constraint of scale disappeared. The library is still the right model. The library is just bigger now.

The Stack Is Green. The Agent Is Wrong.

The Stack Is Green. The Agent Is Wrong.

Your dashboards are green. Your agent approved 17 wrong purchase orders overnight. Traditional O&M answers "is it running?" Agentic O&M must answer "is it behaving correctly?" These are different questions. They require different instruments.

The Agent Worked, Limitless and Unguarded

The Agent Worked, Limitless and Unguarded

Your agent passed every security check. The tools your team used were built for a different system. The frameworks that cover agentic AI are months old, the enterprise adoption cycle is 12 to 18 months long, and the models getting better at finding your gaps ship faster than your procurement cycle.