Tag: continuous discovery

Stop Asking, Start Listening: Turn VOC Into Measurable Behavior, Retention, and Revenue

I’ve learned that the fastest path from feedback to impact is not to ask more questions—it’s to listen more closely to what users already tell us with their clicks, scrolls, and pauses. Surveys and interviews give us color, but behavioral analytics reveal truth. When I connect voice of the customer (VOC) to real user behavior, I can prioritize with confidence and ship changes that improve activation, retention, and revenue.

Discover how to connect voice of the customer (VOC) feedback to user behavior and turn opinions into action.

Here’s the mindset shift that changed my team’s outcomes: opinions are hypotheses, behavior is evidence. I blend qualitative VOC with quantitative product analytics so our roadmap aligns to outcomes vs output OKRs. The result is a tighter feedback loop, fewer bets based on anecdotes, and more decisions grounded in measurable user value.

First, I instrument the product so it can “talk back.” That means a clean event taxonomy for key moments like time-to-first-value, onboarding completion, feature adoption, and conversion health. Tools such as Amplitude analytics, Pendo, and a unified analytics platform help me track funnels, cohorts, and retention analysis with consistent definitions across teams.

Next, I normalize the messy reality of VOC. Support tickets, sales notes, app reviews, in-app guide responses, product tour feedback—everything gets tagged into themes such as onboarding confusion, performance slowness, permissions friction, or pricing clarity. This shared language lets me map qualitative signals to behavioral segments without losing nuance.

Then I join feedback to behavior. For any theme, I create a cohort of users who expressed it and compare their funnel completion, activation rate, and retention curves to a control group. If customers say a flow is “too complex,” I look for excessive time-on-step, back-and-forth navigation, tooltip dependence, or drop-offs at a specific screen. Cohort and funnel analysis make the problem visible and quantifiable.

Prioritization becomes straightforward once the impact is measurable. I size the opportunity by the delta in activation, conversion, or retention and estimate the lift from fixing the root cause. This moves us from feature wish lists to product-led growth bets with clear business cases and confidence intervals.

When it’s time to ship, I close the loop with disciplined experimentation. I use A/B testing with a clear minimum detectable effect (MDE), guide users through changes with in-app guides and product tours, and monitor behavior shifts in near real time. Success means behavior moves in the direction the VOC suggested—fewer drop-offs, faster task completion, and improved activation and retention.

A recent example: we kept hearing about “slow” reporting. Instead of debating, we correlated the feedback with sessions showing long load times and repeat clicks on filters. By simplifying defaults, prefetching key queries, and clarifying loading states, we cut perceived wait time by 42% and improved day-7 retention for affected cohorts. VOC identified the friction; behavior showed us exactly where to fix it.

This practice thrives with a simple cadence: weekly listening reviews with product trios to spot themes, monthly synthesis across VOC and usage, and dashboards that pair sentiment with behavior. Over time, the organization shifts from reactive requests to continuous discovery, where each insight is traced to a measurable change in user behavior.

If you want a roadmap that sells itself, start by letting the product speak. Connect your VOC themes to behavioral analytics, quantify the gaps, and ship targeted improvements that users can feel—and you can measure.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.

December 19, 2025
Inside Google’s Product Model: Hard-Won Lessons to Build Empowered, Outcome-Driven Teams

I’ve been systematically exploring how the product model shows up inside iconic companies. After studying “The Product Model at Spotify” and “The Product Model at Amazon,” I’m turning my lens to Google—specifically, how the product operating model, product culture, and product strategy manifest in practice and what we can pragmatically take back to our own organizations.

When I talk about the product model, I’m looking at the machinery that connects strategy to outcomes: empowered product teams, clear decision rights, tight product trios, continuous discovery, data-informed bets, and an operating cadence that enables learning at speed. My goal here is to unpack how those elements come together at Google and translate them into repeatable patterns you can adopt.

