The Growth Podcast

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Today's Episode

Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce in August. Now a sales team can ask Claude about its pipeline without ever opening Salesforce.

That worries me. LLMs are probabilistic, and you can't have two pipeline numbers.

So I sat down with Jayesh Govindarajan, who runs AI engineering at Salesforce. His teams build Agentforce, the foundation customers use to build their own agents. He walks me through how Salesforce gets one right answer out of an agent every time.

Then he lays out the ADLC, the life cycle that replaces the SDLC once your software is an agent.

If you're trying to turn your team AI native, this is the one episode to watch.

10 Key takeaways

1. Manage agents instead of doing the work - Jayesh says the biggest change in his org is mental. People stopped asking how to do the work by hand. They now ask how to manage a team of agents that does it.

2. Keep tool choice open - His engineers started on Cursor, then moved to Claude Code. Every tool clears security review first, then teams get a choice for a while. Real usage data tells leadership what to back next.

3. The value was never the UI - Going headless puts Salesforce's business logic behind an API. Customers pull decades of tuned workflows into Claude through skills and build whatever interface they want on top.

4. Let deterministic tools hold the ground truth - You describe an agent in plain English and it transpiles to Agent Script, which spells out the tool calls and context lookups. The model orchestrates tested APIs instead of writing fresh code. Hallucination drops sharply.

5. Go eval-first - Jayesh's data science teams were eval native from day one. Now his engineering teams are catching up with custom scorers tied to outcomes and built for each specific agent.

6. Make Slack the context layer - Slack is the one place people are available asynchronously all the time, and that history is gold dust for agents. A PM can mock up a prototype in a Slack thread with a customer and get feedback before a PRD exists.

7. The product trio lines are blurring - Engineers now put prototypes in front of customers directly. PMs no longer wait on engineering. Team ratios haven't shifted yet, but Jayesh already sees work bleeding across roles.

8. AI PMs need prototyping and evals - Jayesh calls these two skills the magic bullet. When he hires, he looks first for agency, then for craftsmanship that refuses AI slop and turns skepticism into failing test cases.

9. Adopt the ADLC - The agent development life cycle covers how you build, test, evaluate, deploy and observe an agent. The model underneath keeps changing, so without evals you are too afraid of breaking things to upgrade. Salesforce's new optimization agent watches every live agent for drift.

10. Start simple, then go wall to wall - Define value and an ROI metric before you build. Minimize variables on the first implementation and get one win. One of Europe's largest recruiting firms started with text agents in 17 languages and is now moving to voice.

Go Deeper

How to Build a Full AI Dev Team in Claude Code

A Company OS on Hermes and OpenClaw

AI PM Crash Course with Aman Khan

How Zapier's CEO Grades PMs on AI Fluency

Listen and watch on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

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To hear more, visit news.aakashg.com!

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Today's Episode

I quote Mark Pincus more than almost anyone, and I still feel a little guilty every time I do. For years, the internet calls him a "FarmVillain," the founder who copies his way to the top.

Today he owns it.

Mark (founder of Zynga, author of Life at the Speed of Play) steps up to my whiteboard and draws Proven Better New, the framework I reach for every time I plan a product. He shows me how Zynga Poker copies the leading tables down to the chip sounds and still wins on one small new bet.

Then he makes the case that most AI founders today are being too clever for the moment.

If you're building anything consumer right now, this is the one episode to watch.

10 Key takeaways

1. Copying is what every product maker already does - Mark argues that all music, movies, stories and games are derivative work. The real skill is the magic trick: you learn from someone else's proven success and make it feel new. Steve Jobs did it better than Bill Gates, even though both copied Xerox PARC.

2. Trust your instinct, doubt your idea - Mark puts your instinct at about 95% right and your specific idea at maybe 25%. Proven Better New lets you act on both at once.

3. Proven means pixel-level, for this audience on this platform - You copy the experience click by click, legally. "Instagram" can't go in your proven column. Today's best version of the specific experience can.

4. Better is what 10 out of 10 existing users would choose - What you think is better is actually new. Better is usually small: no download, free, fewer clicks, a cleaner onboarding.

5. Isolate your new so you fail for the right reason - Zynga Poker copies the leading tables down to the chip sounds, drops the download and adds one new thing, your real friends from Facebook and MySpace. Mark says friends end up at the same table 25% of the time.

6. Onboarding belongs in proven - Zynga's PMs call social Civilization and SimCity Social dead on arrival because of their long tutorials. In casual games you need to reach the good stuff in three clicks, not three minutes.

