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If AI makes it faster to write code, what happens to the product manager's job? I asked Rich Mironov, who has worked in software product management for 40 years and writes about it at mironov.com.
Rich walks through his math on why shipping ten times as many products into the same market does not create ten times as many winners. The same buyers are still looking for software, so four wins out of ten becomes four wins out of a hundred. We talk about the difference between engineering waste and product waste, why speed moves the bottleneck to users, buyers, marketing and sales, and what that means for designers, engineers and product managers.
We also get into discovery. Rich is happy to let AI summarize transcripts. He still wants a product manager, a designer and an engineer in the room when real users talk, because a script cannot follow the surprising thing someone just said. And we look at the barbell shape of the product job and what he thinks AI tools will look like by 2031.
I closed with the question I ask every guest: what does it mean to you to be more human right now?
In this conversation:
- Why 10x faster code does not mean 10x more winners
- Engineering waste versus product waste
- Where product managers spend their time when engineering speeds up
- What senior designers and engineers bring when agents do the first pass
- Why discovery interviews need humans in the room
- The barbell: more weight on what to build and how to sell it
- Guardrails: spending more discovery time on bigger and riskier bets
- Looking ahead to 2031
- What it means to be more human
About Rich: Rich has led product teams for 40 years, including six Silicon Valley B2B software startups (3 exits) and 15 interim CPO roles. Today, he coaches product leaders. Rich is the author of "Money Stories" and "The Art of Product Management." He has been blogging about software product management since 2002 and launched the first Product Camps.
Find Rich: https://www.mironov.com
Book Money Stories: https://www.amazon.com/Money-Stories-Communicating-Value-Product/dp/0986030325/
Human x Intelligent: https://humanxintelligent.com
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🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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Toju Duke has worked in AI long before the hype. In this episode of Human x Intelligent, she explains why so many of us handed our judgment to AI without asking how it works, and how to take it back.
We talk about automation bias, dependency and cognitive surrender; why she never goes to AI first, how to fact-check without drowning in it and what she calls AI-inflicted burnout. Her answer to the closing question: be more kind.
About Toju: named one of the top leaders in AI, Toju is a speaker, author and advisor with 20 years of experience across advertising, retail, not-for-profit and tech. She spent 10 years at Google, the last three leading Responsible AI work on early frontier models. She founded Diverse AI, wrote "Building Responsible AI Algorithms" and "Responsible AI in Practice", leads the career guidance working group at EU Women in Digital and sits on the Council of International Schools' task force for emerging technologies.
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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What should you hand to AI and what should you keep for yourself?
Human x Intelligent is back!! In this solo episode, I explain the delay (imagine a dinner party with the table set and an oven that refuses to cooperate) and share the question at the heart of this season: what do we keep?
AI can help with drafts, summaries and the first pass of our work. But deciding what matters, what's true and what we're willing to put our name on is still ours. And sometimes a task turns into a decision before we notice.
I talk about:
What have you happily handed to AI? And what have you decided to keep? Send me a message on LinkedIn or Instagram. I'd love to hear your answer.
Delegate the work, never the judgment.
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
Explore the show: https://humanxintelligent.com
Book a discovery call: https://calendar.app.google/s8EzUzjCrUuUQv8n9
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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The more people trusted AI on a task, the less critical thinking they said they did on it. Season 3 of Human x Intelligent starts here, with an eight-minute premiere on where your judgment still matters.
I opened the season with a short solo episode, because the real conversations start next Monday. Here I look at what's happening in the market right now, what I mean by the human moat and what this season will look like, including an app I'm building called Human Plus. And I ask the question I can't stop asking: if AI does the practice, where does the next group get good?
What you'll learn:
Next Monday: the first interview of the season!!!
Enter the early birds for Human Plus and tell me what's missing: https://humanxintelligent.com/human-plus
In this episode, I cover:
0:00 The study that made me uncomfortable
1:15 Welcome to Season 3
1:37 Who this show is for
2:01 The human moat, revised
2:41 Gallup: who writes the first draft now
3:07 Stanford: the youngest workers in AI-exposed jobs
3:42 If AI does the practice, where does the next group get good?
4:08 What Season 3 looks like
4:36 Practical videos, starting with Miro, Claude and Lovable
4:56 Human Plus and how to sign up
6:17 Count your nothings
7:10 Next Monday: the first interview
Referenced:
Tools referenced:
Where to find Madalena:
Subscribe so you catch the first interview: https://www.youtube.com/@humanxintelligent
Listen on your podcast app:
#HumanxIntelligent #AIatWork #Podcast
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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We talk a lot on this show about what AI can do. This one's about what it can quietly take, if you let it.