At a high level, I focus on how teams are empowered to solve problems rather than ship outputs, how outcomes vs output OKRs clarify what matters, and how experimentation (from rapid prototyping to A/B testing) de-risks decisions before they scale. I also examine how engineering and product partner to balance platform scalability with customer value, and how stakeholder management reinforces alignment without slowing teams down.

Why does this matter? Because the product model is a lever for resilience and speed. When product strategy is explicit and the operating model is built for learning, organizations multiply the impact of talented people. That’s how small, focused teams repeatedly deliver outsized results—even in complex, regulated, or high-scale environments like Google.

In the sections that follow, I’ll synthesize what I see as the core patterns behind Google’s approach and distill them into actionable guidance: how to structure product trios, how to run continuous discovery alongside delivery, how to set and calibrate OKRs for outcomes, and how to evolve your product culture so empowered product teams can do their best work. My aim is not to idolize a model, but to extract what’s portable and help you adapt it to your context.

Inspired by this post on SVPG.

December 19, 2025
Master Web Vitals in Amplitude to Elevate UX, SEO, and Product Growth with Confidence

I obsess over the moments that make or break user trust: how fast a page paints, how responsive it feels, and how stable it stays as content loads. Web Vitals are the clearest lens I have to connect those micro-moments to macro outcomes—activation, conversion, retention, and, yes, SEO ranking. Bringing those signals into Amplitude lets me translate web performance into product decisions that move the business.

Now in Amplitude, improve your website user experience and SEO ranking by measuring and taking action on your Web Vitals.

In practice, I focus on the Core Web Vitals—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)—and instrument them as event properties so I can segment by page type, device, geography, traffic source, and user cohort. That gives me a single source of truth that aligns engineering performance work with product metrics like activation and revenue, all inside a unified analytics platform.

My workflow is straightforward: I instrument Web Vitals in the client (sampling if needed), stream them into Amplitude, and build dashboards that pair performance distributions with key funnels. I look for thresholds—where a user’s LCP or INP crosses a boundary and their likelihood to convert or retain drops. When I see those cliffs, I know exactly which pages or audiences to target and which improvements unlock the most value.

From there, I run experiments. A/B testing on navigation layout, image optimization, or lazy-loading strategies helps me validate that a performance lift also drives a statistically significant improvement in conversion or retention. Because the analysis lives in Amplitude, I can quickly cohort users by performance experience (for example, “green” vs “yellow” LCP) and quantify how much better experiences translate into business outcomes—reducing the risk of shipping changes that only move a synthetic score without helping users.

SEO benefits are a welcome compounding effect. When I push more sessions into the “good” Web Vitals range, I typically see lower bounce rates, stronger session depth, and better engagement—signals that support search performance. I treat rankings as an outcome of great user experience rather than the goal itself; by improving real-user metrics, I earn durable gains that don’t evaporate with the next algorithm change.

Operationalizing this is crucial. I define product-level service objectives for LCP, INP, and CLS by key page groups, review them in QBRs alongside activation and retention, and set guardrails so performance never regresses during feature velocity. This turns performance into a habit for empowered product teams rather than a one-off initiative.

If you’re starting fresh, begin with a narrow slice: instrument Web Vitals on your top three entry pages, visualize their distributions in Amplitude, and overlay conversion and retention. Within a week, you’ll see where experience degrades for specific cohorts and have a prioritized, testable roadmap for improvement. The fastest path to better UX and growth is making performance visible where you already make product decisions—and that’s exactly what this workflow delivers.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.

December 18, 2025
Stop Tuning Prompts: How Context Engineering 10x’d Accuracy and Adoption in Our AI Platform

"The best AI products improve more through context engineering than prompt tinkering." I’ve seen this play out repeatedly in high-stakes, enterprise use cases: substantive gains come from how we curate, structure, and deliver context to models—not from wordsmithing. When we started treating context as a product surface, performance climbed, hallucinations dropped, and teams shipped with more confidence.

Here are four key decisions we made to improve our AI context.