7. All new fails - Zynga still repeats this mantra. Expect your new to fail so you kill it fast, and treat new that works in the market with reverence, because it just became proven.

8. Early in a platform shift, ship less new - Supercell's Hay Day launches with 0% new, just a FarmVille built for mobile. In the AI cycle, users sit in discovery mode, so an AI version of something they already do beats an idea that's too clever for the moment.

9. Copy everything by default, then cut on audience - FarmVille copies Farm Town's gifting and its two-way neighbor bar, friction included. It cuts only the stranger marketplace, because that doesn't fit its core audience of middle-aged women on Facebook.

10. Test the top of the funnel before you build - Mark's problem with the MVP is the word viable, because it fills you with hope. Test names and web ads first, and set a click-through bar before you write real code.

Go Deeper

How you need to think about product strategy in the age of AI (with Tim Herbig)

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding

Ultimate Guide: Activation

The Multiplayer Lever

Ultimate Guide: Growth Loops

The PM's Guide to Governance with Eric Ries

Listen and watch on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

If you want to advertise, email productgrowthppp[at]gmail[dot]com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe

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Today's Episode

"We no longer need to wait for engineers to build growth experiments."

That's what James McAulay told me. Halfway through our recording, he showed me what he meant, on my own site. He ran one Claude Code skill, and a few minutes later I had a list of SEO fixes I'd been ignoring while my search traffic slid.

So I made this episode for every PM and founder doing growth with no team behind them. James led Creator Growth at ElevenLabs, and now he runs his whole business from one folder in Claude Code. I asked him to open it up.

He walks through:

The goal cascade that stops Claude (and you) from building features nobody asked for

An SEO audit skill wired to Firecrawl, DataForSEO and Lighthouse, run live on my site

Multi-agent refine, the panel of critic agents he runs on every plan before anything gets built

He runs his actual business on every piece of it, and that's why it holds up.

If you own growth and never seem to have time for it, start here.

Key Takeaways

1. Run growth from one folder - James's growth OS is one folder with three layers: tools with real APIs, skills he uses every day, and weekly routines that improve the setup. If the agent can't read a tool's data, the tool doesn't make the cut. That rule alone keeps the whole stack usable by an agent.

2. Tie every session to your goals - A goal cascade runs from a yearly mission file to quarterly OKRs, monthly and weekly retros, and a daily standup. A session hook shows Claude the mission at the start of every session. When you drift, it pushes back.

3. The weekly retro is the one that matters - James sometimes skips the standup, but never the Friday retro. Connected to his to-do list and GitHub, it caught him refactoring for fun while outreach tasks went stale for weeks. Your gut says one thing, the data checks it.

4. Do the long onboarding - The full setup is an interview with Claude that can run two hours. It feels like a slog. But once your context lives in files, every answer after it gets better.

5. Close every experiment - Each test starts from a template with a hypothesis, baseline, primary metric, confounders and stop conditions. The weekly retro and daily standup flag finished and stale tests. Every one ends in a documented learning instead of a forgotten dashboard.

6. Pull baselines, don't type them - When you set up a test, numbers like baseline conversion and traffic should come straight from PostHog, Mixpanel or Amplitude. James says nobody should be answering those questions by hand. Connect the analytics tool before you design the test.

7. Rebuild your SEO audit with cheap APIs - James's SEO audit skill adds Firecrawl to read any site, DataForSEO for keyword research at a few cents a term, and the Lighthouse CLI for page speed. Hand the report to the agent in your repo and it fixes the issues. What used to take an agency and a backlog weeks now takes hours.

8. Put critics in front of every build - Multi-agent refine sends a plan to 3 to 10 subagents, each with a different lens, then ranks the findings P0 to P3. The "what's missing" critic finds the most. Use Sonnet or Opus subagents so you don't burn through your limits.

9. Define every analytics event - James had Claude write definitions for all 350 of his PostHog events in about two hours. A CI test now blocks any PR that ships without tracking. Clean event data lets any agent or contractor measure your funnel correctly.

10. Ask your agent to improve itself - Ask Claude how to improve its own Claude.md, prompt or skill, and act on the answer. Most people miss this because chat can't edit its own instructions. Claude Code and Cowork can.