Ricardo Luiz has spent over twenty years building products at the intersection of psychology, UX and AI, and his warning is simple: the moment you outsource what to think, you've outsourced who you are. AI is good enough and fast enough that most people won't notice the handoff happening.
We get into exactly where the line sits between AI amplifying you and AI quietly making you dependent on it. Ricardo's test: if the tool disappeared tomorrow, would you panic or would you just slow down? Panic means you were never really driving.
We also get into why Anthropic named 'understanding what's happening inside the black box' a real 2026 goal, why intent is the one word Ricardo wants you to sit with before opening another AI tool and a story involving a dog, a cancer diagnosis and a vaccine formula that shouldn't have existed. Plus a study on why people trust an AI's medical answer over an actual doctor's, even when it's wrong.
And we get honest about the economics nobody wants to talk about. The tools feel cheap right now because the real cost isn't being charged yet. Ricardo's bet: give it two years and the businesses behind these tools will have to charge what they actually cost and not everyone will be able to afford what they've gotten used to.
Fair warning: this one might change how you use every AI tool you touch after it.
About Ricardo: Ricardo is a product leader focused on AI-native product development, mentorship and the cultivation of communities of practice. He's spent his career turning ambiguous problems into shipped products and individual contributors into the teams everyone wants to work on. He mentors emerging and senior PMs across geographies, hosts peer-learning circles and believes the most effective thing a senior practitioner can do is multiply other practitioners.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uxluiz/
- UXDX: https://uxdx.com/profile/ricard-luiz/
- WUD Portugal: https://wudportugal.com/orador/ricardo-luiz/
Mentioned in this episode:
Season 2 ends here. Season 3 arrives in September and takes the show beyond tech; we will have doctors, chefs, scientists, artists, all asked the same closing question. Subscribe now so you're there for episode one.
Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/
📩 Want to be a guest on Human X Intelligent? Reach out to Madalena at [email protected]
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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You've heard the productivity pitch. AI makes you faster. AI makes you more efficient. AI makes your work better.
But what if it's also making you worse at working without it and faster than you think?
In this episode of Human × Intelligent, I go deeper into a cluster of research and stories that, taken together, paint a picture we can't afford to ignore. A study from Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT and UCLA found that just 10 minutes of AI assistance was enough to impair independent problem-solving. Researchers have shown that inaudible sounds hidden inside background music can hijack AI notetakers in your meetings without you knowing. MIT professor Max Tegmark has pointed out that AI is currently less regulated than a sandwich shop. And the movie Idiocracy, a 2006 comedy barely anyone saw, is starting to feel less like satire and more like a schedule.
This isn't a doom episode. It's an episode where I share a perspective. I walk through what the science actually says, what it means for how we work and lead and what to do about it. From the three questions you should be asking every AI vendor you work with, to the one habit that protects your cognitive independence, to what it actually means to be an irreplaceable human professional in 2026.
If you use AI at work and you do, this is the episode to sit with.
Reading list:
Connect with us:
🌐 humanxintelligent.com
📸 Instagram: @designwithmaddie
📸 Instagram: @humanxintelligent
💼 linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta
💼 linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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Building an AI agent has never been easier. But getting it to production? That's where most projects quietly die.
In this episode of Human X Intelligent, host Madalena Costa sits down with Joana Mesquita, Machine Learning Engineer at Swiss Post and former ML practitioner at Adidas and Feedzai, to explore what fundamentally changes when you move from deterministic software to probabilistic, generative AI systems and why so many teams are unprepared for that shift.
Joana has spent years building scalable AI systems, implementing MLOps practices and even developing tools to measure the carbon footprint of machine learning workflows. She's one of the clearest thinkers working at the intersection of AI engineering and responsible development.
In this episode, we cover:
One idea that will stay with you: 'Stop thinking about AI products as only the model. Start thinking about them as a system that learns over time.'
Whether you're an ML engineer, a product manager or a technical leader navigating the GenAI transition, this conversation will change how you think about what it actually takes to build AI that works in the real world.
Connect with Joana Mesquita:
→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanamesquita96/
→ Medium: https://medium.com/@joana.c.mesquita.f
Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/
📩 Want to be a guest on Human X Intelligent? Reach out to Madalena at [email protected]
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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NotebookLM can do in an afternoon what used to take a research team a week, if you know how to prompt it.
In this episode of Human × Intelligent, we walk through a complete 8-step AI-assisted research workflow using a real Spotify UX interview study as our working example. Eight participants, 60-minute sessions and a set of raw transcripts, turned into personas, empathy maps, Jobs to Be Done analysis, How Might We questions, an opportunity matrix and a full synthesis report.
Every step includes the exact prompt to paste into NotebookLM. No vague instructions. No, just ask AI to help you. Real prompts, real frameworks, real output.