First, we moved to a retrieval-first pipeline. We unified trusted sources—CRM records, support knowledge bases, product telemetry, and governance-approved docs—behind hybrid retrieval (semantic + keyword) with strong metadata ranking. This let us constrain generations to verifiable facts, apply privacy-by-design rules at the edge, and practice disciplined context window management so every token carried its weight. Freshness policies, source-level confidence scores, and lightweight schemas kept the system precise and auditable.

Second, we made eval-driven development non-negotiable. Every change to context assembly goes through offline evals and online A/B testing with clear acceptance thresholds (e.g., task success, groundedness, time-to-first-answer, and deflection rate). We sized tests with minimum detectable effect (MDE) and tied them to outcomes vs output OKRs so we weren’t just shipping more prompts—we were shipping measurable improvements that mattered to customers.

Third, we personalized context based on intent and role. We built AI workflows that detect user intent, segment by persona, and dynamically assemble context: recent account activity for customer success, policy-safe excerpts for finance, and fine-grained reasoning chains for product teams. For conversational and voice AI agent experiences, we combined short-term conversation memory with scoped, long-term account memory to preserve relevance without bloating the prompt. This agentic AI pattern ensured faster, safer, and more helpful responses.

Fourth, we operationalized context as a first-class platform capability. We invested in data governance (ownership, lineage, and redaction), instrumentation (Amplitude analytics for usage, retrieval hit rates, and failure modes), and CI/CD guardrails for context updates. Product trios partnered with SRE to monitor drift, while side-by-side comparisons and human-in-the-loop reviews turned frontline feedback into structured improvements. The result: a durable system that improves continuously instead of relying on one-off prompt tweaks.

Context engineering isn’t glamorous, but it compounds. By prioritizing retrieval-first design, rigorous evaluation, intent-aware assembly, and operational excellence, we transformed our AI features into dependable, enterprise-ready capabilities. If you’re serious about LLMs for product managers and sustainable AI Strategy, shift your energy from clever prompts to robust context—and watch adoption and trust follow.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.

December 16, 2025
Year-End Reflection for Product Leaders: Values, Themes, and the 100‑Wishes Reset

I’ve been closing the year with a deliberate reflection ritual for more than a decade, and this season I found fresh energy for it after listening to an insightful conversation with Teresa Torres and Petra Wille on All Things Product. Their approaches mirror the evolution many product leaders experience: moving from rigid annual goal-setting to values-led themes, longer time horizons, and a healthier respect for spaciousness. In my own practice, that shift has created better focus, less pressure, and far more meaningful outcomes.

Prefer to listen? You can find this episode here: Spotify | Apple Podcasts. I took notes with my team in mind and translated the discussion into a simple, values-driven framework that any product organization can adopt.

Why does annual reflection matter for product people? Because our work lives at the intersection of ambiguity, trade-offs, and time. If we only measure ourselves by shipped output or quarterly OKRs, we overlook the compounding value of learning, relationships, and judgement. I treat this ritual as a strategic reset: a chance to surface patterns, adjust expectations, and recommit to outcomes over output.

My own reflection habit started scrappy—paper notebooks, messy timelines, and even artful visualizations inspired by Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec. Like Petra, I’ve found that tactile, analog artifacts unlock insights I miss in a spreadsheet. Over time, I’ve kept the spirit and simplified the mechanics: a “what went well” review, a short list of hard lessons, and a handful of decisions that paid off—or didn’t.

The biggest evolution for me has been moving from rigid annual goals to values and themes. I still run OKRs, but I use them to track progress, not identity. The lens of process vs. outcome goals—reinforced by ideas from Atomic Habits—helped me set fewer, better commitments. For example, instead of “launch X by Y,” I’ll emphasize the cadence of customer discovery, the health of the product trio, and the quality of decisions made along the way.

One exercise that changed my practice is the “100 wishes” list. It’s powerful—and surprisingly difficult. Pushing past 30 or 40 wishes forces me to name latent interests and long-range intentions I rarely say out loud. Combined with decade-level themes, the list helps me balance ambition with patience. I don’t try to do it all next year; I use it to spotlight direction, not deadlines.