Related content

1. Podcasts

How to build a Company Operating System with Hermes and OpenClaw

How to Build Effective Product Loops in Claude Code, with Tyler Folkman

This CPO Uses Claude Code to Run his Entire Work Life, with Dave Killeen

2. Newsletters

I spent 100s of hours building a PM OS for you

How to build product-led growth in 2026

AI Agents: The Ultimate Guide for PMs

Where to find James McAulay

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmcaulay

X: https://x.com/thejamesmcaulay

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JamesMcaulay0

Website: https://www.jamesmcaulay.co.uk

Agent Accelerator: https://agentaccelerator.ai

Where to find Aakash

X: https://x.com/aakashgupta

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/

Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com

PS. Please subscribe on YouTube and follow on Apple & Spotify. It helps!

If you want to advertise, please email productgrowthppp[at]gmail[dot]com.

To hear more, visit news.aakashg.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe

Brought to you by

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Ariso - Ship AI agents and features faster, with fewer regressions

Customer.io - Send smarter messages using your product data

Amplitude - The market leader in product analytics

Product Faculty - Get $150 off their #1 AI PM Certification via code AAKASH150

If you want access to my AI tool stack, grab Aakash's bundle.

Today's Episode

Shipping features has never been cheaper.

Which means shipping the wrong ones has never been more expensive.

Most teams have cranked output up 10x, even 100x. Very few can tell you if any of it moved a customer or the business.

So I brought in Tim Herbig. He was a PM for eight years before becoming an adviser, coach, and the author of Real Progress. He's worked with hundreds of PMs on making their product strategy actually make an impact.

I've been reading his Product Practice newsletter for years. It's one of the few I never skip.

In today's episode, Tim walks through:

The one test every strategy has to pass

The stupidity flip, to check if you've actually made a choice

Audience trees, worked through a full marketplace case study

Which differentiators still hold when everyone has the same AI models

The metrics that tell you whether your strategy worked

If you own strategy for your product area, this is the one to watch before your next planning cycle.

10 Key Takeaways

1. Cheap features make wrong bets expensive - AI made shipping fast, so picking the wrong feature now costs more, not less. You still have to get people to use everything you ship. The real question is whether any of that output moved customers and the business.

2. A strategy is only real if it helps you say no - Deck, one-pager or framework, the test is the same. If it doesn't help teams say no to opportunities, it isn't a strategy. A healthy one has most of your team's energy going to work connected to it.

3. Every strategy answers the same core questions - A narrative for why you should act now. A playing field for who you serve and who else competes for them. Winning moves for how you deliver value and differentiate. Canvases and templates are just windows into that messy work, so start with the questions.

4. AI is a resource, not a value proposition - Everyone has access to the same frontier models, so you can't compete on the technology alone. Use AI to amplify the reason customers already choose you. Brand and data are the moats that remain.

5. Run the stupidity flip - Borrowed from Roger Martin. Flip a strategic choice and check whether the opposite is obviously stupid. If it is, you haven't made a real choice. Flip individual components like audience or value prop, not the whole statement.

6. Strategy doesn't have to cover everything - Focusing on paid users doesn't mean turning off the product for free users. The segment choice just has to fit the narrative behind it. Every component has to reinforce the others.

7. Build an audience tree - Land somewhere between too broad and comically narrow. Slice by region, buyer type and value until you can say no. Tim's fictional marketplace lands on repeat buyers of cars worth more than 100K in Germany, and AI speeds up sizing whether that market is big enough.

8. Differentiate on what takes longest to build - Run your winning moves through Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers. Brand and network effects hold up, while process power and AI features get copied. No one buys a car from you because your marketplace has AI search.

9. Measure behavior change, not tokens - First say in plain English what you'll do differently next quarter, then how you'll know it worked. Tokens used is a value exchange for the model provider, not your customers. Ask whose behavior has to change, and by how much.

10. Tie metrics to your specific choices - Generic KPIs like revenue are too noisy and too slow to tell you if a strategy worked. Pick metrics tied to the exact segment and value prop you chose. Then map every roadmap item back to those metrics.

🎁 Win a copy of Real Progress

As a lil treat, I'm giving away 5 copies of Tim's book, Real Progress, in just 3 steps:

1. Subscribe on YouTube and comment on the episode

2. Follow the show on Apple or Spotify

3. DM me a screenshot of both on LinkedIn

The first 5 people get a FREE copy!