What you'll learn:
All 16 prompts are included in the show notes as a ready-to-use guide.
This workflow applies to any qualitative research: user interviews, usability test notes, support tickets, survey responses. If you can put it in a document, NotebookLM can help you make sense of it.
Show Notes:
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
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AI won’t fix your product. In many cases, it makes things worse.
In this conversation, Michelle Brito explains why most companies are getting AI adoption wrong and what they should be doing instead.
From her work at Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Michelle shares practical insights on designing AI-powered products that actually deliver value and not confusion.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- When artificial intelligence actually makes sense in a product
- Why AI is often used as a shortcut for deeper problems
- The difference between AI and simple automation
- How to evaluate if your workflows are ready for AI
- Why user trust breaks when AI is introduced too early
⚠️ The biggest mistake?
Starting with the technology instead of the problem.
💡 Key takeaway:
AI doesn’t fix broken systems. It amplifies them.
Connect with Michelle Brito:
→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-brito-47342554/
Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/
Guest bio
Michelle Brito is a Senior Product Designer at Volkswagen Digital Solutions and a mentor at Ladies that UX Lisbon, with over 15 years of experience spanning journalism, editorial design, and digital product strategy. Based in Lisbon, she currently leads design efforts for B2B search engines and researches the integration of AI-driven solutions within the automotive sector. Her background is uniquely multidisciplinary, combining a Master’s in Communication Sciences with a d.MBA and specialized training in UX/UI design. Throughout her career, which includes work for publishing houses, government agencies and marketing firms, Michelle has focused on bridging the gap between business goals and user needs through benchmarking, usability testing and visual thinking.
Chapter timestamps
00:00 – Why companies are asking the wrong AI question
00:42 – Introduction to Michelle Brito
01:15 – Is AI the right starting point?
02:20 – Where companies misuse AI (simple problems, wrong solutions)
03:18 – AI as a shortcut for deeper issues
03:39 – Why organizations rush into AI
04:44 – When AI creates confusion and distrust
05:30 – How to push back on stakeholders
06:14 – How to know when AI actually makes sense
07:27 – Why users don’t adopt AI tools
08:24 – Questions to evaluate AI vs automation
08:40 – AI driven by hype vs real need
09:28 – Real example: AI making simple tasks harder
10:10 – Red flags in AI product decisions
11:03 – Why research still matters (even if it’s “boring”)
12:07 – Responsible AI in regulated environments
13:28 – Who is accountable for AI decisions?
14:48 – What healthy AI adoption looks like inside teams
16:40 – Where to start with AI (the right way)
17:21 – The most overlooked first step
18:16 – Making decisions under pressure
19:21 – AI requires simplification, not complexity
19:53 – Practical advice to avoid AI traps
21:06 – Final thoughts on AI hype vs reality
Concepts to explore further:
→ AI vs Automation
→ AI as a multiplier (not a fixer)
→ Problem-first vs technology-first thinking
→ User trust in AI systems
→ AI readiness (data, workflows, goals)
👉 Subscribe for more conversations on AI, product design and human-centered technology.
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
Send us an email!
Is your team actually using AI, or are they just playing with it?
In this episode of Human X Intelligent, host Madalena Costa sits down with Kaisa Martiskainen, AI Operations lead, to uncover the hidden gap in corporate AI adoption. While usage metrics might be up, true understanding is often lagging. Kaisa explains why providing access to chatbots isn’t the same as building capability and how the 'Interface Trap' prevents organizations from seeing the real value of AI.
In this episode, we explore:
If you’re a leader, manager or individual contributor feeling overwhelmed by the AI hype, this conversation will help you shift from reactive usage to intentional system thinking.
Connect with Kaisa Martiskainen:
→ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kaisamartiskainen
→ Substack: https://mamaknowsai.substack.com
Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/
Guest bio
Kaisa works at the intersection of technology and human understanding. She helps organizations and individuals understand how to work with artificial intelligence in practical, thoughtful ways, focusing not just on tools, but on how technology changes the way people think, learn and make decisions
Chapter timestamps
Concepts to explore further:
→ AI vs Automation
→ AI as a multiplier (not a fixer)
→ Problem-first vs technology-first thinking
→ User trust in AI systems
→ AI readiness (data, workflows, goals)
👉 Subscribe for more conversations on AI, product design and human-centered technology.
Support the show
🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI. Hosted by Madalena Costa. Book a 30-minute discovery call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ0gWe6GXjyLRo9EsZ3RnwmNbGqS1IkkxXtc3FNSy2HOEarPQlqMurL8Ts4pzWrEx4Zq2qXB2X11
From the publisher's feed
In a world where technology transforms faster than our environment, we can make sense of it. Human × Intelligent invites you to pause, think and design the future with intention.
We…