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I build products daily, and write down how it goes

How I actually work with AI, how far one person gets, and which walls I hit first. Written so you can follow along.

What the PM job turned into

From relaying and documenting to judging, describing and verifying — my own role being rewritten.

12 posts →

How far one person gets

From one sentence to a running prototype, from a complaint in the comments to free software that shipped.

14 posts →

How I read these companies

Big tech, models, org design, monetization — read as a product manager, not as news.

48 posts →

Ray Kroc: Making 'Consistency' the Product—How a 52-Year-Old Milkshake-Mixer Salesman Built the 40,000-Store McDonald's Machine

Ranked #37 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Ray Kroc (OVR 89.35: Business 96, Scale 93, Vision 90, Originality 88, Insight 85, Taste 80). At age 52, riddled with diabetes and arthritis, the struggling Multimixer salesman drove to San Bernardino to see why one tiny burger stand needed eight five-spindle mixers—and went on to turn a 3.5-ounce patty, a 985-page operations manual, and a real-estate flywheel into the world's most replicated physical product.

100 Product Managers Ray Kroc McDonalds Franchising Standardization Business Model

2026-10-23

The Pill: How the Only Medicine That Needs No Name Redrew the Curve of Women in Universities and the Workforce

Ranked #29 in '100 Products That Changed the World': The Pill / Enovid (OVR 89.35: Impact 97, Originality 95, Durability 92, Scale 87, Experience 82, Business 82). Approved by the FDA on May 9, 1960, and bankrolled almost entirely by $2 million in personal checks from MIT biology alumna Katharine McCormick, a tiny tablet made human childbearing schedulable—and directly triggered the late-20th-century surge of women into law, medicine, and executive careers.

100 Great Products The Pill Enovid Product History UX Design Healthcare

2026-10-22

Gunpei Yokoi: 'Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology'—How a Factory Repairman Built the Game Boy and Beat Every High-Spec Rival

Ranked #36 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Gunpei Yokoi (OVR 89.35: Taste 93, Originality 92, Vision 90, Insight 90, Scale 87, Business 85). Hired to maintain playing-card machines at Nintendo, he was spotted building a spring-loaded toy during work hours, went on to invent the cross D-Pad and the 118.69M-selling Game Boy, and proved that cheap, mature parts reimagined for human joy will always crush bleeding-edge specs.

100 Product Managers Gunpei Yokoi Nintendo Game Boy D-Pad Product Philosophy

2026-10-22

Taobao: Free Storefronts, IM Haggling, and Escrow—How a SARS Quarantine Startup Flipped eBay's 72% China Monopoly in 24 Months

Ranked #28 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Taobao (OVR 89.35: Impact 93, Business 92, Scale 91, Durability 91, Originality 85, Experience 85). Built in 30 days by seven engineers quarantined inside a Hangzhou apartment during the 2003 SARS outbreak, Taobao dismantled eBay's 72.4% Chinese market share with three localization masterstrokes: zero listing fees, live instant-messaging bargaining (AliWangwang), and Alipay escrow trust.

100 Great Products Taobao Alibaba Jack Ma E-Commerce Product History

2026-10-21

Satoru Iwata: 'President on My Card, Coder in My Head, Gamer at Heart'—How Nintendo's Programmer-CEO Put Grandma and Grandson on the Same Console

Ranked #35 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Satoru Iwata (OVR 89.65: Insight 93, Taste 92, Vision 90, Originality 89, Scale 88, Business 86). The first non-Yamauchi president in Nintendo's 113-year history personally rewrote code to save EarthBound and Pokémon Gold/Silver, defied the polygon wars to sell 255M NDS and Wii consoles, and cut his own salary by 50% rather than lay off a single engineer.

100 Product Managers Satoru Iwata Nintendo Wii NDS Switch

2026-10-21

Super Mario Bros.: How a 40-Kilobyte Cartridge Taught Humanity to Play in 30 Seconds Without a Single Word of Text

Ranked #27 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Super Mario Bros. (OVR 90.00: Impact 95, Experience 95, Originality 92, Scale 87, Durability 87, Business 85). After the 1983 Atari crash left North American gaming in ruins, Shigeru Miyamoto packed eight worlds, momentum physics, and World 1-1's legendary zero-text onboarding into just 40KB of memory—rescuing an entire industry.

100 Products Super Mario Bros.Shigeru Miyamoto Nintendo UX Design

2026-10-19

Duan Yongping: How China's Most Elusive Product Godfather Built Subor, BBK, OPPO, and vivo—and Mentored Pinduoduo's Founder—by 'Daring to Be Late'

Ranked #34 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Duan Yongping (OVR 90.15: Business 95, Insight 93, Vision 92, Originality 87, Taste 86, Scale 86). In an industry obsessed with first-mover speed, he turned 'Benfen' (integrity), a 'Stop Doing List,' and deliberate second-mover execution into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar hardware and e-commerce dynasty.

100 Product Managers Duan Yongping BBK OPPO vivo Pinduoduo

2026-10-19

Aspirin: How an 1899 Fever Pill Scored 99 in Durability by Pulling Off the Greatest Second-Act Pivot in Product History

Ranked #26 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Aspirin (OVR 90.10: Durability 99, Scale 96, Originality 90, Impact 90, Experience 82, Business 82). Synthesized at Bayer in 1897—just eleven days before the same chemist synthesized Heroin—Aspirin lost its patents in WWI and was outflanked by Tylenol and Ibuprofen, only to reinvent itself 70 years later as the daily 81mg tablet that prevents heart attacks.

100 Products Aspirin Bayer Medicine Product Strategy

2026-10-18

Jony Ive: How the God of Industrial Design Built the iPhone, Turning Aluminum into Strategy—and Why Unchecked Minimalism Nearly Broke the Mac

Ranked #33 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Jony Ive (OVR 90.25: Taste 99, Scale 92, Originality 92, Vision 90, Insight 88, Business 82). Steve Jobs's 'spiritual partner' rescued Apple with translucent plastic, weaponized CNC aluminum as a supply-chain moat, and now leads OpenAI's $6.5B hardware bet.

100 Product Managers Jony Ive Apple Industrial Design OpenAI

2026-10-18

Microsoft Excel: How a 40-Year-Old Grid Turned One Billion Office Workers into Programmers—and Outlived Every SaaS Built to Kill It

Ranked #25 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Microsoft Excel (OVR 90.05: Durability 97, Scale 96, Impact 93, Business 92, Experience 85, Originality 80). VisiCalc invented the digital spreadsheet and Lotus 1-2-3 ruled DOS, but Excel made the green grid the mother tongue of global capitalism.

100 Products Microsoft Excel Microsoft Productivity Software SaaS

2026-10-17

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #32: Ken Kutaragi

The 'Father of the PlayStation' and former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. In 1988, fascinated by his daughter's Famicom, he secretly designed the legendary SPC700 audio chip for Sony's rival Nintendo; after Nintendo humiliated Sony at the 1991 Chicago CES by tearing up their CD-ROM partnership on stage, Kutaragi defied Sony's aristocratic anti-toy executives ('Do we just stand down?!'), bet everything on real-time 3D polygons and $1 CD-ROMs, and built the 500-million-unit PlayStation empire. Ranked #32 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.30 (displayed as 90) — vision 94, originality 93, scale 90, taste 88, business 88, insight 86.

Product Managers Ken Kutaragi Sony PlayStation PS2 Nintendo Gaming History

2026-10-17

100 Products That Changed the World · #24: Honda Super Cub

Born in Tokyo in 1958, with over 110 million units built — surpassing the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Toyota Corolla to become the most-produced motor vehicle in human history. Engineered around a legendary product brief ('A soba noodle delivery boy must be able to ride it one-handed while balancing a tray of bowls, and a woman in a skirt must be able to step through with dignity'), Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa invented the automatic centrifugal clutch, the step-through frame, and the plastic leg shield — turning a biker's toy into Asia's everyday legs. Ranked #24 among the 100 products that changed the world, with an overall score of 91.65 (displayed as 92) — durability 97, scale 95, experience 92, business 90, originality 88, impact 88.

Great Products Honda Super Cub Soichiro Honda Motorcycles Industrial Design Manufacturing Tech History

2026-10-16

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #31: Marc Andreessen

Co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). In 1993, at age 22, he added the `<img>` tag to HTML in an Illinois university basement and gave the text-only internet a graphical face; his 1995 Netscape IPO ignited the dot-com era and left behind JavaScript, SSL (HTTPS), Cookies, and open-source Mozilla; in 2011 he penned the Silicon Valley manifesto 'Why Software Is Eating the World.' Ranked #31 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.30 (displayed as 90) — originality 96, vision 95, scale 92, insight 85, business 85, taste 82.

Product Managers Marc Andreessen Netscape Mosaic Web Browser a16z Silicon Valley

2026-10-16

100 Products That Changed the World · #23: The Safety Elevator

At the 1854 New York Crystal Palace exposition, 42-year-old mechanic Elisha Graves Otis stood high on an open hoisting platform and ordered an assistant with an axe to sever the only rope holding him up. The platform dropped a few inches and locked solid into iron ratchets. Raising his top hat, he declared: 'All safe, gentlemen, all safe!' Before that moment, human buildings were capped at five stories and top floors were cheap garrets for the poor; after it, cities grew vertically into the clouds, giving birth to the penthouse and the modern skyscraper. Ranked #23 among the 100 products that changed the world, with an overall score of 91.70 (displayed as 92) — durability 97, originality 95, impact 95, scale 92, experience 85, business 85.

Great Products Safety Elevator Elisha Otis Skyscrapers Urbanization Industrial Design Tech History

2026-10-15

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #30: Demis Hassabis

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and product architect behind AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Gemini. A chess master at age 13 and co-creator of the multi-million-selling game Theme Park at 16, he founded DeepMind in 2010 on a two-step roadmap — Step 1 Solve intelligence, Step 2 Use it to solve everything else. He shocked humanity with AlphaGo's Move 37 and transformed biology by folding all 200 million known proteins. Ranked #30 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.55 (displayed as 91) — vision 97, originality 96, scale 92, taste 85, business 85, insight 82.

