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 few weeks. The best case scenario is it becomes the product-leader version of ‘This Week in Tech’ 😂…
More realistically, it just quietly fades into the internet’s long tail. I’m OK with either outcome.
One thing is for sure: I will be writing this myself. ChatGPT and Perplexity and such are plenty busy right now, and this is meant to be a few minutes of real curation — things that genuinely caught my attention, and might matter to other product people.
All that said, here we go.
1/ Elena Verna’s growth lessons behind Lovable’s wild $6.6B valuation
Elena Verna is a true thought leader on all things product growth. She’s also an excellent communicator. It’s no surprise she’s leading growth at Lovable, one of the most AI ‘growth-y’ companies out there today.
If you haven’t used Lovable, it’s a great AI app builder — and, in my opinion, clearly differentiated both as a product and as a brand. They’ve done a lot of things right in a very short amount of time.
In this post, Elena recaps key lessons learnt from her time at Lovable, drawing on insights from her recent appearance on Lenny’s podcast.
“Everyone keeps asking for the secret sauce behind the growth. Sorry to disappoint - there’s no magic new channel. We just do a few things differently, and we’re relentless about them.”
Most conference talks these days are a hard pass. Too many recycled ideas, too much shameless selling, and not enough insight.
That’s why YouTube is so great. You can usually tell within seconds whether a talk is worth your time.
Case in point: This fun gem by Kitze, the founder of Sizzy, at AI Engineer Code Summit. He walks through the past, present, and future of coding with AI — and does so with effortless sense of humor.
Watch it at 1.5x speed if you can keep up. But don’t miss this part:
“Managers have been vibe coding since forever, this is nothing new.”
3/ Shreyas, Claude, and the two lives of a builder
Shreyas Doshi has worked on product teams at Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Stripe.
In this post, he explores — via a chat with Claude — the idea of the ‘two lives’ of a builder. This is something every product leader has experienced; both the gift and the burden of it.
“Product work isn’t just about speed. It’s about 100s of micro-decisions that quietly attach you to what you build, constrain future choices, and determine outcomes before success or failure is visible.”
Bonus: Dwarkesh Patel’s conversation with Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sustskever, of OpenAI fame and infamy, talks about SSI’s (safe and super intelligent) strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and AGI.
“From 2012 to 2020 it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling… But now the scale is so big… So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.”
Ps.
Christmas is my favorite holiday. If you celebrate, Merry Christmas! ✨ If you don’t, maybe give it a try this year. Either way, this season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s can be bittersweet for many. I hope youknow that you matter — far beyond your job and life’s work. This time of year, it’s a great opportunity for all of us to disconnect and show those in our lives that they matter.
Thanks for reading Product State. Excuse the typos. Subscribe for free, because why not.
