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AI and the Economics of Product

Evals Belong in the System You Already Have
AI changes how teams decide what “good” looks like, but good product teams have always needed ways to articulate what that means before the work gets…
 • Ari Franklin
Surfers and Divers
In a world of instant answers, real understanding means knowing when to leave the surface.
 • Ari Franklin
AI and the Work of Slowing Down
Tying the lessons from Daniel Kahneman to the current moment in AI
 • Ari Franklin
AI Makes Coordination More Important, Not Less
The faster teams can generate work, the more deliberately they have to coordinate it
 • Ari Franklin
AI Agents Are Repeating the Microservices Trap
Splitting work into smaller pieces makes the system look cleaner, but the real complexity needs to be in the handoffs
 • Ari Franklin
Conviction versus Confidence
AI creates polished documents giving the appearance of conviction. But there's a difference between an idea you're confident about and a pressure tested…
 • Ari Franklin
AI makes the First Yes cheaper
AI lowers the cost of beginning things, but it does not remove the cost of owning what begins
 • Ari Franklin
AI Will Not Save You From Your Operating Model
AI adoption will fail when organizations try to scale it as a fixed methodology. It will work better when they spread disciplined adaptation
 • Ari Franklin
The Wrong ROI Question for AI
Evaluating AI with throughput accounting vs cost accounting principles
 • Ari Franklin
AI Strategy Is a Blotto Game, Not a Factory Problem
AI makes execution cheaper, but that does not make strategy easier
 • Ari Franklin
AI is eating the “keep things moving” work
Coordination gets cheaper, and value of product work moves increasingly to judgment and sense-making
 • Ari Franklin
Why AI Skills Exist and Most Teams Will Struggle With Them
From prompt engineering to environment design: why the future of AI is infrastructure, not content
 • Ari Franklin
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