Where to find Tim Herbig

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herbigt/

Website: https://herbig.co/

Where to find Aakash

Twitter: https://www.x.com/aakashg0

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/

Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com

Check out the conversation on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

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Today’s episode

LinkedIn shut down its Associate Product Manager program and replaced it with an Associate Product Builder program.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been writing about this shift for a long time. What’s new is that the market just gave it a full-fledged title.

And a title in a job post comes with 3 things: a JD, interviews, and a comp range.

So I brought back the one guest I knew would bring the best-case data. Ankit Shukla, founder of HelloPM, ran 12,500 PM job descriptions through Claude and GPT to see what top companies hire for. His AI PM roadmap is still my most popular episode ever. His evals episode is #2.

This one goes further than both.

10 Key takeaways

1. The product builder role is real, and the data says so - 12,500 PM job postings analyzed with Claude and GPT. More than 30% now ask for hands-on AI building. The title has not caught up everywhere, but the requirements already have.

2. Judgment is the skill being paid for, not the tools - Across those postings, RAG, agentic AI and prompt engineering were not the number one skill. Identifying the right use case for AI was. The engineering part is what AI can already do for you.

3. The premium is real and it is bigger in India - More than 20% over traditional PM pay globally, with a $195,000 median in the US and senior roles reaching $250,000 to $560,000. Indian AI PM roles carry an even steeper premium over their non-AI counterparts.

4. Start with possibilities, not problems - Traditional product management starts with the problem. AI inverts that, because some problems you never framed as problems at all. You were treating them as harsh realities. Map what AI can do before you map what hurts.

5. Never start with the tool - The biggest takeaway Ankit gives is that POW comes before E. Possibilities, opportunities and workflows first. The moment you open n8n before you have done those three, you are building AI slop with extra steps.

6. The five levels, and why most people stall at level one - Prompting, then reusable Gems and custom GPTs, then skills and connectors, then vibe coding, then production builds with MCPs. Most people live at level zero and one. Level two is where the ROI actually starts.

7. Claude Code versus Codex is a settled debate - Ankit benchmarked both plus Cursor and a DeepSeek harness across e-commerce, social, and gaming builds. All of them shipped functional sites. For 90% of use cases the choice does not matter, so stop optimizing it.

8. The build was 20 minutes of human time and 20 hours of agent time - A production email platform on Node, TypeScript and AWS, built by someone who deliberately avoided the languages he already knew. He pulled the AWS MCP so he never touched the console, then slept while Claude shipped slices.

9. Audit what the agent spends - Claude proposed a $420 a month stack. Ankit knew AWS well enough to ask why it provisioned a machine that large and what Fargate was for. The revised stack came back at $110. The judgment is in the review, not the build.

10. The last 20% is where the job moved - Claude takes you 80% of the way overnight. Bug fixing, edge cases and errors are what remain, and in most companies the PM hands that part to an engineer. The PM's new job is producing the prototype that makes the conversation real.

Please subscribe on YouTube and follow on Apple and Spotify. It helps!

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Today's Episode

n8n was the most written-about AI tool in this newsletter last year. I covered it 25 times and ranked it A tier, above Zapier and Make.

Then Claude Code and Cowork arrived, the Google Trends line bent downward, and a tweet went around declaring n8n irrelevant.

So today I went to the person with the most to lose.

Jan Oberhauser is the founder and CEO of n8n, last valued at $5.2 billion after SAP's strategic investment. He says n8n has been declared dead roughly a thousand times, including the week OpenAI shipped its own agent builder, which turned out to be one of his best growth weeks ever.

His argument is not that Claude Code is bad. He uses it. His argument is that they are different products and you need both. Claude Code is where you prototype in ten minutes. n8n is where the thing goes once it has to run every night, survive a model outage, pass an audit, and be handed to someone who did not build it.

So he opened the product and showed me. A live agent build, an eight-minute AI assistant run, an approval gate that stops an agent mid-action, and an execution log that shows every decision the agent made.

Then we got into the growth story. 10x revenue in a year. No lead gen target. No per-seat pricing. A goal of a billion users with fewer than a thousand employees.

10 Key takeaways

1. Claude Code and n8n are different products, and you need both - Claude Code runs Anthropic models in your terminal as an agentic tool. n8n is the orchestration layer connecting your tools, models and data sources on a visual canvas. Jan's own users prototype in Claude Code and migrate to n8n once the workflow has to be reliable.

2. Reliability is fallback models, self-hosting and maintained integrations - Every provider goes down, so you set a fallback model inside the same workflow. You can self-host next to your own data. Each integration is code n8n writes and maintains, so an API change gets fixed once for everyone instead of separately by every builder.