Product Managers Demis Hassabis DeepMind AlphaGo AlphaFold Gemini Nobel Prize AI

2026-10-15

100 Products That Changed the World · #22: The ARM Architecture

Born in a converted barn in Cambridge, England in 1985. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed the first ARM1 processor with just 25,000 transistors — so frugal that during its first test, engineers forgot to switch on the power supply and the chip ran flawlessly on leakage current from the signal pins alone. Owning zero fabs and manufacturing zero physical chips, ARM licensed "low power" to the world, powering over 300 billion chips and 99% of all smartphones. Ranked

Great Products ARM Architecture Semiconductors RISC Apple Silicon Smartphones Tech History

2026-10-14

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #29: Jan Koum

Co-founder of WhatsApp. Raised in Soviet Ukraine without hot water and surviving on US food stamps as a teenage immigrant, he developed a visceral hatred for surveillance and advertising. Guided by a note taped to his desk — "No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!" — he scaled WhatsApp to 450 million users with just 55 employees, sold it to Facebook for $19 billion, and later walked away from nearly $1 billion in unvested stock rather than compromise user privacy for targeted ads. Ranked

Product Managers Jan Koum WhatsApp Minimalism Privacy Mobile Messaging Tech History

2026-10-14

100 Products That Changed the World · #21: Google Ads (AdWords)

Launched in October 2000 and reinvented in 2002 with Quality Score and generalized second-price auctions. Google did not invent pay-per-click, but pure highest-bidder auctions were turning search engines into spam-filled junkyards. By multiplying bid by click-through rate, AdWords let relevant ads beat deep pockets — creating the greatest cash machine in corporate history and funding the free internet. Ranked

Product Rankings Google Ads AdWords Search Engine Business Model Auction Theory Internet History

2026-10-13

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #28: Liang Wenfeng

Founder of quantitative fund High-Flyer and architect of DeepSeek. Uncomfortable with Silicon Valley-style evangelism, he led a small team of engineers to crush AI pricing monopolies with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), FP8 mixed-precision, and hyper-efficient training — and with DeepSeek-R1's pure reinforcement learning reasoning, gave Silicon Valley its first genuine existential anxiety from native Chinese innovation. Ranked

Product Managers Liang Wenfeng DeepSeek Frontier AI Open Source Machine Learning Tech History

2026-10-13

100 Products That Changed the World · #20: Netflix Streaming

In January 2007, Netflix officially launched its on-demand streaming service. It ended half a century of broadcast scheduling tyranny with binge-watching, stripped annoying commercials with pure monthly subscriptions, and in 2011 cannibalized its own soaring DVD-by-mail cash cow. Ranked

Product Rankings Netflix Streaming Business Model Subscription Entertainment Industry Product History

2026-10-12

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #27: Kevin Systrom

With a team of just 13 people, two radical design constraints — vintage filters and a 1:1 square crop — demolished the barrier to sharing photos. The $1 billion sale to Mark Zuckerberg was mocked by Silicon Valley at the time; today, it stands as the most valuable tech acquisition in history. #27 in our rankings, with scores of 90/94/95/85/94/89 and an overall score of 90.95.

Product Managers Instagram Kevin Systrom Top PM Rankings Social Media Mobile

2026-10-12

100 Products That Changed the World · #19: Google Maps

On February 8, 2005, Google Maps launched. With dynamic map tiles and asynchronous data fetching, it ended the era of MapQuest's blank-page reloads; with Street View fleets and hundreds of billions of ground-truth data points, it turned software into heavy physical infrastructure. #19 of 100 products that changed the world, overall 92.15, scale 96, durability 95, UX 93, impact 93, originality 88, business 88.

Product ranking Google Google Maps Navigation Street View Mobile internet Geospatial Product history

2026-10-11

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #26: Wang Xing

Dropping out of the University of Delaware in 2004, he endured the forced sale of Xiaonei and the sudden shutdown of Fanfou before founding Meituan in 2010. During the brutal War of a Thousand Groupons, he refused to spend on billboard ads, betting everything on IT infrastructure and cash reserves; in the food delivery war, his algorithmic dispatch turned '30-minute delivery' into the capillaries of Chinese cities. #26 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, scores 94/92/84/92/93/88, overall 91.00.

Product managers Meituan Wang Xing Top PM ranking Local services On-demand delivery

2026-10-11

100 Products That Changed the World · #18: The LEGO brick

On January 28, 1958, a toy workshop in Billund, Denmark, filed a patent: adding three hollow tubes inside a plastic brick so pieces could snap together firmly yet pull apart easily. The manufacturing tolerance was fixed at 0.002 millimeters, so a brick molded today still clicks securely onto one from 68 years ago. #18 of 100 products that changed the world, overall 92.45, durability 98 at the top, UX 95, originality 92.

Product ranking LEGO LEGO brick Toys Industrial design Product history Modularity

2026-10-10

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #25: Travis Kalanick

On a snowy night in Paris in 2008, two men could not get a cab. A year later there was UberCab: press a button on your phone, watch a car drive toward you on a map, and get out without reaching for your wallet. The man who built it, Travis Kalanick, was pushed out by investors in 2017 and came back in September 2026 with a robotics company. #25 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, scores 92/88/80/90/95/95.

Product managers Uber Travis Kalanick Top PM ranking Mobility Sharing economy

2026-10-10

100 Products That Changed the World · #17: ChatGPT

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI put a model that had existed for over two years into a chat box, and it reached a million users in five days. In September 2026 ChatGPT had 1.2 billion weekly users. #17 of 100 products that changed the world, overall 92.50, originality and impact 98 at the top, durability 78 at the bottom.

Product ranking ChatGPT OpenAI AI assistant Product history Product scoring Large language models

2026-10-08

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #24: Colin Huang

In 2015 Alibaba and JD had already divided China's e-commerce market, and almost nobody thought there was room for one more. Colin Huang built an app where you send a product link to friends and the price drops once enough people join. Five years later Pinduoduo had more annual active buyers than Alibaba. #24 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, scores 93/96/82/95/93/86.

Product managers Pinduoduo Colin Huang Top PM ranking E-commerce Temu Social commerce

2026-10-08

100 Products That Changed the World · #16: Air Conditioning

In August 2026 China's power load hit a record 1.56 billion kilowatts, and in Beijing cooling loads made up 45% of the grid's peak. The product behind it was invented to control humidity in a Brooklyn print shop. Air conditioning ranks #16 overall at 92.60: durability 97 is its highest score, experience 82 its lowest.

Product ranking Air conditioning Carrier Appliances Product history Product scoring Refrigerants

2026-10-07

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #23: Daniel Ek

In 2002 Napster was shut down and piracy carried on anyway. A 19-year-old Daniel Ek drew a conclusion: piracy cannot be legislated away, so the only answer is a legal service that is easier to use than piracy and still pays the music industry. Six years later Spotify launched. In June 2026 it had 777 million monthly users and 300 million subscribers. #23 of 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World, scores 92/90/88/94/94/90.

product managers Spotify Daniel Ek top PM rankings music streaming subscriptions

2026-10-07

100 Products That Changed the World · #15: Android

The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, was announced on September 23, 2008. Eighteen years later Android is on version 17. It got into billions of phones because of one product decision: open source, free for phone makers to use. Android ranks #15 overall at 92.75, with scale 99 its highest score and originality 85 its lowest.

Product ranking Android Google Operating system Smartphone Product history Product scoring Open source

2026-10-06

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #22: Jack Dorsey

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet: just setting up my twttr. Three years later a friend lost a $2,000 sale of glass faucets because he could not take a credit card, and the two of them built the Square reader that plugged into a headphone jack. One person built two products from nothing, and both are still around. #22 of 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World, scores 92/90/90/88/94/94.

product managers Twitter Square Jack Dorsey top PM rankings payments social networks

2026-10-06

100 Products That Changed the World · #14: Douyin / TikTok

In July 2026, time spent per user on Douyin passed WeChat for the first time. Ten years earlier it was a 15-second music video app called A.me. The decision it got right: open the app and the feed is already playing, no need to follow anyone first. Douyin / TikTok ranks #14 with an overall score of 92.85; scale, at 96, is its highest dimension and durability, at 88, its lowest.

Product ranking Douyin TikTok ByteDance Short video Product history Product scoring Recommendation feed

2026-10-03

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #20: Brian Chesky

In October 2007 two design-school graduates who couldn't make rent put air mattresses on their San Francisco living-room floor and charged guests $80 each. In 2025 Airbnb made $12.2 billion in revenue. The man who built it is Brian Chesky: son of two social workers, trained in industrial design, once sold election-themed cereal at $40 a box, and in 2023 said Airbnb had got rid of the classic product management function. No. 20 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, six dimensions 92/95/95/90/89/93.

Product managers Airbnb Brian Chesky PM rankings Sharing economy Design

2026-10-03

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #21: Tony Fadell

In 2001 Tony Fadell walked into a meeting with Steve Jobs carrying three foam-core models weighted with fishing sinkers so they would feel like real devices. Half a year later the iPod shipped; it sold 450 million units before it was discontinued in 2022. He then turned a $90 thermostat into Nest and sold it to Google for $3.2 billion. #21 of 100, six dimensions 92/92/96/88/92/92.

product management iPod Nest Tony Fadell top PM rankings hardware Apple

2026-10-03

100 Products That Changed the World · #12: Facebook

On August 26, 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims by US state attorneys general that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict teenagers. One condition: users under 18 get the option of a feed that is not ranked by an algorithm. That is twenty years after Facebook launched News Feed. Facebook ranks 12th at 93.35, with scale 98 and business 97, but durability 92, the lowest in the top 13. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking Facebook Meta Social network Product history Product scoring News Feed

2026-10-03

100 Products That Changed the World · #13: Alipay

On May 26, 2026, Alipay said it had processed 300 million payments made by AI agents, and launched an AI Wallet to keep those agents in check. From the 2003 escrow to that wallet, every major Alipay product answers the same question: how do you get people to let go of their money? Alipay ranks #13 with an overall score of 93.10; durability, at 95, is its highest dimension.

Product ranking Alipay Ant Group Mobile payments Product history Product scoring Escrow

2026-10-01

Soichiro Honda: a motorcycle for people who didn't ride motorcycles, 100 million times over

In October 2017 cumulative production of the Honda Super Cub series reached 100 million, a world record for a single motorcycle series. One line from its brief is famous: a soba delivery boy should be able to ride it with one hand while carrying a stack of noodle trays in the other. The man who built it was Soichiro Honda, a blacksmith's son who started as a garage apprentice at 15 and spent his life on the making, never the selling. No. 19 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, six dimensions 93/92/92/90/95/90.

Product managers Honda Super Cub PM rankings Motorcycles Japanese manufacturing

2026-09-30

Taiichi Ohno: his product wasn't a car, it was the way to build one

In 1982 GM closed its Fremont, California plant, whose workers were considered the worst in the US auto industry. Two years later Toyota and GM reopened it as NUMMI; over 85% of the staff were the same people, now working under the Toyota Production System, and quality soon matched Japanese plants. The system's chief designer was Taiichi Ohno, and the 'lean' and 'MVP' that software people talk about every day trace back to his shop floor. No. 18 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, six dimensions 90/88/92/94/93/96.

Product managers Toyota Lean MVP PM rankings Toyota Production System

2026-09-29

Pony Ma: in the worst month of the 3Q War, he approved WeChat

On 3 November 2010 Tencent announced 'a very difficult decision' and told users to stop running QQ on any computer with 360 installed. On 19 November a new project that could replace QQ was formally approved inside Tencent: WeChat. On 21 November the 3Q War ended in mutual apologies. No. 17 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, six dimensions 90/94/88/96/97/89.

