This week on Product Fridays, we’re trying something new: a deep dive. We focus on a single product and debate whether it’s worth keeping on our phones.

First up: Rise, the sleep and energy-tracking app that promises to turn anyone into a morning person—whether you like it or not.

We break down what makes Rise different from other sleep apps (spoiler: it’s not just the graphs), how it gamifies your sleep debt and energy potential, and whether it actually works. Along the way, we compare our numbers, debate alarm strategies, and explore why some of the app’s early guesses about our sleep schedules were… deeply cursed.

Plus:

* McGill’s daughter vs. the Rise smart alarm

* Why passive sleep tracking is still messy

* The joy of a good dopamine loop

* What Rise could learn from Flighty

* Why you should cancel just to get the 50% discount

What app is worthy of our next case study? Reply to this email or comment on Substack to tell us!

Happy Friday,

The Andrews

It’s Friday, and Andrew McGill is a deflated car dealership arm-waving balloon of a human being.

So this week, we take it easy… and build a bracket to determine the very best utility app on our phones. OK, so it wasn’t easy at all.

Eight apps enter. The losers are deleted from the world. Forever!!!

In this bracket:

* YouTube – universal video hub

* TikTok – short-form video juggernaut

* Instagram – photos, Reels, DMs

* Spotify – music and podcasts

* Google Maps – navigation & local search

* Amazon Shopping – everything store in your pocket

* WhatsApp – encrypted messaging & calls

* Gmail – go-to email client

Do you disagree with our pick of The One App To Rule Them All? We DARE you to throw down with us in the comments.

And if you like this bracket thing… tell us! Frankly, we had a ton of fun and we’re considering making it a more regular thing. But if it sucks, you know, break the news to us. But gently.

What does it actually look like to invent something new in a week?

This week we take you behind the scenes of a recent client sprint — a real one, with a real team, real stakes, and the usual emotional arc:

* Monday: new faces and high hopes

* Tuesday: existential dread

* Wednesday: ideas take shape (somehow)

* Thursday: revealing our work to real users

And yes, at one point, the phrase “sex party” ends up on a whiteboard in front seasoned editors. It’s a long story.

What you’ll learn:

* Why we’ve adapted the classic Google Ventures Design Sprint (and what we ignore completely)

* How to get to real user feedback in days, not months

* Why “bad ideas” are often the most valuable

* How we use sprints to compress months of decision-making into a single week

Whether you’re a startup founder, a PM, or just sprint-curious, this episode breaks it all down.

Thoughts or questions? Want to work with us?

Hit reply! We’d love to hear how you’re running product discovery in your own work.

Happy Friday,

Andrew & Andrew

Google owns the open web. If your website isn’t Googleable or doesn’t work in Chrome, it doesn’t exist.

Search has fueled discovery, traffic, and revenue growth for just about every online company of the last 25 years.

So what happens when Google rewrites the rules?

In this week’s episode, we unpack “Google Zero,” the moment Google stops sending traffic to websites. The term, coined by Nilay Patel at The Verge, describes a future where traditional search collapses under the weight of AI agents and instant answers.

Consider this: one analysis found nearly 60% of Google searches end without a click. And as LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity become the go-to for complex queries, the web itself risks being reduced to a training set.

This shift is existential for digital media. If your product is information—and AI is doing the reading for your users—you’ve been written out of the loop. No clicks, no impressions, no subscriptions.

We break down:

* How LLMs have rewired our own search habits

* Why Google is shoving Gemini into search (despite how bad it is)

* The rise and decline of Business Insider as a case study

* Whether the newsroom of the future is just an API

* What this means for marketers, founders, and anyone who thought SEO was a moat

How have your own search habits changed? Let us know in the comments. And please like this video if you like this video.

Andrew Phelps leads off with a question, one he’s never spoken out loud before — “Am I creative?”

Oof, isn’t that a straight jab to the ol’ imposter syndrome funny bone? If you’re like us, you’ve grappled with this very question many times before (especially when you’re in the midst of a creative drought).

So this Friday, we’re talking about ideas — how we get them, how we keep them coming, and how anyone can come up with good ones if they put in the work.