3. Auditability is the thing generated code cannot give you - With code you see the input and the output and nothing in between. n8n replays every past execution step by step, with the data going in and out of each node, and lets you rerun half a workflow from a single data point.

4. AI plus deterministic logic plus human in the loop - An if statement is cheaper, faster and 100% reliable, so it belongs next to the model rather than being replaced by it. Destructive actions sit behind an approval gate, so the agent asks before it sends the email or books the meeting.

5. The AI assistant builds the workflow for you - Jan prompted it the way you would prompt Claude Code. It asked clarifying questions, thought for eight minutes, and returned a working multi-tool agent. Extending it with one-on-one scheduling and Google Contacts took another five.

6. Start small, and skip AI when you do not need it - Companies that try to transform everything at once spend weeks building the wrong thing. Jan's favorite example is a company that automated employee password resets and saved multiple full-time employees a year. The small wins are also the ones that get colleagues interested.

7. n8n wins wherever the work is business-critical - Security orchestration, compliance, employee onboarding and offboarding, DevOps, monitoring. The rule Jan gives is that the more reliability and security matter, the better n8n fits, which covers nearly everything that is not a personal use case.

8. Sprinkling AI on top gets 10 to 30%, being in the value chain gets 10x - Adding an AI button somewhere is not a strategy. n8n's bet was that when someone decides to build an agent, they build it in n8n. That choice is what produced 10x growth in a year.

9. Deleting the metrics that would make money faster - No lead gen target and no per-seat pricing, because profitability means n8n can think in years instead of quarters. The company does not push free self-hosted users onto paid hosting either. The internal goal moved from a billion in ARR to a billion users so nobody confuses the mission with money.

10. Talent density over headcount - The target is a billion users with fewer than a thousand employees, which keeps the hiring bar high. Jan wants tinkerers who run home automation and understand scale, evals and reliability. Live problem-solving beats take-home tasks now that AI can do the take-home for you.

Go Deeper

Build your first n8n workflow with Pawel Huryn’s guide.

Then follow Mahesh Yadav’s learning path in How to Become a Builder PM. Prototype your next agent there, and promote it into n8n through the MCP server.

Write 20 test cases and run them as an eval.

***

You can get my podcasts on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

***

If you want to advertise, please email productgrowthppp[at]gmail[dot]com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe

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Today’s episode

I wrote a PRD using ChatGPT, with a considerable number of iterations, and gave it to the CEO of Zapier to grade.

In 2024, that PRD would have killed in any product review.

But Wade Foster called it a little old-fashioned.

In 2026, the work that made you look smart in 2024 is now the bare minimum. Shopify, Meta, and Microsoft have all tied AI to employee evaluations.

Zapier took it a notch higher and published a whole rubric on AI fluency. Then reintroduced another one just 10 months later!

Read the complete update here.

Wade co-founded Zapier and took it to a $5B valuation on roughly $1.4M of venture money. His rubric is the one a lot of companies have modeled their own on.

So I got him to share his grading structure live. If you want to know where you’d be when your company starts grading, I got you.

Key takeaways

1. Basic AI use is the floor, not the bar - Summarizing, drafting, looking things up and generating a basic PRD are table stakes at Zapier in 2026. Everything above that line needs structured, reusable systems for specs, prototypes and research. Wade is looking for people operating at a meaningfully higher level than the tool's default.

2. Adaptive is where the curve should sit - Zapier wants most PMs at adaptive most of the time, with one transformative example to point to. Living at transformative full time means you are tuning your systems instead of shipping. Gaps in the capable band are normal, even for strong PMs.

3. Transformative means an n of one - Wade's bar is that you are the first person doing a new thing and figuring it out as you go. On a team of 30 to 40 PMs, that is roughly one rating a half. He grades his own fluency as adaptive in most places and admits he steals his transformative tactics from his team.

4. You should be ahead of your CEO inside your own discipline - Wade's rule of thumb is that he should be behind his PMs on PM-specific AI fluency. When he spots a technique that is obvious to him and new to the PM, he gets nervous. You breathe this every day and he does not.

5. Never stop at the PRD - A document alone reads old-fashioned in 2026. Fire up a coding agent and build the prototype, even though production code is not the PM's job. A picture is worth a thousand words and a prototype is worth ten of those.