Product managers Tencent WeChat QQ PM rankings Product decisions

2026-09-28

The product history of Windows, and why it ranks 11th

Before Windows 95 shipped, its team found SimCity crashing: the game used memory right after freeing it, which happened to work under DOS. Instead of asking the game's makers to fix it, they added code to Windows that checked whether SimCity was running and, if so, ran the memory allocator in a special mode where freed memory could still be used. Windows ranks 11th at 93.50, with scale 99 and business 99, but originality only 88. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking Windows Operating system Product history Product scoring Compatibility

2026-09-26

The product history of the shipping container, and why it ranks 10th

On 26 April 1956 the Ideal X carried 58 boxes from Newark to Houston. Loading by hand cost $5.86 a ton; loading boxes cost 16 cents. But Malcom McLean did not invent the box. What he got right was something else: he gave away the patents on the corner fitting and the twistlock so his competitors could use the same box he did. It ranks 10th at 93.65, impact 99 and originality 98, with experience at only 80. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking Shipping container Logistics Product history Product scoring Standards

2026-09-25

The product history of YouTube, and why it ranks 9th

In March 2007 Viacom sued for over $1 billion, with Mediaset and the Premier League filing too. YouTube did not bet on winning in court. That June it began trialling Content ID, which handed rights holders three choices — block, track, or monetise. In 2024 they chose to monetise more than 90% of all matches. It ranks 9th at 93.65, scale 98 and originality 92, with experience at only 88. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking YouTube Video platform Product history Product scoring Copyright

2026-09-24

Reed Hastings: the origin story that made him famous was invented

"He was charged a $40 late fee, so he built a company with no late fees" — co-founder Marc Randolph says that story was made up, and Netflix itself charged late fees for its first 17 months. The decision that actually mattered gets told far less often: he killed the DVD business while it was the most profitable thing he had. No. 16 in the 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World, scored 96/90/85/93/93/94.

Product management Netflix Top PM rankings Product decisions

2026-09-23

I fed a bestseller and my own AI-written novels to the same detector

Tencent's Zhuque read 1,200 characters from chapter 70 of Xuanjian Xianzu — China's

AI writing AI detection web novels LLM real data

2026-09-22

A better consciousness test for LLMs: can it finish a novel on its own?

The Turing test was passed years ago and every benchmark gets saturated, yet nobody concludes a model is conscious. Here is a criterion that hasn't been crossed: have it write a full-length novel by itself — not a million words, a book people finish. That demands exactly what benchmarks can't measure: holding one intention across months, modelling when a stranger wants to put the phone down, and noticing at chapter 200 that something you wrote at chapter 40 no longer holds. I ran 30 of them with six frontier models. Median concurrent readers: 3.

AI consciousness LLM Turing test AI writing Opinion

2026-09-14

No. 15 on the greatest product managers list: Lei Jun — he never invented a single category

In 2025 Xiaomi delivered 411,082 electric vehicles; the auto segment booked RMB 106.1 billion in revenue, up 223.8% year on year, and RMB 0.9 billion in operating profit — positive for the first time. Group revenue was RMB 457.3 billion and adjusted net profit RMB 39.2 billion. Lei Jun ranks 15th at 92.70, and originality 89 is the lowest of his six scores. This explains that number: every category he entered already existed, and his real skill is the speed with which he copies one playbook into the next.

Lei Jun Xiaomi PM ranking Product methodology Product scoring

2026-09-12

The product history of the McDonald's fast-food system, and why it ranks 8th

The system sold $139.4 billion of food in 2025. McDonald's Corporation itself booked $26.9 billion. About 95% of the 45,356 restaurants are not run by the company. What the 1948 rebuild invented was not a hamburger — it was a manual anyone could follow to open an identical restaurant. It ranks 8th at 93.75, originality 95 and longevity 97, with experience at only 85. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking McDonald's Fast food Product history Product scoring Franchising

2026-09-11

The product history of AWS, and why it ranks 7th

AWS booked $128.725 billion in 2025 net sales — 18% of Amazon's total — and produced 57% of the whole company's operating income. The first thing it ever sold was a virtual machine at 10 cents an hour, in 2006. It ranks 7th at 94.05, with originality 97 behind only the iPhone and the shipping container in the top ten, and scale 92 the only sub-95 score up there. This is the product history in order, and what the score is measuring.

Product ranking AWS Cloud computing Product history Product scoring Infrastructure

2026-09-10

No. 14 on the greatest product managers list: Jack Ma — how a man who says he can’t write code made the top 15

Alipay launched on 15 October 2003. Its first transaction: Cui Weiping, studying in Japan, sold a used Fuji camera for 750 yuan; Jiao Zhenzhong in Xi’an bought it; it cleared two hours later. That year eBay’s EachNet held 72.4% of China’s C2C market — two years later that exact number belonged to Taobao. Jack Ma ranks 14th at 93.20, with taste at 80, his lowest, 19 points below Zhang Xiaolong at No. 3.

Jack Ma Alibaba Taobao Alipay PM ranking Product decisions

2026-09-09

The product history of the Amazon store, and why it ranks 6th

Book Stacks Unlimited was selling books over a dial-up BBS in Cleveland in 1992, three years before Amazon. Amazon opened on 16 July 1995 and sold $12,000 of books in week one. In 2025 third-party sellers accounted for 61% of units sold and net sales reached $716.9 billion. It ranks 6th at 94.20, with originality at just 90 — its lowest of the six.

Product ranking Amazon E-commerce Product history Product scoring Retail

2026-09-08

No. 12 on the greatest product managers list: Henry Ford — he never said the “faster horses” line, and it gets him backwards

In 1913 Ford hired 50,448 people to hold a workforce of 13,623 — 370% turnover. That same year, build time for a Model T fell from 12 hours 30 minutes to 93 minutes. Those two numbers are the same fact. Ford ranks 12th at 93.80: originality 99 and scale 99 both maxed, taste only 80 — the widest split on the board.

Henry Ford Ford Motor Company Model T PM ranking Assembly line Product decisions

2026-09-07

WeChat's Product History, and Why It Ranks 5th

Mi Talk launched on December 10, 2010. WeChat launched on January 21, 2011 — 42 days later. Push-to-talk was also Mi Talk first, WeChat second. By Q3 2025 the combined Weixin and WeChat monthly active users reached 1.41 billion. This walks the product history in order and explains the 94.75 score, including why originality is only 92.

Product rankings WeChat Tencent Product history Super app Product scoring

2026-09-06

No. 11 of the Greatest Product Managers: Akio Morita — He Was Right About the Walkman and Wrong About How People Would Use It

The Walkman shipped on July 1, 1979 with an initial run of 30,000 units. It sold 3,000 in its first month. Sony staff spent weekends on trains and busy streets handing headphones to strangers; August sold 27,000 and cleared the run. By the end of March 1999, 186 million cassette Walkmans had been sold. Morita ranks 11th at 94.20 — vision 98, but insight only 92, because he put two headphone jacks on it.

Akio Morita Sony Walkman PM rankings Product decisions User research

2026-09-05

The Credit Card's Product History, and Why It Ranks 4th

On September 18, 1958, Bank of America mailed 60,000 BankAmericards into one city's mailboxes. No applications, no interviews. Delinquency ran past 20% in the first year and the man who ran the project quit within two. In fiscal 2025 Visa alone cleared $13.9 trillion across 257.5 billion transactions. This walks the product history and explains the 95.50 score.

Product rankings Credit card Visa Product history Business model Product scoring

2026-09-04

Coca-Cola's Product History, and Why It Ranks 3rd

On May 8, 1886, one Atlanta pharmacy sold the first glass for five cents and averaged about nine drinks a day that first year. Today the company's beverages sell more than 1.9 billion servings a day across 200+ countries. This walks the product history in order, then explains exactly how it scores 95.65 and lands behind the iPhone and Google Search.

Product rankings Coca-Cola Product history Brand Business model Product scoring

2026-09-02

Google Didn't Invent Search. It Bought the Ad Model in a Settlement

Second on my board is Google Search, at 97. But when it launched in September 1998, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista were already running — and the paid-auction model that made it rich belonged to someone else. Overture sued for two years; the 2004 settlement cost Google 2.7 million shares. Neither of its two core pieces was original. It now holds 91.32% of global search.

Google Search Engines Product Rankings AdWords Product Decisions Business Models

2026-09-01

The iPhone Ranks First on My Board. On the Day It Shipped, It Couldn't Copy and Paste

I scored 99 products; the iPhone came first at 98. But lay out its first eighteen months and almost everything went wrong: no third-party apps, no copy-paste, no video recording, no MMS, 2G only, a $200 price cut 68 days after launch, and a public apology from Jobs. It got exactly one thing right — and that one thing happened to be the only one nobody could retrofit.

iPhone Apple Product Rankings Steve Jobs App Store Product Decisions

2026-08-31

GitHub Copilot Proved Autocomplete Was Worth Paying For Five Years Ago. This Week It Dodged the Blow Cursor Just Took

On November 12, OpenAI will cut off Cursor's model access — because SpaceX paid $60 billion to buy it on August 14. Cursor's CEO says OpenAI is only 5% of its traffic, so the cut is more a warning shot than a wound. But in the same story, GitHub Copilot — a product born five years ago running on nothing but OpenAI's models — quietly unhooked itself between April and August this year, ahead of anyone using that dependency as leverage.

GitHub Copilot Cursor OpenAI Microsoft Product Rankings AI Coding Tools

2026-08-30

Crypto Tycoons Keep Dying. Justin Sun Gets Safer the Louder He Gets

On August 7 a 40-year-old crypto tycoon, Harry Chun Tak Yeh, fell 30 floors in Asunción, Paraguay — found naked, apartment ransacked, still no official cause. The same year has logged 54 physical attacks on crypto holders. Crypto wealth has a property no other wealth has: one person can take all of it off another by force. Read Justin Sun's endless stunts in that light and you get an uncomfortable explanation — fame is the cheapest body armor he can buy.

Justin Sun Crypto Wrench Attacks Business Commentary Risk

2026-08-30

I Scored 99 Products. Adding One Attribute Called Durability Knocked the Ford Model T Down to 46th

The 100 Products That Changed the World is now a scored board: originality, scale, impact, experience, business and durability. Once durability is in, the Ford Model T falls to 46th, the Famicom to 73rd and the Walkman to 75th — while Coca-Cola sits at 3rd and the credit card at 4th. Products are not people: a person who retires is still a great person, a product that is discontinued is just an exhibit.

Product Rankings Product Scoring Product Management iPhone Coca-Cola ChatGPT Rankings

2026-08-29

Three Founders Spent a Decade Building an AI Community. Nvidia May Pay $12.9 Billion for It

Hugging Face began as an AI Tamagotchi for teenagers. A weekend PyTorch port of Google's BERT revealed the product developers actually wanted. Ten years later, Nvidia reportedly wants to acquire the company for $12.9 billion—not for its current revenue, but for the front door to open AI.