I also review patterns across years: Where did over-scheduling create hidden costs? When did I protect focus time and what did that unlock? Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule remains a useful calibration tool here. And when I feel the pull toward constant throughput, I revisit Stefan Sagmeister’s The Power of Time Off (TED Talk) to remind myself why strategically creating space often yields the most valuable ideas.

Of course, not every year follows plan—and that’s normal. Reflection helps me spot unrealistic expectations early and let them go. When setbacks hit, I’ll rewatch Dealing with Setbacks and re-ground in continuous discovery. The question isn’t “Did we do everything?” but “Did we learn fast, protect customer value, and make trade-offs aligned with our values?” That’s how empowered product teams compound impact.

My sharing philosophy has become more nuanced over time. Some reflections are public to invite dialogue and accountability; others stay private so I can process honestly. I’ve found it helpful to publish what I’m saying no to, capture a theme for the year ahead, and keep the rest for myself and my team. This balance preserves motivation while still contributing to the broader product management leadership community.

If you’re designing your own ritual, consider this lightweight flow: review wins and tough calls, write your “100 wishes,” extract a few values-based themes, then translate those into process goals for Q1. Revisit monthly, not just annually. If you like structured prompts, Chris Guillebeau’s How to Conduct Your Own Annual Review from The Art of Nonconformity offers a practical template you can adapt to your context.

For deeper dives and complementary ideas, I bookmarked these as part of my year-end reset: What I’m Saying No to This Year—And Why, Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do?, Scaling Impact: A Look at the Year Ahead (2022), Let’s Connect in 2025: A Look at the Year Ahead, The Interview Coach, and Petra’s own year-ahead reflections (here and her 2026 version). I also recommend revisiting the prior conversation on leadership and change: Role of Leadership in Transformations.

I’d love to hear how you approach your end-of-year reflection. What questions bring you the most clarity? Which practices help you set an intentional, values-driven path for the next year? Share your process—I’m always looking to learn from other product creators and leaders.

Inspired by this post on Product Talk.

December 16, 2025
From Insights to Impact: Turning Amplitude Analytics into Product-Led Growth at Scale

I’ve seen time and again that when content is as data-driven as the product, adoption accelerates. Partnering closely with a data-driven content marketing manager and Amplitude power user, I watched how precise storytelling—grounded in Amplitude analytics—can unlock user activation and retention at scale.

Previously, she managed all customer identity content at Okta.

We started by translating product strategy into measurable moments in the customer journey: activation events, aha moments, and retention cohorts. Using Amplitude analytics, we built funnels and segmentations to isolate high-signal behaviors, ran A/B testing on messaging and in-app guides, and turned retention analysis into an editorial roadmap that spoke to specific use cases and jobs-to-be-done. This unified analytics platform approach ensured the content engine and product telemetry were speaking the same language.

From there, we aligned go-to-market strategy with lifecycle communication—product tours, onboarding sequences, and contextual education that made the value proposition unmistakable. Through continuous discovery and product discovery rituals with product trios, we iterated messaging to sharpen product positioning and reduce time-to-value. The result was content that didn’t just describe features—it moved outcomes.

To keep us honest, we instrumented outcomes vs output OKRs tied to activation rate, expansion intent, and long-term retention. We watched leading indicators (setup completion, power-user actions) roll up into lagging results (weekly active usage and cohort retention), and refined our bets in tight feedback loops.

If you’re building a product-led growth motion, pair your roadmap with a content leader who treats telemetry as a design material. When an Amplitude power user brings the same rigor to narrative that engineers bring to code, the compounding effect on adoption, engagement, and retention is unmistakable.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Perspectives.

December 11, 2025
From Concierge to AI Marketing Engine: Inside Mowie’s Document Hierarchy Playbook

I’m constantly asked by SMB owners: What if your small business could have a full marketing team—automated content calendars, customer segmentation, and channel-specific posts—without the headcount? That question is no longer hypothetical; it’s precisely the promise behind Mowie, and the way they got there is a masterclass in practical AI product development.