6. Evidence got cheap, so there is no excuse - Sift Gong calls, Zendesk tickets, subreddits, LinkedIn and X before asking anyone for buy-in. AI makes a mountain of sources searchable in the time it used to take to read a handful. The buy-in conversation now happens after you have proof, not before you start.

7. Judgment separates a turbo brain from a slop cannon - AI plus judgment looks like watching a new species get invented. AI without judgment generates so much noise that it is harder to work with than a teammate who uses no AI at all. At least that person is quiet.

8. Label the effort level when you share AI-assisted work - Say whether you skimmed it once or stand behind every sentence. Handing over unreviewed output just moves the judgment onto the reader. Speed is a fine reason to share something rough, as long as you say it is rough.

9. The job shifts from doing tasks to auditing the factory - When agents handle spec, prototype, eval and first-draft code, your job is to ask why the machine produced a bad batch, not to fix widgets by hand. Where the human gates go is the design question nobody has solved. Wade sees teams still scratching their heads on the loop design.

10. The new no-code is code, and the user is now the agent - Wade's daily brief runs on generated code he has never read and does not care about. Zapier's bet is deterministic execution in the cloud, so workflows run reliably without burning tokens or keeping a laptop open. If your software cannot run headless, you are swimming against the current.

Go Deeper

If you ask me, start by shipping your first pull request. Then learn loops to automate your repetitive tasks. Give your system a memory on Claude Code or Hermes or OpenClaw. Then version everything you build for PMs on GitHub. You can also bring the whole org on the same page with an all-in-one team OS. And once the system is running, build your first eval, as auditing is the whole point here.

I’ll see you in the next one :)

If you want to advertise, please email productgrowthppp[at]gmail[dot]com.

PS. Please subscribe on YouTube and follow on Apple and Spotify. It helps!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe

Today’s Episode

90% of teams have adopted AI, yet 56% of CEOs say they saw no major financial benefit. Both metrics are accurate, and I’m pretty sure you fall somewhere between them.

With new AI tools flooding the market every week, it is safe to say that every team has its own AI setup by now. But are any of those setups in sync with each other?

I’ve been building this argument in stages. First, Carl Vellotti showed you how to build a personal OS, and Hannah layered it with building a team OS. Jiaona and Mikhail vouch for a full-blown company OS as well.

So, today you get a screen share.

My guests are the product team at Together AI that raised $800M at an $8.3B valuation and sells inference and fine-tuning to developers. Charles Zedlewski is their CPO who brought Necoline, Pavneet, and Hassan on the call to talk about how to build a shared context repo.

Their customers are already agents and their engineers are already agent-first. Their product team had no choice but to catch up.

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10 Key takeaways

1. Individual productivity can move a company backwards - The team's starting question was not how to make each person faster. It was whether everyone generating unlimited code and content actually added up to progress. Charles called the failure mode flooding your coworkers' context windows, where everyone launches slop at each other.

2. The shared repo holds context and skills, not code - Markdown and YAML files covering customer intelligence, sandboxes, and the output of strategy meetings broken down by mission and milestone. Anything tied to a specific codebase stays out of it. The point is that a PM can read another team's context and draft a real proposal before taking up that PM's time.

3. Skills live closest to the work they touch - If a skill references code inside one team's repo, it stays colocated there. Everything else goes to a personal or shared repo. Test it on a branch, use it a few times, and only push to main once it proves repeatable. Niche ones never get pushed.

4. Shared context is a hierarchy, not a flat pool - The team abandoned the idea that everyone should carry everyone's context. Most people have no motivation to learn the depth of someone else's area. They want the one answer they came for. Some people live at the bottom of the hierarchy, most just traverse the top.

5. The PRD stopped being a gate - Historically it was the document everyone aligned on before building started. Together treats it as a trigger for ideation and problem solving instead. One to two pages, defining the customer problem, a few solution options, and a sample user journey. That is enough to argue about whether the thing is worth building.

6. A prototype replaces the bulk of the long document - A separate skill takes the one pager and produces a prompt for a design tool, and that visual is where the sharpest feedback shows up, from engineering and marketing alike.

7. Discovery collapsed from half a day to five minutes - The research agent pulls from the support platform, the project tracker, and internal docs at once. It surfaced 19 tickets filed in two months, flagged that the feature had been partially built and abandoned, and gave verbatim quotes with sources. The value is not the summary. It is not duplicating work someone already started.

8. Automate execution, keep decisions human - Defining the feature, the API surface area, and the abstraction layer stay hands on. Code writing is the part that runs on its own. The PRD skill is explicitly instructed to challenge the PM's assumptions rather than accept them.

