Here are nine things across AI, product and company-building that got my attention this month. Plus, my perspective on what they actually mean for product leaders and people who want to become one.

We’ll start with AI-native operating models, then get into siloed AI workflows, what AI should and shouldn’t change about product management, the economics of great AI companies, infinite software and finite attention, the Rule of 40, faster pricing decisions… and some slop grenades.

Here we go.

1/ AI-native is becoming an operating model.

OpenAI published an interesting look at how companies like Clay, Basis, and Exa Labs are using AI internally. The stat that got my attention: Companies in the top 10% of enterprise AI usage now generate 8.3x more output tokens per active user than typical companies, up from 2.6x in January.

The more interesting part is what they’re doing with it. These companies are connecting agents to company context and tools, and putting them to work across onboarding, account management, developer integrations, and other real workflows.

The term “AI-native” is getting watered down by overuse, but in practical terms it comes down to what the product does AND how the company operates. From researching, designing, and shipping products to replacing SaaS tools, visualizing data, and automating internal workflows… both the breadth & depth of AI usage are rising quickly.

The real difference won’t be who uses the most AI. For a product leader, more AI tokens, credits, or outputs should be seen as little more than a vanity metric. What matters is whether the company, and its customers, are actually getting meaningfully better outcomes from them.

The companies that stand out won’t stop at chat boxes and AI-assisted workflows. They’ll change how the work gets done, and let automation take on more of the repetitive and execution-heavy parts.

Because here’s the thing: More companies are cancelling software and they’re building internally. And their customers are increasingly capable of doing the very same. Tokenmaxxing alone won’t solve that.

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Mike Belsito is Head of Product Evangelism at Pendo and Mind the Product. He’s the author of the upcoming book ‘The Future Proof Product Manager.’ He’s also Co-Founder of Product Collective, organizer of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, now known as MTP Chicago.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: As AI automates more of the mechanics of product management, what should PMs focus on above everything else?

MB: Today, AI can automate so much of the mechanics of product work away… things like writing specs, drafting PRDs, summarizing user interviews, and keeping stakeholders informed. But those things weren’t really the hard part of the job. They just ate so many hours, so it often felt that way.

The things that can’t be automated away (or at least, shouldn’t!) are timeless core characteristics like judgement, product sense, taste, and curiosity. These skills have always been important, but now they’re more important than ever. AI can give you ten ways to solve something. But it can't see the look on your customer’s face when you talk about a specific problem during a discovery meeting to know that next quarter’s roadmap needs to be reprioritized.

Execution used to be the bottleneck, so a PM who could get things built and shipped stood out. But things have changed so fast and we can now build faster than ever… which is great! But it also means we can move in the wrong direction faster than ever.

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Barry O’Reilly is the the best-selling author of Artificial Organizations, Unlearn, and Lean Enterprise. He’s the Co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Nobody Studios, Founder of Outlier Venture Partners, and Founder of ExecCamp.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: As AI systems get better at generating answers, what does good human judgment look like? And where …

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Here’s what got my attention this month — a short list of things I read and watched that stood out to me as a product leader, plus my 2 cents.

Here we go.

1/ AI prototype workflows, pitfalls and guardrails

One of the first things I noticed this month was a growing number of tech teams publishing how they actually operate. One good example: Uber published …

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Nir Eyal is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and New York Times best-selling author of ‘Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough,’ ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,’ and ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.’
Website / LinkedIn

EC: In a world shaped by AI, abundanc…

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Here’s what got my attention this month — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

This month’s main takeaway: The boundaries are blurring. Between PM & builder. Between software and labor. Between venture appetite and market adoption.

If you work in product, this doesn’t feel temporary. It feels like a new operating environment taking shape.

1/ AI-Native PM on the AI Exponential

One of the more interesting things I saw this month came from Cat Wu, Head of Product for Claude Code at Anthropic: A thoughtful look at how PM teams are adapting their workflows and roadmaps in the face of rapidly evolving LLMs.

There were two ideas in particular that stuck with me.

The first was a familiar-looking Venn diagram that, on the surface, could be easy to dismiss as just another version of the classic product management model. I think that would be a mistake.

What it actually reflects is the real thing happening inside product teams right now: The lines are blurring very quickly.

Tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, v0, Lovable, and Replit are making it easier for more people to move across the product dev lifecycle. Code is more accessible. Prototyping is faster. Distribution is being reshaped from multiple angles. Tiny teams can do the work that once required much bigger ones.

That doesn’t mean product management disappears, but it is changing. It’s almost shapeshifting.

“The new product management rhythm is rapid experimentation, consistent shipping, and doubling down on what works.”

— Cat Wu, Anthropic

We now have solo founders building real SaaS businesses. We have teams compressing in size while accelerating and expanding in output. We have people spending more time learning agentic tools — and then producing much more, faster.

The second idea was Cat’s framing around ‘side quests.’

“A side quest is a short self-directed experiment you run outside your official roadmap—an afternoon spent prototyping an idea, testing a capability you assumed was out of reach, or just seeing what happens when you push the model harder than you expect to.”

At first glance, that might sound like a modern rebrand of Google’s infamous ‘20% time.’ But what got my attention wasn’t the existence of side projects. It was the implication that, in the right environment, they may matter more than a rigid long-range roadmap.

In fast-moving environments, a side quest is not a distraction. It’s not a once-a-year hackathon either. It can be a discovery engine.

And done well — which requires the right team, and the right culture — that kind of aligned autonomy may be part of the recipe for continuously shipping actual value. It also helps explain how products or features that initially look peripheral can become strategically important faster than anyone expected.