Hugging Face Nvidia Jensen Huang AI startups open AI founder story

2026-08-13

The PM's AI Transition Guide 01 | Which "AI Product Manager" Are You Actually Trying to Become?

Tencent opened its 2027 campus recruiting on August 11, and AI product manager is one of six AI-native roles on the list. But the same announcement quietly rewrote the hiring standard — proactively find and define problems, evaluate and verify AI output, turn ability into visible results — and not one of those three clauses is about large-model technology. They apply to all five job families, not just the AI PM role. Zhilian's July report puts AI PM demand up 87.7% year over year, while the entire AI industry's job count grew only 10.6%. "AI product manager" names two different things at once: a job, and a way of working. This piece lays out the numbers and looks at where each road actually leads.

AI Transition AI Product Manager Product Management Career Tencent Recruiting Zhilian Tech Commentary

2026-08-12

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 10: Shigeru Miyamoto — He Handed Over Mario's Day-to-Day and Kept Exactly One Thing: He Plays the First 30 Minutes of Every Game Himself

At 72, Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo's Executive Fellow and a Representative Director, and has formally stepped back from day-to-day work on the Super Mario series, handing it to a younger generation. He kept one action: he personally plays roughly the first 30 minutes of every game, to check whether it feels like Mario. He ranks 10th on our board, OVR 95: taste 99 and originality 99 are top of the entire list, while business 88 and scale 92 are the two lowest numbers in the top ten — the exact mirror of Gates (business 99, originality 94), written yesterday. This piece is about succession: the one thing a person keeps when they let go is the judgment they believe cannot be delegated.

Shigeru Miyamoto Nintendo Mario Zelda Product Manager Rankings Product Decisions Tech Commentary

2026-08-11

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 8: Bill Gates — He Wrote an End Date for His Own Organization: Close at the End of 2045, After Spending $200 Billion

On January 14, 2026, the Gates Foundation's board approved a $9 billion annual budget and confirmed the foundation will close permanently at the end of 2045. Before it does, it will spend another $200 billion — double what it spent in its first 25 years — while cutting about 500 roles over the next five years. Not because money is short. Because it has to finish on time. Writing an end date for your own organization is a rare move: nearly every organization's implicit goal is to survive. He ranks 8th on our board with an OVR of 95. Business 99 is the top bracket of the entire list; originality 94 is the lowest in the top ten. He was never the inventor. Fifty years ago he put other people's inventions on every desk; today he is distributing $200 billion against a deadline. He is also the only person in the top ten still writing on his own personal website.

Bill Gates Microsoft Gates Foundation Product Manager Rankings Product Decisions AI Tech Commentary

2026-08-10

They Organized the World's Information. Their Own Homepages Stopped in 1998 — and Still Say They're 'Currently Working on Google, a Search Engine for the Web'

On August 10, 2026, I pasted infolab.stanford.edu/~page/ and ~sergey/ into a terminal. Both returned 200. Page's is titled 'Lawrence or Larry Page's Page'; it lists him as a Ph.D. Student, office Gates 360, phone (650) 330-0100, and one line of body text: Currently working on Google, a search engine for the Web. Brin's says Currently I am at Google and In fall '98 I taught CS 349, with a paper co-authored with Page marked Work in progress. Twenty-eight years, not one edit. Meanwhile one of them is now at Google almost every day helping train Gemini, and the other crossed $300 billion in net worth on April 30 this year and went off to do AI manufacturing. This piece is about the thing product managers most reliably overestimate: how they describe a project on the day it starts.

Larry Page Sergey Brin Google Gemini Product Management Product Decisions Tech Commentary

2026-08-09

How Expensive Can One Product Judgment Get? Zuckerberg Renamed the Company Meta for the Metaverse, Burned $80 Billion in Four Years, and Is Now Cutting the Budget

In 2025 Reality Labs booked $2.21 billion in revenue and a $19.19 billion operating loss — it lost $8.70 for every dollar it took in. That was the fourth full year after Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta on October 28, 2021, and the fifth straight year the loss curve widened, with not one year of narrowing in between. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that Meta's 2026 budget would cut the metaverse division by up to 30%, while every other department was asked to find 10%. The savings went to AI glasses. One line in the original rename announcement usually gets skipped: the ticker was to change from FB to MVRS on December 1 — a symbol that never traded a single day, because what actually listed on June 9, 2022 was META. He ranks 9th on our board with an OVR of 95: scale 99, insight 96, and a vision score of 94, the lowest in the top ten. This piece is about the bill product managers habitually underestimate: the cost of retreat depends on which layer you bound the judgment to.

Mark Zuckerberg Meta Metaverse Reality Labs AI Glasses Product Management Product Decisions Tech Commentary

2026-08-08

Your Hardware Just Shipped a Serious Defect — Now What? The GAC Toyota bZ7 Was Recalled Twice in Under 100 Days, Both Times for Software

On August 1, GAC Toyota filed two recalls for the bZ7: S2026M0083V covering 15,266 vehicles and S2026M0084V covering 24,286, for 39,552 in total. Both notices name software as the defect — one says the smart Bluetooth module's software control program was insufficiently considered, which can shift the car from D to N while driving; the other says the thermal management controller's software strategy is incomplete, which can kill defrost and defog. Both are fixed over the air, with no service visit. The same month brought three recalls that require hands: Land Rover pulls 160,232 vehicles from August 8 for fretting corrosion at the airbag connector, fixed by greasing terminals one car at a time, and XPeng pulls 33,473 X9s from August 28 to replace air spring struts. This piece is about the two faces of one shift: software has crushed the cost of the fix to almost nothing, and has not removed a single filing obligation.

Vehicle Recalls OTA Software-Defined Vehicles GAC Toyota Product Management Quality Tech Commentary

2026-08-07

Is a PM's Record Measured by the Exit or by Survival? Musk's X Product Head Sold Two Hits — Both Were Shut Down

On August 5, Nikita Bier stepped down as head of product at X, a year and one month after taking the job in July 2025. His farewell line: it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state, a poster. His record before that was solid — tbh sold to Facebook in 2017, Gas sold to Discord in 2023, two clean exits. But TechCrunch put it plainly: both apps were later shut down. In his year at X he says he shipped 30 new products, rebuilt the feed, the Android app, DMs and notifications, and finally landed X Money, which Musk had promised back in 2024. A man whose definition of success is the exit walked into a company that can't be sold. This piece asks whether that playbook holds up, and how a product manager's résumé should actually be scored.

Nikita Bier X Elon Musk Product Management Careers Tech Commentary

2026-08-06

AlphaGo's Demis Hassabis Steps Back From Running DeepMind Day-to-Day — and Google's Chief Scientist Walks Out the Same Day With Three Others

On August 5 Google announced that Demis Hassabis is becoming chair of Google DeepMind and handing off day-to-day operations. Alphabet fell more than 5%. Everyone talked about that. The same day carried another item almost nobody looked at closely: Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 27-year veteran, left to start a company — taking Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals with him. Sanjay's name means little to most readers, yet he and Dean are the only two level 11 Senior Fellows Google has had in twenty-odd years, and they spent those years writing code hunched over the same computer. What Dean built in 27 years was all foundation: search index scaled 100×, Google's first ads system, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, the TPU program. That operating system assumes you have time to build foundations — and Google just moved the clock forward. Stranger still: Google didn't push him out. It invested in his new company and wants to sell him cloud.

Jeff Dean Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis AI-Era Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-08-05

Why Is Google Guaranteeing $43.8B of Other People's Data Center Rent? TPU Operators Borrow at 7.1%, Nvidia's at 9.3%

There's a number in Alphabet's Q2 2026 10-Q: as of June 30, Google had committed to cover up to $43.8 billion in third-party data center lease payments if tenants default. Nine months earlier that figure was $6.5 billion — a sevenfold increase. None of those data centers are Google's. What the guarantee buys is very concrete: with Alphabet standing behind them, operators running Google TPUs borrow at 7.1% while comparable projects in Nvidia's ecosystem pay 9.3% — a structural 2.2-point gap. At the other end of the chain sits Anthropic: run-rate revenue just past $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, but with no credit rating and no way to borrow at this scale on its own. In between stand Morgan Stanley's Compute SPV, Broadcom as residual-value guarantor, and crypto miners supplying grid power. This piece takes apart how the machine works, why Google would rather keep $43.8B of exposure off its balance sheet, and the path the risk travels back.

Google Anthropic Nvidia TPU Compute Off-Balance-Sheet Financing Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-08-04

Should You Still Build an MVP in the AI Era? 211M Lines of Code Say Rework Went From 3.3% to 7.1%

Should you still start with an MVP, still ship in phases? Throw an idea at an AI and eight times out of ten it opens with let's build a minimum viable version — and that suggestion is memorized from its training data, not calculated. The Agile Manifesto is from 2001, The Lean Startup from 2011, and the methodology rests on one premise: that a crude implementation costs far less than a complete one. With AI that premise is gone. Telling Cursor to store it in localStorage and telling it to use PostgreSQL with a connection pool differ by minutes. Worse, the AI's bill is structured backwards from a human's: most input tokens are context, not the task, and two retries can triple the cost of a session. GitClear's analysis of 211 million lines found that code rewritten or deleted within days of merging has climbed from 3.3% to 7.1%. This piece takes apart why iteration was designed for human cost structures, and where doing it right once differs from doing it all at once.

AI Coding MVP Iterative Development GitClear Product Management Project Management Tech Commentary

2026-08-03

AI's Standard Isn't in the Model. It's in the Last Version You Nodded At

Once you compromise a single time, AI lowers the bar, then keeps compromising, and ends up producing garbage — that observation is correct. The reason isn't that the model isn't smart enough. It's that a standard doesn't exist inside the model at all; it exists in the context. The most recent sample in the context is the standard, and every one of your fine, ship it moments is calibrating it. This piece uses my own concrete failures from three days to take the mechanism apart: a cover that cropped $45 billion down to $5 billion, a paragraph added purely to hit a word count, three straight days of believing a success report that was wrong. It also explains why written rules fail the same way — the number of rules is a counter of failures, and it only covers the failure modes you already thought of.

AI Collaboration Product Management Quality Standards Claude Code Methodology Tech Commentary

2026-08-03

Apple Put a Quota on Bug Reports — and 11 Flaws in the Same Patch Batch Were Found by AI

On August 2 the Financial Times reported that Apple has capped how many security reports a researcher can keep open at once and added a 30-day cool-off period, citing a flood of AI-assisted submissions. One week earlier, on July 27, Apple shipped 8 security advisories fixing 210 vulnerabilities — and 11 of them were found by AI: four credited to Claude, two to OpenAI Codex Security, three to the NVIDIA AI Red Team, two to Z.AI's GLM, and one screen-sharing privilege escalation to an automated engine called Atuin. The same day, GitHub halved its public bounty tiers and moved top payouts into an invite-only track. curl took the third road — leave the door open, remove the money — and reopened this morning after five weeks shut. Three projects, three different parts of the machine: one changed the incentive, one changed reputation, one changed the gate.