Also, stay for the outtakes at the end. It’s possible we’ve never laughed harder in our lives?

NB: The Andrews are publishing biweekly for the summer season.

Mentioned in this episode:

* On Writing by Stephen King

* The Atlantic’s iOS app

This week we talk about the shifting role of product management—and whether the profession we grew up in is headed for extinction, evolution, or something in between.

We start with the data: Lenny Rachitsky’s recent State of the Product Job Market shows PM hiring has rebounded from its post-Covid trough, but it’s nowhere near the highs of just three years ago. Big tech is thinning middle management ranks. And teams are asking: Do we really need so many PMs?

We unpack the pros and cons of soft power, the rise of the product engineer, and the arrival of AI-powered super ICs who can make PRDs and prototypes without a traditional team.

Plus: Our advice for PMs navigating this new world.

If you’re a PM, a maker, or just product-curious, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. How do you see product evolving?

Until next time,

—The Andrews

This week, The Andrews met up in Baltimore for the Hacks/Hackers Journalism x AI Summit, which was a blast. (Even before the Mario Kart tournament got underway.)

For one, we got to see some good friends and hear them say smart stuff, like Patrick Swanson and his session on synthetic audience panels.

But it was also the first time we’ve seen a huge group of talented journalists grapple with the implications of AI together in one space — and boy, was it energizing.

At the national level, it can feel like media organizations only have one of two paths: either reaching licensing deals with companies like OpenAI (The Atlantic, Axel Springer) or suing them for copyright infringement (The New York Times).

But in Baltimore, we heard a lot of ideas for a third or fourth path (MCP micro-transactions! Chat client integrations!)… and of course, we’ve got some ideas of our own.

Thanks to Hacks/Hackers for organizing the conference. And BIG thanks to The Real News Network, our Baltimore hosts, for being amazing and gracious and literally opening up a restaurant next door so we could record this video.

Mentioned in the video:

* Hacks/Hackers

* Verso

* Synthetic audience panel research

* Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

* The Art of Audience Engagement: LLM-Based Thin-Slicing of Scientific Talks

* The Real News Network

* Model Context Protocol

* The Atlantic adding two print issues to its yearly cycle

We all love praise. It feels good! But if a friend gives it to you over and over again, it becomes disingenuous, then irritating. If that friend is a chatbot, it can even become dangerous.

That’s what happened with ChatGPT in the last week. The model got too eager to please—so much so that even Sam Altman admitted it had become “too sycophant-y and annoying.” OpenAI rolled back recent changes to the model (and did an admirable job communicating the changes).

On this episode, we talk through the design challenges of building a single conversational interface that can satisfy all use cases—and why we want to see more transparency in prompt engineering, not less.

Also, a birthday surprise??

Mentioned in this video:

* OpenAI: Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

* Pete Koomen: AI Horseless Carriages

* CNN: Why computer voices are mostly female

This week we pit products against each other in a rapid-fire game of “This or That.” The rules are simple: two products enter, one product leaves. We set a strict timer and make our cases with maximum conviction—and minimum prep.

The matchups:

* Apple Maps vs. Google Maps

Both have niceties and flaws. But only one buzzes McGill’s watch.

* ChatGPT vs. Claude

We both pay for both. So who wins? It comes down to coding, candor, and the creeping inevitability of AI lock-in.

* Nintendo Switch vs. Valve Steam Deck

“It just works” versus raw power and an extensive game library.

* Jira vs. Notion

We unleash some product manager trauma. Then dream of a world where AI manages backlogs for us.

Got a matchup you want us to debate next time? Drop a comment or email us at [email protected].

What if anyone could build full-stack software just by describing an app in a few sentences? That’s vibe coding, and it’s pretty exciting to fraudulent software engineers like us.

In this episode:

* Our vibe coding tools and workflows

* The long arc of abstraction in programming

* Why this moment feels a lot like the iPhone and photography

* Also: Is prompt engineering a real job?

We also answer a listener’s question about the flawed-but-adorable Playdate, talk about the greatest product innovations of the last 5 years, and debate why AR/VR hasn’t caught fire (spoiler: it’s sweaty).

Plus, an idea: Should we do a live vibe next week? Comment and tell us what we should make for a special live edition of the show!