I recently listened to Chris O'Connor (CEO) and Jessica Valenzuela (Co-Founder) of Mowie, an AI marketing platform built for small and medium-sized businesses in restaurants, retail, and e-commerce. Their story starts with a concierge marketing service—doing the work by hand for overwhelmed owners—and evolves into a fully automated AI product.

They walk through their "document hierarchy" approach: how Mowie crawls the web to build a "dossier" about each business, infers customer segments and marketing pillars, and generates quarterly content calendars with channel-specific posts. As a product leader, this is the kind of retrieval-first pipeline that consistently outperforms naive prompt chaining because it builds durable context before generation.

They also unpack the technical challenges of structuring unstructured data and the evolution from rigid schemas to loosely structured markdown. In my experience with LLMs for product managers, markdown becomes a flexible intermediate representation that’s easy to diff, trace, and feed back into models without brittle parsing.

Equally important, they use customer feedback—from calendar approvals to regeneration requests—as their primary evaluation signal. That’s eval-driven development in practice: close the loop with lightweight evals that reflect genuine user intent, not proxy metrics.

The planning model is elegant: the three mini-calendars—public events, business-specific events, and recommended campaigns—roll up into a coherent plan that eliminates the blank-page problem and enables steady, predictable execution.

Crucially, they’re building traceability so customers can see which context documents influenced their content. This kind of transparency increases trust, accelerates edits, and supports governance in regulated categories where auditability matters.

Onboarding and data collection stay pragmatic: let the system crawl first, ask humans only for deltas, and progressively profile over time. It’s a pattern I advocate in continuous discovery and AI workflows—keep humans in the loop without overwhelming them, and make the right action the easy action.

Early on, they used Simon Sinek's Golden Circle framework to validate demand and sharpen messaging. Framing the "why" before the "what" helps teams maintain a crisp value proposition and tighten their go-to-market strategy.

Performance measurement goes beyond vanity metrics by connecting marketing performance back to point-of-sale data for attribution. The ability to tie campaigns to revenue events is the bridge from clever content to accountable outcomes.

What’s next is equally compelling: deeper attribution, omnichannel expansion, and digital out-of-home displays. For SMBs, that points to a unified analytics platform spanning email, social, and in-store touchpoints—exactly where modern marketing is headed.

My takeaways for builders: invest in a retrieval-first pipeline with a resilient document hierarchy; prefer loosely structured markdown over rigid JSON when dealing with messy inputs; design human-in-the-loop controls that double as evals; and always connect activity to business outcomes. That’s how you turn an idea into a repeatable system that scales.

If you want to explore further, start here: Mowie AI — AI marketing platform for SMBs. For early validation and storytelling, revisit Simon Sinek's Golden Circle.

Inspired by this post on Product Talk.

December 11, 2025
Automated Insights for Product Teams: Uncover Causal ‘Aha’ Moments in Minutes, Not Weeks

I’ve spent countless cycles guiding teams through the maze of dashboards, SQL pulls, and ad‑hoc analyses—only to watch truly meaningful patterns emerge far too late. Automated insights are the next frontier in product analytics: a shift from manual exploration to AI that proactively surfaces what matters most. When we let the system do the heavy lifting, we accelerate discovery, reduce bias, and give product trios the clarity to act.

Finding causal connections in product data involves exhaustive searches and tests. We trained our AI to find “aha” moments in minutes instead of weeks.

Here’s what that means in practice for product management: the platform continuously scans events, cohorts, and segments; prioritizes signals linked to activation, conversion, and retention; and highlights likely causes behind meaningful movements in your core KPIs. Instead of sifting through endless funnels and cohorts, I get ranked hypotheses I can validate with targeted A/B testing and minimum detectable effect (MDE) guardrails.

This approach turns analytics into action. Automated insights reduce time-to-learning, tighten our discovery loops, and make continuous discovery tangible—especially when we’re aligning roadmaps, designing experiments, and refining onboarding. Whether you’re using tools like Amplitude analytics or instrumenting a unified analytics platform, the value is the same: faster, clearer paths to customer impact.