9. Agents are already the majority user, so validate for them - Agent evals spins up a sandbox, gives an agent a real task against the product, and watches. It caught that agents could not find the fine-tunable models page because it was not linked from the quick start. Dozens of docs fixes came out of this. Charles calls agent success the new bar for UX.

10. They refused to oversell the gains - No story points, so no proof, but velocity is up more than 5%. Charles finds 3x claims suspicious, because discovery, debate, and coordination do not get magically better with AI. Costs stayed sane partly through open weight models, partly because optimizing for collective output never produced the runaway token budgets others report.

Go Deeper

As promised, I put together this section to help you become the best version in your product management journey. If you’re starting from zero on this, begin with How to build a Team OS in Claude Code with Hannah Stulberg, then scale it up with How to build a Company Operating System with Hermes and OpenClaw. For the skills layer specifically, 3x CPO Oji Udezue on the Essential Claude Skills for PMs is the one to read. And if section 3 sold you on agent evals, go to How to Build Frontier-Lab Quality Evals with Daniel McKinnon. Finally, Pavneet’s take on the one-page PRD lines up almost exactly with what Srini Raghavan showed from Freshworks.

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Today’s episode

Most PMs have automated something with AI by now. A PRD review. A weekly status update. The problem is that every session starts from scratch.

Loops are what fix that. A skill that runs the same way forever is just a skill. A skill that takes the log of what happened and rewrites itself is a loop. Everyone keeps saying loops are the new prompts. Almost nobody shows you how to build one.

Tyler Folkman is Chief AI Officer and Head of Product at JobNimbus. In this episode he builds a loop live on screen. He runs a preflight check on his own podcast recording, spins up three prototype variants while answering questions, writes a decision skill from scratch, and closes the loop on camera.

He also covers the loops every PM should be running, the hooks that stop Claude from doing real damage, and the point where vibe PMing breaks.

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10 Key takeaways

1. A skill becomes a loop when you feed the learning back. A static skill sits there and stays the same forever. The loop closes when you hand the AI the log of the whole session and ask what to improve. Skip that step and you are just running a skill.2. The gate is the most important part of the loop. Fetch inputs, do work, pass a gate, write the artifact. The gate is where you validate the work was correct, and making it deterministic matters more than anything else in the chain.

3. Agents make decisions, prompts wait for you. The difference is not the model. An agent gets a task plus a way to verify itself and executes as far as it can alone. Prompting keeps you in the loop, which caps how far you can scale yourself.

4. Write the first version of a skill by hand. Human authored skills tend to beat AI authored ones because you know more about what you actually want. Once you are on the AI loop it moves fast enough that injecting your own thinking gets hard, like promising you will still pedal on an ebike.

5. In product, the gate is a customer, and that breaks the loop. Code loops run fast because the gate is a test. You cannot lock customers in a room and iterate on them. The workaround is mining the research calls and transcripts you already have to build a cheap first filter.

6. Prototypes are free now, so generate variants instead of one answer. The internal standard is at least three variants per idea. One minimal, one full featured, one creative. Then narrow a hundred ideas down to five before anyone talks to a real customer.

7. Synthetic customers filter, real customers decide. Customer research transcripts loaded into a warehouse let AI inspect a prototype as your customer. It is not a high bar, but it catches low hanging failures fast, which is the whole point of a gate.

8. Write docs for AI, keep human docs to three pages. Part of onboarding is not written for people to read. It is context so the AI can answer questions. Anything a human is expected to read should be one to three pages, visual, and cut down by hand.

9. Hooks add determinism that a prompt cannot. Telling Claude never to delete everything or never to share credentials only works if it reads that instruction today. A hook fires on the bash command itself. Session close hooks can also force the improvement step you would otherwise forget.

10. Ship AI output you have not thought about and it costs you. Passing unreviewed AI work up the chain just moves the effort to someone busier than you. Answering a question in a meeting with what Claude said is the failure mode. Use AI to push your thinking, not to replace the part where you do it.

Related Content

If you don't know where to start on Claude loops, I got you covered with my ultimate guide on Loops for PMs. And then you can follow it up with The Complete PM Guide to /goal in Claude Code. Tyler mentioned the evolving role of PMs and how it is shifting into a Product Builder role, so you can read all about it in my How to Become a Builder PM deep dive.

If you want to advertise, please email productgrowthppp[at]gmail[dot]com. 

