WGMaTW: Product signals for 2026, emotional JTBDs, and the myth of product utopia
What Got My Attention This Week, as a product leader
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 piece aggregates predictions from operators and investors at the frontier of AI innovation — spanning autonomous agents that own workflows to ‘taste graphs’ reshaping personalization, and even AI companions that clearly ‘remember you’ rather than just respond to prompts.
2026 isn’t simply about more powerful models. It’s about meaningful product leverage, where memory, proactivity, and business impact become the basis for real adoption and defensibility.
“The next big thing in 2026 will be an escalation in the battle between Systems of Record companies and AI agent companies.”
— Gokul Rajaram, Founding Partner at Marathon Management
“The next big thing in 2026 will be autonomous computing; AI that doesn’t just respond but operates.”
— John Milinovich, Head of Product, GenAI at Canva
2/ Grant Lee: The emotional job-to-be-done is the product
Grant Lee told a story every product leader should re-read once a quarter: An early customer call where the ‘why’ wasn’t functional at all… It was identity. The user loved Notion because it ‘makes me feel smarter,’ and that reframed the whole product lens for Gamma: Not ‘what does it do,’ but ‘who does it help me become?’
This is one of those deceptively simple insights that upgrades how you run discovery. If you’re only capturing tasks and pain points, you’ll miss the part that creates obsession and word-of-mouth: The self-image the product reinforces.
“Products don’t just do things for people. They make people feel a certain way about themselves.”
— Grant Lee, CEO at Gamma
3/ Stephanie Leue: ‘Physics of the business’
Stephanie Leue lays out a helpful and clarifying framing many product leaders need to hear: When the underlying business is sales-led, no amount of PM craft can override the operating model. If the company is fundamentally sales-led in certain ways, PM craft alone can’t will you into ‘product utopia.’ She maps business models into zones where the ‘textbook product model’ either survives or gets crushed by contractual obligations and survival-driven custom work.
The takeaway isn’t ‘sales-led bad.’
It’s this: Be honest about which game you’re in.
If you’re in a feature-factory dynamic, pretending you’re in a retention-led, outcome-driven world creates frustration for literally everyone, especially PMs who are operating under different laws of motion.
“You can’t ‘mindset’ your way out of a Sales-Led business model.”
— Stephanie Leue, CPO, Ringier
Bonus: Gagan Biyani on growth ‘Coming back’ in the AI era
On this LinkedIn post, Gagan’s point is basically that Growth didn’t disappear — it collapsed into product, and a lot of it devolved into paid marketing. But AI re-opens the playground: Faster shipping, cheaper experimentation, and new surfaces (e.g. AEO, app-store-like distribution, etc.) create room for the original spirit of growth again: Weird loops, channel invention, and systems-level creativity.
The bottleneck is no longer ‘can we ship?’ — it’s ‘Do we have taste + a thesis for what’s worth testing?’
“Now in 2026, I believe growth hacking will make a strong comeback… There are tons of fresh opportunities for growth marketers to play with and innovate on. The intersection of data, product, and marketing is going to have a rebirth.
— Gagan Biyani, CEO and Co-Founder at Maven