I’ve seen teams unlock retention analysis breakthroughs by spotting counterintuitive patterns—like a specific feature combination or an overlooked step in onboarding—well before they would have surfaced through manual analysis. With AI workflows scanning the noise and elevating the signal, we can focus on decisions: ship or iterate, scale or sunset, double down or pivot. That’s empowered product teams in action.

If you’re building for product-led growth, this is the leverage you’ve been waiting for. Automated insights transform how we prioritize, test, and communicate strategy—bringing us from gut feel and lagging indicators to explainable, causal narratives we can stand behind. The outcome is simple: more confident bets, less waste, and a faster path to durable product-market fit.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.

December 10, 2025
Unlock Real-Time Product Insights: Amplitude + OpenAI MCP in ChatGPT, Without BI Bottlenecks

I’ve been working to remove the friction between product questions and product answers. The most impactful step so far: connecting Amplitude analytics directly into ChatGPT via OpenAI’s MCP. This turns everyday conversations into decision-grade insights—no dashboards to hunt, no SQL to write, and no analytics queue to wait on.

Connect Amplitude data directly to the tools your team uses every day. OpenAI’s MCP connector eliminates traditional barriers to product data.

In practice, this means I can ask ChatGPT natural-language questions like, “Where are users dropping in our activation funnel this week?” or “Which cohorts are driving retention lift post-onboarding?” and get grounded answers from Amplitude—fast. It’s a step-change for product-led growth because the insights live where we already think and plan.

Here’s how I apply it day to day: I’ll prompt ChatGPT to compare week-over-week activation for new SMB signups across regions, diagnose drop-offs by step, and summarize A/B testing outcomes with guardrails like minimum detectable effect considerations. When we’re shaping strategy, I’ll pull a retention analysis and cohort breakdown to inform bet sizing and roadmap tradeoffs—all without pulling the team into a BI bottleneck.

Governance remains non-negotiable. I scope the MCP tools to a least-privilege data slice, apply privacy-by-design rules to exclude PII, and log every query for auditability. Clear data governance and AI risk management policies ensure we maintain trust while accelerating discovery. Tight context window management keeps prompts focused and reduces noise.

Operationally, the setup is straightforward: define the MCP tool spec for Amplitude, map canonical events and metrics (activation, retention, conversion, and product-qualified lead stages), and test with a retrieval-first pipeline so responses reliably cite the right source of truth. We standardize metric definitions across product, growth, and customer success to avoid semantic drift.

The impact on empowered product teams is immediate. Continuous discovery becomes a daily habit rather than a quarterly ritual; questions move from “I’ll get back to you” to “Let’s check right now.” For product managers working with LLMs, this is the connective tissue that makes ChatGPT a true ChatGPT connector for analytics—an on-demand, unified analytics platform that supports faster iteration and sharper decision-making.

If you’ve been waiting to make analytics truly ambient, this is the moment. Start small with a single funnel or cohort, validate governance, and expand to your core lifecycle metrics. The payoff is a shared understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus next—delivered in the flow of work.

Inspired by this post on Amplitude – Best Practices.

December 10, 2025
Build Powerful AI Writing Workflows with Claude Code: A No‑Code, Step‑by‑Step Playbook

My writing process used to be messy. Even in my role leading product strategy, I’d start strong and then stall because I hadn’t clarified what I truly wanted to say.

I’d begin with a brain dump—everything swirling in my head. I’d try to shape it into an outline, lose patience, and just start writing. A few paragraphs later, I’d realize I didn’t know where I was going, stop, and return to the outline. It was a tortured loop between writing and structuring.

Now I do it differently. When I get stuck, I don’t start writing. I ask Claude for help.

Claude reviews my outline and helps me fill in gaps. It often suggests things that I don’t like. This is good. It helps me figure out the core of what I want to say. Instead of writing my way to what I think, I discuss my way to what I think.

Claude isn’t just a sounding board. I also use it to help me brainstorm headlines, explore outline alternatives, critique each section as I write, conduct supporting research, act as my thesaurus and dictionary, make SEO recommendations, and so much more. As a result, I am writing way more.