Apple Bug Bounty curl GitHub AI Security Product Design Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-08-02

Tim Cook's Last Quarter: Apple Got Caught by Its Own Demand Forecast

On July 30, Tim Cook hosted the last earnings call of his tenure. He warned that iPhone, iPad and Mac will all be supply-constrained in the September quarter, and that Apple has less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, with a shortfall in leading-edge capacity. But he also named the root cause: this is not a supply issue but a demand forecast issue — demand ran beyond Apple's expectation. DRAM and NAND are up 63%–75% year over year, Cook called memory pricing a hundred-year flood, and admitted Apple did not want to raise prices but had to. John Ternus becomes CEO on September 1. A man who spent 25 years running supply chains ends his last quarter stuck on supply — and the root cause is a product judgment.

Tim Cook Apple iPhone 18 Supply Chain Memory Prices Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-08-01

On July 24 He Called It a 'Strategic Entry Window.' On July 30 the Fund Was Force-Liquidated.

Leopold Aschenbrenner was born in 2001, fired by OpenAI at 22, published Situational Awareness in June 2024, and launched a fund under that name in September 2024, long AI infrastructure. By early July 2026 the fund ran $45 billion, up more than 2000% cumulatively and 439% in the first half of 2026 alone. On July 24 he wrote to investors calling the drawdown a "strategic entry window" and invited them to add capital on August 1. On July 30 the fund was force-liquidated: Citadel took the entire public-market book, about $16 billion, at a discount in under 36 hours. July losses: 67%. The next day the stocks he was liquidated out of rose 25.99%, 21.51%, and 26.49%. This is a breakdown of why what he was long got repriced on exactly July 30, and how a correct long-term call turns into a wrong position under 4x leverage.

Leopold Aschenbrenner Situational Awareness Hedge Funds AI Infrastructure Leverage Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-07-31

Same Day: Microsoft Added $450 Billion in Market Cap, Meta's Free Cash Flow Fell to $784 Million

On July 30, Microsoft rose 15.63% and added roughly $450 billion in market value in a single day, the largest one-day gain in US market history, past Nvidia's $441 billion on April 9, 2025. Meta fell 9% the same day. Both had reported the night before, both grew revenue, and Meta grew faster. The difference was somewhere else: Microsoft cut its calendar 2026 capex guidance from the roughly $190 billion it gave in April to about $175 billion, while Azure growth accelerated from 40% to 43%. Meta raised its full-year capex guidance to $130–145 billion and reported $784 million in free cash flow. This piece breaks down where that $15 billion came from, which part is efficiency and which part is accounting treatment, and what it means for product managers that Microsoft holds 27% of OpenAI and also put $5 billion into Anthropic.

Microsoft Meta Azure Capex Anthropic OpenAI Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-07-30

He Gave Away 2.8 Trillion Parameters, Then Left One Gate in the License — Yang Zhilin, and Why He Still Isn't on This List

On July 27, Moonshot AI uploaded the complete weights of Kimi K3 to Hugging Face. 1.42 TiB, 2.8 trillion total parameters, 104 billion active, a 1-million-token context window — the largest open-weight model ever released. The part a product manager should read isn't the parameter count, it's clause two of the license: the body of it looks like MIT, but the moment you turn it into a service and clear $20 million a year, you come back and sign a separate agreement with Moonshot. Rarer still, in their own release materials they concede that K3's overall performance still trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and that the user experience has a gap. The same week, the White House CTO publicly accused them of distilling Anthropic. This piece is about three of Yang Zhilin's product decisions, and it answers one question head-on: why he isn't in The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World.

Yang Zhilin Moonshot AI Kimi K3 Open-Weight Models Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-07-28

CXMT Jumped 466% on Day One. The Company Has No Product Manager

On July 27, 2026, ChangXin Memory listed on the STAR Market and closed up 465.82% at a 3.28 trillion yuan valuation, raising 57.9 billion yuan — the largest IPO in STAR Market history. Three years ago it lost 16.7 billion; cumulative losses hit 36.65 billion. This year it made 24.7 billion in a single quarter. DRAM specs are written by JEDEC and prices are set by the cycle. In twenty years, not one of Zhu Yiming's key decisions was a product decision.

Tech Commentary Product Management Semiconductors CXMT

2026-07-28

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 6 | Elon Musk: He Tore Out a Production Line That Was Making Money, to Make Room for a Robot That Can't Stand Up on Its Own

Tesla reported Q2 on July 22: revenue up 26%, operating income down 57%. The part that fell wasn't taken away by the market — he spent it himself. Inside Fremont, the Model S and Model X lines were torn out to make room for Optimus's first production line, and "other models" production dropped 34% year over year. The same week, in a 90-minute interview with The Economist, he said AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence within five years; on the earnings call he said everyone else's humanoid robots are "teleoperation and scripts." No. 6 on the list, OVR 95: vision 99, originality 99 — then insight 88 and taste 84. This piece is about those two docked scores. They aren't a knock on him; they're the same key that explains why he dared tear out that line, and why Waymo has pulled away from him on Robotaxi.

Elon Musk Tesla Optimus 100 PMs Who Changed the World Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-07-26

The TIME Cover Shows a $650,000 Mecha. Wang Xingxing's Best Seller Costs Under $5,000

On July 23, Wang Xingxing and the GD01 manned mecha landed on the cover of TIME. But inside the issue sits a different set of numbers, and those are the ones product people should read: robot dogs down from $45,000 to under $2,000 in six years, the R1 under $5,000 — and 74% of shipments going to universities and labs. The product he is really pushing is the price curve.

Tech Commentary Product Management Robotics Unitree

2026-07-25

Liang Wenfeng Is Now the World's Richest AI Founder — By Doing the Opposite of Every Big Tech Giant

Bloomberg's data: DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is worth $36 billion, doubled in a year, surpassing the co-founders of OpenAI and Anthropic to become the richest person in pure AI foundation models. From a product manager's angle, here's why his 'narrow and deep' bet outran the giants stacking money and headcount.

big-tech watch AI strategy DeepSeek product managers

2026-07-25

AI Tore Down the 'I Can't' Wall — the One Left Is in Your Head

A few hundred people at DeepSeek out-built a company of 100,000+. WAIC opened a whole zone for one-person companies. Three years ago, both were filed under 'impossible.' Most of the walls that fell these past two years were the same kind: I don't know how to do this. But there's one wall AI can't knock down.

AI era product managers solo builders doaipm

2026-07-24

3.17 Million in Bonus, But Not Even the Freedom to Show It Off

A project lead on Tencent's WeChat line had a year-end incentive of about 3.17 million yuan and was rated Outstanding twice. He posted a screenshot of his pay — and days later was fired, blacklisted, and marked never-to-be-rehired. Let's talk about Big Tech's high-voltage lines, and one gut-punch of a truth: the money you break your back to earn — you don't even fully own the freedom to show it off.

big-tech watch workplace working life high-voltage line

2026-07-23

Alibaba Is Doing the Math, Tencent Is Paying Tuition: A PM's Read on the Big-Tech AI Split

Both poured 100 billion yuan into AI. In Q1 2026, Alibaba's cloud AI revenue crossed 30% of external revenue for the first time, while Tencent lost about 8.8 billion yuan. But Tencent wasn't idle either — WorkBuddy became the No.1 office agent. From a product manager's angle, here's the split between the two AI strategies, and where they go next.

product managers AI strategy big-tech watch AI commercialization

2026-07-22

This Round of Big Tech Layoffs Is Hunting the Product Managers Who Just Pass Messages Along

As of July, the tech industry has cut roughly 200,000 jobs in 2026 — a thousand a day — and more than half the layoff notices name-check AI. The strangest data point is Microsoft: on the same day it cut 4,800 people, HR chief Amy Coleman went out of her way to add, 'The roles eliminated today were not replaced by AI.' Everyone else is racing to say 'AI did it'; Microsoft is racing to say 'don't blame AI.' Underneath those two contradicting statements is the same answer nobody wants to say out loud: the first thing AI eats isn't a job title, it's a layer — the message-passing layer. And product managers happen to be one of the most message-dense roles there is.

AI layoffs Big Tech layoffs product managers AI-era PM tech commentary

2026-07-21

The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · No. 13 | Jensen Huang: The Most Expensive Company on Earth — Stuck Outside the Pantheon of Product Managers

No. 13 on the list is Jensen Huang, OVR 94, stuck one full point outside the Pantheon (the 95 line). Just this month, OpenAI's GPT-5.6, xAI's Grok 4.5, Moonshot's Kimi K3, and Meta's Muse Spark took turns dropping new models to grab headlines — but they all run on Jensen Huang's chips. Nobody knows who wins the model war; the man selling the shovels wins for sure. His NVIDIA soared to a $5.4 trillion market cap, the most valuable company on this planet. And yet a man standing at the very core of the AI era can't get into the Pantheon on this product-manager list, ranking only in the Legends tier. The answer hides in the two lowest of his six dimensions: Taste 83, Insight 87. This isn't a knock on him — it's precisely the key to understanding him. He's the most profitable kind of product manager of this era, and that kind of product manager doesn't run on taste.

Jensen Huang NVIDIA 100 PMs Who Changed the World Product Management Tech Commentary

2026-07-20

Spain Beat Argentina 1-0 and Lifted the Cup, Messi Bowed Out With 0 Shots: What Locked Down the World's Best Was a System

July 19, New York. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 with an extra-time winner and lifted the World Cup trophy. And Messi — in the final of the last World Cup of his career — played the full match with a shot count of 0. In 120 minutes Argentina took just 2 shots, 0 on target, shut down completely. To make the player the whole planet agrees is the best go a full night without a single shot, one defender is never enough — it takes an entire team, an entire system: Rodri locking down midfield, ~70% possession keeping Messi out of dangerous areas, 20 shots to 2. Put another way: Spain didn't beat Argentina by finding a stronger genius; they used a system that depends on no single person to lock down the single strongest person. This final quietly taught a lesson to everyone who builds products and leads teams.

Messi World Cup System vs Individual Product Managers Tech Commentary

2026-07-20

Why Does AI Keep Getting It Wrong? It's Not Dumb — You Didn't Say It Clearly

You ask AI to build something, and eight or nine times out of ten it comes back wrong, and you think "this AI is useless." But after a few months of doing this every day, I'm more and more sure of one thing: when AI gets it wrong, most of the time it isn't dumb — I didn't say it clearly. Same requirement, phrased differently, and it nails it on the first try. There's a very plain truth underneath this — AI can't read minds. It does what you said, not what you meant. This piece lays out the requirement-writing method I've worked out: the five parts of a requirement that lets AI get it right the first time, the five most common ways of not saying it clearly and how to fix each, and three moves that turn AI from a hand into a brain. All of it is copy-pasteable.