In some ways, the PM role is changing as fast as the tools. New learning curves are forming in real time.

In other ways, the role has not changed at all.

Judgment. Taste. Decision-making. Influence. Vision. Strategy. Insight. Adaptability. Impact.
That mix is still the core of product management.

The tools are changing. The focus is changing. The lines are blurring.
But the need for people who can see clearly and bet well is not.

As Ben Horowitz put it… “Your only job is right product, right time.”

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

TL;DR What you choose to build — and how small you keep the right team doing it — may matter more than ever.

1/ What to Vibe Code (and What Not To)

“The most important question in tech right now: what should you vibe code?
Vibe code your product. Buy everything else.”

— Elias Torres

Elias Torres (Drift Co-founder) weighed in on build vs. buy in the age of AI. If you can spin up a Calendly clone in a weekend, should you?

His answer: Only if scheduling is your product.

You can vibe code a URL shortener, a lightweight CRM, an Asana-style goals tool. But you pay somewhere — not always in dollars, often in mindshare. In a world where everyone is AI-assisted, prioritization compounds.

In response to this tweet by Naval ^, Saeed Khan wrote a post reminding us what PMs need to be strong at.

“Vibe coding is not a superpower… There are three ‘superpowers’ that Product Managers (and Product Leaders) should focus on. Discovery and Market Research. Clear and Intentional Strategy. Meaningful Differentiation.”

— Saeed Khan

I think his point is that AI lowers the cost of building, but it may not lower the cost of being wrong.

My take: Anyone vibe coding is doing discovery and strategy — implicitly or explicitly. Differentiation... not so much. We could all use some superpowers in that area.

By the way, vibe coding also will have huge implications on product design. In a recent conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen (who leads design at Claude / Anthropic) shared how design is changing. She also pointed out how humans will continue to make key decisions (and be accountable for them).

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a list of interesting things I read and watched, as a product leader.

1/ The Power of Saying No in an AI Gold Rush

“What if the best product decision is saying no to what everyone else is building?”

In an episode of Supra Insider, Marc Baselga and Ben Erez sat down with Alexander Danilowicz, founder and CEO of Mag…

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

This week had a clear theme: power is shifting between roles, tools, and capital.

1/ Debates over the future of the CPO role

With the rise of AI, a question that may have felt fringe a year or two ago is now being d…

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

1/ The Adolescence of Technology

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and former research leader at Open AI and Google Brain, shared an essay that reads less like societal speculation and more like a warning label.

“Humani…

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Ed Biden is the Founder of Hustle Badger. He was formerly CPTO at FYLD, CPO at YunoYuno, SVP of Product at Jobandtalent, CPO at FutureLearn, Director of Product at Depop, Director of Product at Rocket Internet SE, Product Lead at Wooga, and PM at Kobojo.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: How can product leaders get good at AI building?

EB: Even in the last few weeks …

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short, curated list of things I read and listened to that felt genuinely worth pausing on, as a product leader.

1/ Welcome to the Era of Agent-Led Growth ⚡️

On TBPN, John Coogan and Jordi Hays spoke with Sequoia Partner Sonya Huang, who argues that after moving from sales-led growth to product-led growth, we’re n…

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader. The common thread this week is that the fundamentals are critical, especially now.

1/ SaaS valuations are officially back on Earth 🌍

The latest SaaS Valuation Multiples (2015–2025) report from Aventis Advisors confi…

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Here’s what got my attention this first week of the new year — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

1/ The next big things in 2026, curated by NBT

This week’s ‘next big thing’ Nikhil Basu Trivedi essay reminded me how much the AI boom is shifting from raw capability to product outcomes. The pi…

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On the final week of 2025, what got my attention as a product leader were a few videos and posts that seemed to orbit around the same underlying tension — coming from very different angles.

What kind of tension? Speed vs. depth. Tools vs. craft. Experimentation vs. commitment.

Let’s get into it.

1/ Webflow’s CPO on how she AIs

On the most recent episode …

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Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.

1/ State of Consumer AI 2025: Hits, Misses, and What’s Next

This post by Olivia Moore and Justine Moore at Andreessen Horowitz was a nice read on consumer AI. Instead of just chasing after hype cycles and the capabi…

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I’m starting a new series here on Product State.

It’s nicknamed ‘WGMaTW’ — short for ‘What got my attention this week.’ It’s inspired by Chamath’s ‘What I read this week,’ but with a very specific filter: What’s actually worth a product leader’s attention right now.

This is a bit of a test. We’ll see how y’all respond, and how I feel about it after a fe…

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Stephanie Leue is the CPO at Ringier Medien Schweiz. She was formerly CPO at Doodle, Head of Product Ops at Eurospace AG, Director of Product & Design at Contentful, Co-Founder at 3Weine, Senior PM at PayPal, and Global Manager of Innovation at Spreadshirt.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: What separates a roadmap that gets buy-in from one that falls flat?

SL: It…

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Tami Reiss is CEO of Leader Within, Executive Coach at Women in Product, and author of ‘What do Product Managers Do?’ Formerly, she was CPO in Residence at Insight Partners, Guest Lecturer at Northwestern University, and Sr Product Consultant at Pivotal Labs.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: What separates PMs who rise quickly from those who stall?

TR: Product Maan…

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Malte Scholtz is the Co-founder of airfocus, and Head of Product at airfocus by Lucid. He’s also the co-founder of welevel. Previously, he was a Sr Product Manager at ePages and a Research Assistant at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: Why do product leaders struggle with misalignment, and how can they fix that?

MS: Misalignmen…

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