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe

Today’s episode

Today I’m showing you how to build a company operating system, with Mikhail Shcheglov, CPO at OLX Classifieds.

After 5 months of continuous building on OpenClaw and Hermes, his entire product team now runs on it.

His knowledge graph covers 54% of the company's product, business and customer context. That is a number he tracks as a personal KPI. At that level the agent already makes backlog decisions. Stakeholders pitch feature requests to it before they’re allowed near a PM. It runs his email, his calendar, his recruiting funnel and his design system.

He opens his IDE on camera and shows all of it. 2 findings cut against everything you’ve been told. Summarizing your meeting transcripts costs you 20-25% recall, so he stores every single one raw. And letting Hermes write its own skills off repeated tasks produced a 31% accuracy lift in controlled testing.

We also get into something heavier than architecture.

What happens to PM headcount when one PM covers four domains? And what does a CPO actually screen for now when hiring?

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If you want access to my AI tool stack including Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arize and Mobbin, that's $27,000 of value for $150, grab https://bundle.aakashg.com/. 

Key Takeaways

Context coverage is a CPO level KPI - Mikhail tracks what percentage of the company's industry, business model and customer knowledge his agent actually holds. It sits at 54%. That is enough for it to operate like a junior to mid PM and make backlog calls. At 70 to 90% he expects strategy level work.

The real problem AI solves is knowledge leakage - A domain expert leaves and takes five years of context with them. Every company has this hole and almost nobody measures it. One store of business, customer, product and technical knowledge closes it, and the better your AI knows that context the more you can hand it.

Do not summarize your transcripts - Summarization cost them 20 to 25% recall. You lose the granular detail where the answer usually lives, and you force every conversation into a template it was never shaped like. Store everything raw.

Memory needs three layers, not one - A knowledge graph for structure, a vector database for fuzzy retrieval, and raw daily transcripts in MD files. Exact keyword matching fails on most real queries because real questions are ambiguous. The vector layer carries the load.

Auto generated skills lifted recall by 31% - Hermes watches what you keep asking for and decides on its own that a skill is worth writing. Tested across five core topics with ten questions each, control group against treatment group. Plus 31% accuracy.

Imperatives matter more than prompts - Their rules file runs 700 lines. No fabrications. Think before you act. Facts over guesswork. And a ban on what he calls fake helpful, where the agent can't do the thing so it explains how you could do it yourself.

CLAUDE.md stays short, SOUL.md goes long - CLAUDE.md holds under 100 lines and carries the highest priority. SOUL.md runs 800 and sits second. Some of those 800 lines contradict each other and it still produces his most accurate output, because every imperative gets tested against real queries.

Make the agent the gatekeeper - Stakeholders are trained to pitch the agent first. It asks clarifying questions, checks the request against priorities already set, declines politely if it doesn't clear the bar, and routes it to the right PM if it does. The org chart is mapped internally so it knows who owns what.

Half of PM time is process, not thinking - Weekly reports, stakeholder updates, demos. Delegate that layer and one PM does the work of two, pointed entirely at discovery. He now runs one PM across three or four customer facing domains, and only keeps dedicated owners on monetization and search.

Own the agent yourself or lose the advantage - Feedback arrives daily and he pushes changes from his phone straight into the repo. Hand it to an AI ops hire or an engineering team and you keep the tool but lose the speed. Nobody without skin in the game iterates fast enough.

Related content

I’ve already created all of the resources Mikhail mentioned in this episode. But I never mapped them all to one place. That changes today in this edition. PFA the map sorted by the parts you want to build.

Memory first, I Built You Memory for Claude Code, Hermes and OpenClaw

Once you've got a memory layer, put it in version control. GitHub for PMs has the 3-repo setup I use for skills and eval

The Hermes Agent Guide for PMs is a 20-minute setup and a 30-day rollout with persona and skill templates included

For OpenClaw, start with Mahesh Yadav on becoming a Builder PM

For the org-wide version, watch my episode with Jiaona Zhang, CPO at Laurel, on building a Company OS

My conversation with Hannah Stulberg of DoorDash on building a Team OS is the same thing one floor down, with a free starter kit

👨‍💻 Where to find Mikhail Shcheglov:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scheglovm1/

Substack: https://corpwaters.substack.com/

👨‍💻 Where to find Aakash:

Twitter: https://x.com/aakashgupta

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/

Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com/

If you want to advertise, email [email protected].

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.news.aakashg.com/subscribe