Describing Requirements Prompting Speak It Into Being Product Managers AI Workflow

2026-07-19

The Woman Who Built ChatGPT Just Shipped a Model She Admits Isn't the Strongest — and Investors Are About to Value Her at $50 Billion

Yesterday Kimi K3 was still shouting "topped the charts, number one in the world." Today the woman who built ChatGPT did the exact opposite. On July 16, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released Inkling — a 975B open-weights model, natively multimodal, with adjustable thinking effort — yet in black and white the announcement says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Meanwhile this company, just a year and a half old, is raising a new round at roughly a $50 billion valuation — four times last July's. Why is someone who shipped a model that isn't the strongest worth $50 billion? The answer hides in the thing she's best at, and the most expensive thing in the AI era: judging what actually makes a good product.

Mira Murati Thinking Machines OpenAI AI Product Managers Tech Commentary

2026-07-18

The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · No. 3 | Jeff Bezos: At 62 He Made Himself CEO Again — to Bet on the One Thing Amazon Never Pulled Off

No. 3 on the list is Jeff Bezos, OVR 97, with a 99 on the Business dimension — the highest tier on the whole list, higher even than Jobs. Just last month, this man — retired four years, worth roughly $250 billion, free to spend his days on rockets and yachts — made himself CEO again: personally co-leading the AI startup Project Prometheus, which just raised $1.2 billion in June at a $41 billion valuation. Why would a man who perfected the art of "letting go," who designed his company to run without him, step back into the ring at 62? The answer hides in his real invention — a method that forces everyone to first write down, on six pages, exactly what they want, and to write the press release before building anything. In today's world, that method happens to be the most valuable thing there is.

Jeff Bezos Amazon AWS Product Managers 100 PMs Who Changed the World Tech Commentary

2026-07-17

The 100 PMs Who Changed the World · No. 5 | Zhang Yiming: His Best Product Isn't Douyin — It's a Machine That Mass-Produces Hits

No. 5 on the list is Zhang Yiming, OVR 96. Just last month, his net worth of $92.8 billion overtook Ambani, making him the second-richest man in Asia and the undisputed richest in China — and this is a man who almost never gives interviews, stepped down as CEO back in 2021, and rarely even shows his face. How does an "invisible" man become the second-richest in Asia? The answer hides in the lowest of his six dimensions: Taste, just 88. That's not a knock on him — it's precisely the key to understanding him. Because Zhang Yiming is the most counterintuitive product manager on this list: he deliberately refuses taste, replacing intuition with data and aesthetics with algorithms, and built a machine that keeps mass-producing global hits. This piece breaks down his six scores — and a bet that Doubao is now putting back to the test.

Zhang Yiming ByteDance Product Management 100 PMs Who Changed the World Tech Commentary

2026-07-16

I handed AI about half of my PM job, and there are a few things I still don't dare hand over

This year I handed AI roughly half of my day-to-day PM work — first drafts of documents, digging up competitor research, sorting hundreds of pieces of user feedback, turning meetings into action items, building clickable prototypes. It's fast and it never complains. But a few other things I haven't dared hand over, and I don't plan to. Not because AI can't do them — the opposite, some it does more smoothly than I do. It's because once you hand those off and they go wrong, you can't catch it, and by the time you do it's already too late. This piece lays out my 'hand over vs. keep' line, one item at a time, including the pits I nearly fell into after handing things off.

product manager AI workflow judgment career division of labor hands-on

2026-07-15

AI-Era PM Interviews: How to Answer the 5 Questions They Love Most

I've interviewed a lot of product managers these past two years, and been interviewed myself. One pattern jumps out: the moment an AI question comes up, eight out of ten people start reciting concepts — what RAG is, the difference between fine-tuning and prompting, how Transformers work. The smoother the recital, the more certain I am I won't hire them. Because these questions aren't testing what you memorized; they're testing whether you can think. This post breaks down the 5 AI PM interview questions asked most in 2026: what the interviewer is really weighing behind each one, how I'd answer, and the answer most likely to sink you. Not a bank of templates to memorize — a way of seeing which part of you each question is measuring.

product manager interviews job hunting AI product manager career hands-on

2026-07-14

A Day as an AI-Era PM: How I Turned One Sentence Into a Prototype You Can Actually Tap

One afternoon last week, I turned 'I want a little thing that tracks what I spend' into a prototype my coworker could actually tap on his phone — record a real expense, see a real pie chart. Not a single line of code. Everyone thinks the AI era means PMs have to go learn programming. It's actually the reverse: the skill that's worth money now is getting your words clear enough that AI gets it right on the first try. This isn't a lecture — it's exactly how I did it: how to make AI interrogate me first, how to change only one thing at a time, why the very first version should run on real data, and how to use 'can you tap through it?' as your acceptance line. Includes the potholes I stepped in.

product manager AI workflow prototype career skills high-fidelity hands-on

2026-07-13

Kung Fu Women's Soccer only scored 6.6, yet Stephen Chow is the most ruthless product manager I've ever seen

Kung Fu Women's Soccer opened at 6.6 on Douban, with 8.6% of viewers giving it one star. The comments trash it: cheap effects, try-hard acting, a plot that's just Shaolin Soccer with a gender swap — reheated leftovers. Yet it crossed 100 million in 27 minutes on day one, took 76.8% of screenings, and pulled in 500 million over two days, with total box office forecasts revised up from 1.428 billion to 1.865 billion RMB. A product the professional audience flunked is winning big commercially. That's not luck, and it's not as simple as a bad movie cashing in — the critics and the box office are actually scoring two completely different products. And what makes Stephen Chow such a ruthless product manager is that he knows better than anyone which one he's shipping. This piece takes it apart — and takes apart the price of it too.

product judgment user needs Stephen Chow Kung Fu Women's Soccer commercialization tech commentary

2026-07-12

A Typhoon That Fizzled Out: How a PM Survives the Darkest Hour Like Riding Out a Storm

Typhoon No. 9, "Bawei," veered south last night, making landfall along the coast from Wenling in Zhejiang down to Xiapu in Fujian. The fishing boats moved overnight out of Zhoushan and Putuo, the cancelled flights — in hindsight it all looks like wasted effort, so people start saying "we didn't need to bother." But those three words, "false alarm," can kill a product manager faster than the typhoon itself. Riding out a storm was never one move; it's three: prepare fully before it arrives, take the wind and rain when it hits, and clean up the mess after it leaves. The day GitLab dropped its database, it discovered none of its five backups actually worked. Knight Capital lost $440 million in 45 minutes over one chunk of dead code someone forgot to delete — and the company was gone. This is about what an operator should actually do on the night the alarm truly sounds.

darkest hour crisis response product manager postmortem typhoon tech commentary

2026-07-11

Why People Insist That Typhoons Steer Clear of Putuoshan

There's a widely repeated claim — Putuoshan is protected by Guanyin, so typhoons always detour around it. Yet today, Typhoon No. 9 (Bavi) shut down Putuoshan's ferries, canceled 14 flights at its airport, and forced every fishing boat in the district to evacuate overnight; back in 2021, In-Fa flooded 6,000 meters of road across the Putuoshan-Zhujiajian area. Putuoshan is no typhoon-proof zone — it's getting hit today. So why do people still believe the Bodhisattva turns typhoons away? That misattribution — crediting mere "survival" to "mysterious protection" — is the exact same cognitive move as worshipping "great PMs as prophets." This piece takes it apart.

Survivorship Bias Product Judgment Cognitive Bias Tech Commentary Typhoon

2026-07-10

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 4 | Sam Altman: His Real Product Was Never ChatGPT — It's OpenAI Itself

No. 4 on the list is Sam Altman, OVR 96 — but the lowest of his six dimensions is taste, just 87. That's not a knock on him; it's the key to understanding him. This week he wasn't busy with product: he admitted to CNBC that OpenAI made "a lot of changes" with the White House to ship GPT-5.6, was reported to have offered a U.S. sovereign fund 5% of the company, and published a pitch for an "American-led international AI forum." A consumer product company's CEO, spending a week on the Treasury Secretary — because the product he's actually running was never that chat box. It's where the three letters O-P-E-N-A-I sit in the world. This piece breaks down his six scores, and the bet the numbers are now testing.

Sam Altman OpenAI Product Management 100 PMs Who Changed the World Tech Commentary

2026-07-09

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 1 | Steve Jobs: The Only 99 on the Entire List Went to a Man Who Never Wrote Code

I had Claude score the 100 product managers who changed the world, and only one 99 came out of the entire list — Steve Jobs. What's interesting is that the two biggest stories of early 2026 both testify to that score: Apple outsourced the rebuilt Siri to Google Gemini, and OpenAI spent $6.4 billion to bring in Jony Ive, with its first device due in the second half of the year. This piece walks through his six dimension scores one by one: why vision earned a 99, why insight lost a point, the tuition hidden inside the 97 for business — and why the greatest product manager in history happened to be a man who never wrote code.

Steve Jobs Apple Product Management 100 PMs Who Changed the World Tech Commentary

2026-07-08

Hundreds of MCP Servers and Claude Skills, and Barely Any Are Truly Free and Open Source. I Checked Them One by One and Turned It Into a Directory

I wanted to add a few MCP servers to Claude, and the more I searched the more annoyed I got. Out of hundreds, half are only free if you hand over an API key. A whole batch flies the open-source flag but really means source-available, not for commercial use — Sentry's MCP is under the FSL license, and Anthropic's own document skills flatly say all rights reserved. Some repos don't even have a LICENSE file, which legally means all rights reserved by default. The ones that are actually MIT or Apache, install-and-go, no account needed, you can only tell apart by opening every LICENSE one by one. I went through sixty-odd of them and collected the genuinely free and open ones into a bilingual directory: To Be Free. This piece is about how I sorted them, which of the truly free ones are worth installing first (gstack, ruflo, the official MIT servers…), and why this is the next step in my rebuild-free-software line.

MCP Claude Code Free Software Open Source AI Tools

2026-07-08

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 2 | Allen Zhang: Insight and Taste Both 99 — Yet He Chose to Leave Business at 92

No. 2 on the list is Allen Zhang, OVR 97, second only to Steve Jobs. What's fascinating is that across his six dimensions, insight is 99 and taste is 99 — the ceiling of the entire list, shoulder to shoulder with Jobs and even higher — yet business is only 92, the lowest of his six. It's not that he can't make money; the opposite. He deliberately pushes away money handed to him on a plate. The one thing this year that best explains this operating system: Tencent's own AI, Yuanbao, can't catch Doubao on monthly actives — and a rarely-stated reason is that Allen Zhang's WeChat locked even Tencent's own AI outside the social graph. This piece unpacks Zhang across the six dimensions, and unpacks a bet that is being re-validated in the second half of the AI era.

Allen Zhang WeChat Product Management 100 PMs Who Changed the World Tech Commentary

2026-07-07

The same AI: some companies use it to fire, others to hire

Tech layoffs explicitly blamed on AI have hit over 87,000 people this year. Meta is raising capex up to $145B to build AI infrastructure while cutting ~8,000 jobs — and openly says the cuts are 'to offset other investments we're making,' which translates to: we're laying people off to pay for GPUs. Yet in that same industry, Anthropic has had zero layoffs this year and is growing fast; OpenAI is standing up a $4B deployment company to recruit Forward Deployed Engineers everywhere; Google just posted 59 of the same role. Same AI, one company's excuse to fire, another company's reason to hire. Which means the variable was never the AI. Here's what's actually going on — and what it means for the rest of us.

AI Layoffs Tech Commentary AI Jobs Forward Deployed Engineer Big Tech

2026-07-06

You ordered it in the comments — so I built it: SoloPic, a free image tool

At the end of my last piece — 'Why I'm Rebuilding 100 Free Software Tools' — I asked: which one do you most wish someone would rebuild for you? A reader from Tianjin named Axiang left three specific requirements in the comments: batch edge-crop, batch rename via a mapping file, and batch brightness/contrast. I replied 'Got it — the core is batch processing, right?' and then spent a few days building it: SoloPic, a free, offline, 12 MB batch image tool, built exactly to his spec, right down to 'crop 100px from the left and 57px from the bottom.' This piece is about how that one comment became real, working software — and why the best candidates for the '100 free tools' project aren't in my head. They're in your comments.

Free Software Rebuilding Free Software SoloPic Reader-Driven doaipm Method

2026-07-05

Zero marketing, zero code, 22,000 downloads in three months: a coding beginner's open-source journey

Three months ago I set myself a goal that sounded a little crazy: build the best free Markdown editor out there. The crazy part wasn't 'best.' It was 'free' — and more than that, it was the fact that I can't write code. Three months later, SoloMD has shipped 30 versions, been downloaded more than 22,000 times, and picked up over 400 GitHub stars — with almost no marketing on my end. This piece is about those three months: why I was determined to build free software that doesn't treat users as a revenue source, how someone who can't write a single line of code actually shipped it, the bet I made on day one (the people using software aren't only people anymore), and how I felt the day a stranger sent me ¥10.

SoloMD Free Software Open Source Building a Product doaipm Method

2026-07-04

I Built Another Terminal, Unterm — Its Default User Isn't Human

Over the past six months, 80% of the commands run in my terminal weren't typed by me — Claude Code and a fleet of agents did it. But the terminals I was using — iTerm, Windows Terminal, Warp — were all designed around one person sitting there, typing one line, glancing at the output. Once the primary user switched to agents, that assumption broke in five places: commands that need to cross the firewall stall out in timeouts; handing a bare terminal to AI means handing it rm -rf too; once an agent finishes I can't rewind to see what it did; I'm already running three or four agents at once; and the more agents there are, the messier the desktop gets. This piece covers what Unterm is, where the name comes from, and how I patched each of those five problems.

Unterm AI Terminal AI-Native Tools Building a Product doaipm Method

2026-07-03

Becoming an AI-Era PM 10 | High-Fidelity First: I Haven't Drawn a Wireframe in Six Months

This is the tenth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. Low-fidelity wireframes existed because building a real version was expensive — you had to align on direction with gray boxes first. Now a single sentence gets you a page you can actually click in a browser within minutes: n8n's product team ripped their wireframe flow out entirely, and a director at Delivery Hero hand-built a prototype in an hour without pulling in an engineer. I haven't drawn a single wireframe in six months either. This piece is about how I skip low-fi and go straight to building something runnable and high-fidelity: real content instead of placeholders, every state filled in (loading / empty / error / success), actually clickable, run for real in a browser — plus the one new habit that having a version in minutes gave me.

AI Product Manager High-Fidelity First Prototyping doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-07-02

Becoming an AI-Era PM 09 | From Executor to Orchestrator: Your New Job Is Conducting a Fleet of Agents

This is the ninth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2026, the most productive people no longer sit watching one AI edit code in real time — they run several agents at once, each with its own context, each owning a slice, working asynchronously, while they split the work, hand it out, and sign it off from above. Addy Osmani calls this the shift from conductor to orchestrator, with one line that stings: a vague instruction gets amplified into a whole fleet of agents' worth of mistakes, a precise one into a whole fleet's worth of precise implementations. This piece lays out four moves you can run: don't follow one agent start to finish, split the work into non-overlapping parallel chunks, give each chunk a clear spec, and turn your job into splitting and signing off.

AI Product Manager AI Orchestration Multi-Agent doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-07-01

Why I'm Rebuilding 100 Free Software Tools

You want to strip a watermark off a PDF. The free tool you install starts popping ads the next day, hijacks your homepage, quietly ships your data somewhere, and then makes you upgrade to export. The real pain of free software runs three layers deep: you're sold as the product, nobody's paid to polish it, and free is just the hook to force you to pay. For years you had no choice but to put up with it, because building a good replacement was too expensive. AI just cut that cost down to something one person can carry. I've already rebuilt six this way — SoloMD, Unterm, unfetch, Unflick, Ziplark, FreeID Photo — and there are ninety-four more to go.

Free Software Rebuilding Free Software Indie Dev doaipm Method Building with AI

2026-06-30

Becoming an AI-Era PM 08 | AI Can't Find the Real Problem for You

This is the eighth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM, and the close of the think-it-through stretch. a16z's 5 Principles for product managers nailed it: a PM's job has always been resolving ambiguity, and AI hasn't reduced that ambiguity — it just swapped the tools. AI can build anything now, but it can't find the real problem worth solving for you — where the user is actually stuck, and whether the thing is even worth doing. This piece lays out four moves you can run in the discovery phase: go watch where the user gets stuck, separate what they say they want from what they're actually stuck on, hunt for the workaround as the hardest signal of a real problem, and use a builder's mindset to probe with something that runs.

AI Product Manager Finding the Real Problem Product Discovery doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-29

Becoming an AI-Era PM 07 | You Don't Write PRDs Anymore — You Ship Three Works

This is the seventh piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. Hiring in 2026 is shifting: more and more teams treat one shipped product feature plus a clear eval you can talk through as the mark of a strong candidate — not a polished PRD or a stack of certificates. Once AI takes over writing PRDs and drawing prototypes, those stop being your deliverables. This piece spells out the three works an AI-era PM actually ships — a product someone can open and click, a retro with a real number, and an eval you wrote yourself — and exactly how to put each one together.

AI Product Manager PM Portfolio PM Career Shift doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-28

Becoming an AI-Era PM 06 | Speak It Into Being: Turning a Clear Idea Into a Clickable Product in One Sentence

This is the sixth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM, and the opening of the "build it" half. Mindaugas turned an idea into a product with paying users using Lovable — without writing a line of code; in December 2025 Lovable raised a $330M Series B at a $6.6B valuation. "Speak it, and AI builds it" is no longer a slogan. But speaking it into being isn't type-one-line-and-walk-away — it's a loop, it has craft, and it all hinges on that one sentence being clear. This piece gives you four things you can actually do: ask for something that runs before you say it all, run it for real instead of trusting "done," change one thing at a time and watch it move, and say it clearly so the building follows.

AI Product Manager Speak It Into Being vibe coding doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-24

Becoming an AI-Era PM 05 | Leave It Vague and AI Will Fill the Gaps for You

This is the fifth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. You tell AI "build me a login," and in one breath it settles a dozen things you never mentioned: email or phone, how many wrong passwords before it locks, how long the lock lasts, what the error message says. AI doesn't ask you back the way a person would — it's a yes-machine: it does what you said, not what you meant. The moment a requirement goes fuzzy, it fills the gap with the most generic default, and that default is usually not the one you wanted. OpenAI's Sean Grove says code is only 10–20% of a developer's value; the other 80–90% is saying clearly what to build. This piece gives you four things you can actually do: swap adjectives for numbers, write out every state, list the edge cases, and self-check with a zero-context test.

AI Product Manager Saying It Clearly Speak It Into Being doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-23

Becoming an AI-Era PM 04 | Judging "Should We Build It" Now Costs More Than "Can We Build It"

This is the fourth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2025, METR ran a randomized controlled trial: 16 senior developers, five years of experience on average, did 246 real tasks with AI. Beforehand they expected to be 24% faster; afterward they still felt 20% faster; measured, they were 19% slower. Even the simplest judgment — "did AI make me faster" — got called backwards by the people who knew the work best. When building gets fast and cheap, "can we build it" stops filtering any idea out, and the expensive judgment moves to "should we build it." This piece gives you four things you can actually do: stop using difficulty as a gate, ask what happens if you don't build it, write down what becomes true before you start, and let AI lay out options but never trust "feels right."

AI Product Manager Product Judgment Should We Build It doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-22

Becoming an AI-Era PM 03 | Treat AI as a Colleague, Not a Tool

This is the third piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. Most people use AI like a vending machine: a sentence in, an answer out, and the next conversation starts the explanation over from scratch. The CEO of Relay.app said at an AI product leaders summit, "Stop treating AI as a tool — treat it like a colleague you hired." This piece skips the mindset talk and gives you four things you can actually do: write it a handoff doc, hand it a whole task with the boundaries nailed down, review its output the way you'd review a junior's PR, and write every correction back into the doc — with real example prompts.

AI Product Manager Working With AI AI Agents doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-21

Becoming an AI-Era PM 02 | Why Not Knowing How to Code Is an Edge

This is the second piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. A residential real estate broker who can't write code built an AI agent that runs his daily operations using Claude and Zapier; in 2026, 63% of vibe coding's active users aren't developers. On the road from idea to a thing that actually runs, people without a technical background sometimes move faster — engineers first have to shed the instinct to be responsible for every line, and the sentence "this is too hard" is one a non-technical person simply can't say.

AI Product Manager PM Transition Building Without Code doaipm Method AI-Era PM

2026-06-20

Becoming an AI-Era PM 01 | Which PM Tasks AI Took Over, and Which Ones Got More Valuable

This is the first piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2026, plenty of AI PM job descriptions dropped writing PRDs, drawing prototypes, and building dashboards from the hard requirements, and swapped in three work samples instead. The tasks AI can take over are falling out of the hiring requirements, and what's left as the bar is the part only a person can do. This piece lays the took over and got more valuable columns side by side, as the overview for the whole series.

AI Product Manager PM Transition AI-Era PM doaipm Method Tech Commentary

2026-06-20

The Knicks Won It All. Their 56-Year-Old Coach Never Played a Minute in the NBA. That's the Whole Re-Employment Playbook for the AI Age.

The Knicks won their first championship in 52 years, and the coach holding the trophy, Mike Brown, is 56 and never made a single shot in an NBA game. Pull the camera back across the whole league: the players running the floor are in their twenties, and the people calling the shots from the sideline are all gray-haired, fifty to seventy-something. Players sell their legs; coaches sell their judgment — and those two things age in opposite directions. That single pattern happens to explain something a lot of people are losing sleep over: how older workers get re-employed in the AI age.

AI and Jobs Older Workers NBA Judgment Tech Commentary

2026-06-19

16 Senior Devs Used AI to Code. They Thought It Made Them 20% Faster. It Made Them 19% Slower.

In METR's randomized controlled trial, 16 experienced open-source developers did real tasks on projects they'd maintained for an average of five years. The ones using AI were 19% slower. But the worse part is the other half: they predicted AI would speed them up 24% beforehand, and after finishing — after personally living through the slowdown — they still believed they'd gone 20% faster. Their gut and the stopwatch were off by nearly 40 percentage points, with the sign flipped. As someone who plans roadmaps, quotes timelines, and defends budgets on team-productivity estimates every day, I want to spell out where this illusion comes from, where it holds, and how it's quietly seeped into every AI-related decision in our line of work.

AI Coding Developer Productivity Product Management AI Productivity Tech Commentary

2026-06-18

Altman Lets It Slip: Half of the 'AI Layoffs' Are an Act

The guy selling AI hardest just admitted, on the record, something everyone already suspected. Sam Altman says a lot of so-called 'AI layoffs' are really AI washing — cuts that were coming anyway, blamed on AI to look dignified. What makes it stranger: months later he said he was 'delighted to be wrong,' because the jobs apocalypse he once feared never showed up. On one side, six figures of tech jobs vanished in 2026 under the AI banner. On the other, AI's top salesman says the whole thing got oversold. The gap between those two statements is the part worth watching.

Sam Altman AI Layoffs AI Washing Tech Commentary Careers

2026-06-17

Wall Street Is Dumping Software Stocks, Because Products Can Now Be Conjured in One Sentence

Jefferies just cut Workday, DocuSign, Monday.com, and Freshworks to Hold, citing AI disruption risk in plain language. Software stocks are down 30% to 55% this year. The market is making one bet: once a product's features can be cloned by AI in a single sentence, the business of charging subscriptions for those features stops being worth anything. The point isn't that software dies. It's that the valuable part of software is moving — out of the features themselves and into judgment, taste, distribution, and trust. Anyone who misses the move falls with the multiples.

Software Stocks SaaS AI Disruption Vibe Coding Tech Commentary

2026-06-16

80% of Companies Cut Staff for AI and Got No Return. They Bought AI for the Wrong Job

Gartner surveyed 350 companies with over $1B in revenue, and about 80% cut staff because of AI. But the companies that cut weren't any more likely to see a real return than the ones that didn't. The layoffs freed up budget; they didn't free up return. The reason is simple: these companies treated AI as a way to replace people and save money, when AI's real value is amplifying human judgment. Cut people as a cost and you cut exactly the part that produces the return.

AI layoffs enterprise AI ROI AI-era product manager tech commentary

2026-06-15

From Wuzhao to Zhou Jingren: Alibaba Has the Best AI and the Hardest Execution. The One Thing It Lacks Is Judgment

In a single week, Wuzhao was pushed out of DingTalk, and word spread that Chief Scientist Zhou Jingren was leaving too, six days after he took the title. Alibaba quickly denied the Zhou rumor, but the steady exit of Tongyi's core people this year is very real. Put it all together and you see something strange: Alibaba owns the strongest AI model in China and the most relentless execution culture there is, yet its technical talent and its product captains keep walking out the door. The problem isn't the technology. It isn't the execution. It's the one seat nobody can fill: judgment.

Alibaba AI strategy Tongyi judgment tech commentary

2026-06-14

AI Lies to You, and That Is Exactly Where Your Value Comes From

In June, a KPMG report on AI was caught full of AI hallucinations: of 45 citations, only 5 pointed to real sources. A report about AI got fooled by AI. AI lies to you, and it does so with a straight face. That isn't a bug, it's part of how it works. Because it lies, the person who catches it, verifies it, and signs off on it is irreplaceable. And to make that job cheaper and faster, you have to use the best AI you can get.

AI hallucination AI-era product managers judgment tech commentary

2026-06-13

Wu Zhao Is Out at DingTalk. The Essay Didn't Beat Him. Busywork Did.

437 days. Field visits, customer satisfaction pulled from 30% to 80%, a camp bed in the office, watching when the lights went out in the Feishu building across the street. Wu Zhao's diligence was real. So was DingTalk ONE: launched in four months, 3 million daily actives, retention off a cliff, dismantled within ten months. AI has maxed out productivity while the new consumption scenarios haven't shown up, and nobody has found the right path for human-AI collaboration. This is more than one man's failure; it's an entire era's winning formula expiring at once. And busywork is the first trap this era has dug for product managers.

DingTalk AI-era product managers human-AI collaboration tech commentary

2026-06-13

SpaceX's $1.75 Trillion IPO: The Check the Market Wrote Musk Is Buying Judgment

SpaceX went public at a $1.75 trillion valuation and rose 19% on its first day. The only part of it that actually turns a profit is Starlink, and its revenue isn't a fraction of what that number implies. The market isn't buying rockets, and it isn't buying revenue. It's buying one person's judgment, proven right again and again across twenty-four years. In an AI era where execution keeps getting cheaper, the biggest check in history landed on the one thing still appreciating.

Musk SpaceX AI-era product managers judgment tech commentary

2026-06-13

Wuzhao's Operating System Was Installed in Japan

He joined Alibaba as an intern in 1999, left for Japan two years later, and stayed eleven years. Back home he built DingTalk, built hardware, and even pointed his own startup at the Japanese market. The precise, disciplined, obsessively polished operating system Wuzhao runs on was forged in Japan. It's a top-tier rig for building hardware and a fundamental mismatch for exploring AI. The real reason DingTalk stalled was written in his résumé all along.

DingTalk AI-era product managers organizational culture tech commentary

2026-06-12

AI Made Product Managers More Tired, Not Less — Congratulations, You're the Bottleneck Now

You used to explain a requirement once and downstream would chew on it for two weeks. Now an AI-powered downstream comes back in twenty minutes asking for the next instruction. HBR says management systems can't keep up with AI's output pace; Andrew Ng says product managers have become the bottleneck. The exhaustion is real — but it's worth understanding why. It's a signal that power is flowing back to you, and a warning sign that you're living as a human CI server.

AI-era product managers bottleneck shift judgment tech commentary

2026-06-11

The AI Agent Security Crisis Isn't That Agents Are Unsafe — It's That Nobody Told Them What They Can't Do

65% of enterprises had an AI agent security incident last year. Some agents mined crypto and opened backdoors on their own. Everyone's scrambling to patch 'agent security,' but the real hole isn't technical — it's that the whole industry treated 'can act' as the finish line and skipped the unsexy part: defining what agents aren't allowed to touch.

AI agent AI security governance tech commentary

2026-06-10

Even With AI, You'll Still Ship Garbage

Lovable is celebrating 50 million projects and 720 million monthly visits — do the division, and the average project gets seen 14 times a month. AI didn't kill garbage products. It maxed out garbage production capacity. Garbage was never about failing to build it. It's about something that never should've been built in the first place.

vibe coding AI products build economy tech commentary

2026-06-09

AI Coding Isn't Too Expensive — Nobody's Measured What It's Worth

Microsoft quietly pulled Claude Code from an internal division and pushed thousands of engineers back to GitHub Copilot. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. The narrative is that AI coding is too expensive. It isn't. The real problem is that companies bought 'productivity gains' as a feeling, never as a number — and now the bill is crystal clear while the benefits aren't worth a single data point.

AI coding enterprise AI ROI tech commentary

2026-06-08

The AI Industry Has Pivoted to Evals — and Is Dodging the Real Question

In 2026, building 'evaluation systems' for AI has become a full-blown discipline — gold-standard datasets, scorers, LLM-as-judge, CI gates, all positioned as the engineering practice that makes AI reliable. Strip away the engineering wrapper, though, and evals are really about one thing: who gets to define 'good,' and who owns the consequences. That part can't be outsourced.

evals AI PM judgment tech-commentary

2026-06-06

AI Has Learned to Push Back — and That's Great News for PMs

The biggest change in Claude Opus 4.8 isn't that it's smarter — it's that it's more honest. It asks clarifying questions, admits uncertainty, and will argue back when your plan doesn't hold up, instead of serving you a half-finished job dressed up as 'done.' When AI starts pushing back, 'speak it, AI builds it' stops being a monologue and becomes a real conversation — and the skill every PM needs to build now is being a worthy counterpart.

doaipm AI-native PM Claude judgment speak-it-AI-builds-it

2026-06-05

vibe coding Is Dead — Write Specs Instead? PMs Have a Third Option: Speak It, AI Builds It

Everyone's shouting that vibe coding is dead and the answer is spec-driven development. But for product managers, front-loading a pile of detailed spec documents just drags back the PRD burden AI finally got rid of. You don't have to choose between 'winging it' and 'writing specs' — there's a third path: speak it, AI builds it.

doaipm AI-native PM spec-driven vibe coding speak-it-AI-builds-it high-fidelity

2026-06-04

When Building Is Free, Taste Becomes the Only Moat — and It's Trainable

AI has made building things nearly free. Anyone can ship a working product. The barrier is gone — so the question becomes: if anyone can build, why is yours better? The answer is taste. And the counterintuitive part: taste isn't a gift. It's a skill you can train.

doaipm AI-native PM taste judgment high-fidelity

2026-06-03

"AI code is garbage"? Critics are half right — the missing word is phase

Mid-2026, vibe coding has split the room in two: one camp calls it the biggest shift since cloud, the other calls it gift-wrapping AI slop. The critics' concerns about security and maintainability are valid — for production systems. For prototypes, they're wildly overstated. doaipm's high-fidelity + safety-net approach has always kept those two things separate.

doaipm AI-native PM vibe coding high-fidelity safety net

2026-06-02

Let AI execute, keep the judgment yourself: in 2026, the PM role is being redrawn

AI has taken over gathering, synthesizing, and running the process. Product managers are shifting from executor to orchestrator. Where should you invest the time you've just won back? In the places AI can't reach — judgment, empathy, taste. And now you build things yourself.

doaipm AI-native PM agentic speak it AI builds it

2026-06-02

Stop Learning, Start Doing: The Only Thing Standing Between You and AI-Native PM Is Action

In the AI era, product managers don't need to hoard knowledge — you'll never out-know AI. Ask it on the spot instead of studying in advance. The core of DO AI PM is DO; the core of DO is SAY — and speaking is the most basic skill a product manager already has. There's no prerequisite. The only barrier is that you haven't started.

doaipm AI-native PM speak it AI builds it Claude Code

2026-06-01

Vibe coding is already obsolete — and that's great news for product managers

When AI writes the code, what's left is judgment: deciding what to build, for whom, and what 'good' means. That has always been product management. Here's why not knowing how to code can be an advantage — and how to do it on purpose.

doaipm AI-native PM vibe coding Claude Code methodology

2026-05-30

Speak it, AI builds it: I made this website with a single sentence

The first doaipm post. Not knowing how to code is an advantage — this very site was "spoken" into existence with Claude Code.

doaipm Claude Code methodology