I didn’t design this workflow in one sitting. I built it iteratively, the same way I build products: by asking, "How can Claude help with this?" and evolving from there.

If you haven’t been following along, I’m deep in a series about Claude Code and how it helps me work better. Here’s what we’ve covered so far: Claude Code: What It Is, How It’s Different, and Why Non-Technical People Should Use It, Stop Repeating Yourself: Give Claude Code a Memory, How to Use Claude Code Safely: A Non-Technical Guide to Managing Risk, and How to Choose Which Tasks to Automate with AI (+50 Real Examples).

This week, I’m diving into how to design personal AI workflows. I’ll use my writing workflow to illustrate each step, and I encourage you to follow along with your own process so you end with something tangible.

Claude breaks down an AI workflow article and suggests three paywall points, weighing trade-offs to guide conversion strategy. A clear, structured example of planning content and automation steps with Claude Code.

Designing AI workflows looks a lot like designing product solutions. I lean on "discovery" habits—clarifying outcomes, mapping the journey, and testing assumptions—to make the work both reliable and repeatable.

This series is inspired by my personal usage of Claude Code. I have not received any compensation from Anthropic for writing this series. And you can trust that if that ever changes, I will disclose it. This is not only required by the FTC here in the US, but I strongly believe it is the right thing to do. You can count on me to do so.

First, I map out what I do to complete the task. Once you’ve identified the AI workflow you want to create, start by mapping exactly what you do when you do it yourself. If this feels hard, do the task a few more times and jot down each step as you go.

Here’s what I do when I write a blog post: I choose a topic; I write down everything I can think of related to that topic; I structure it into an outline; I do some research to fill in gaps; I write each section; I edit each section; I think about SEO tactics; I brainstorm headlines; I decide what images to add; and I send it to my editor.

If this looks a lot like story mapping, that’s because it is. Instead of mapping what a customer has to do to get value from a solution, I’m mapping what I do to complete a task. The benefit is the same: I can see what must happen and ask, "Where can AI help?"

From here, I focus on four moves: choose one step to automate or augment with AI; decide on the right automation (or augmentation) strategy—code vs. LLMs; prototype the first workflow with detailed instructions; and test and iterate until it meets my bar for quality and speed.

My goal is to give you enough guidance that you can follow along and end with a draft of your first AI workflow. If you apply continuous discovery to your own process, you’ll not only accelerate output—you’ll improve the clarity and quality of your thinking along the way.

Inspired by this post on Product Talk.

December 10, 2025
Train Leaders First: How Product Leadership Unlocks Real Transformation and Discovery

I recently listened to Role of Leadership in Transformations – All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille, and it crystallized a pattern I’ve seen across multiple transformations: teams often get trained in continuous discovery, but nothing changes because leadership habits stay the same. If you want to move from projects to true product thinking, “train your leaders first” isn’t a catchy mantra—it’s a prerequisite.

The episode digs into why discovery training can be stellar while adoption still stalls. I’ve witnessed this firsthand: teams return excited to interview customers and test ideas, but leaders continue to manage via features, roadmaps, and approvals. The result is predictable—discovery fades. When leaders evolve how they evaluate work, talk about outcomes, and shape rituals, discovery sticks. Without that shift, even energized, empowered product teams drift back to output.

What resonated most was how organizational dynamics kick in the moment teams start bringing real customer evidence to the table. Discovery uncovers conflicts. Sales, account management, stakeholders, and executives all feel the impact when the old “my job is to tell teams what to build” mindset collides with evidence-driven practices. Hierarchy also clashes with modern product practices—because in discovery, “all ideas come equal.” Product culture isn’t an accident; it must be intentionally created through norms, expectations, and systems that prioritize outcomes over output.

I’ve also seen the leadership skills gap up close. Many product leaders never learned continuous discovery themselves, so they aren’t equipped to coach it, critique it, or celebrate it. This is where great product management leadership shows up: the ability to assess discovery quality, reinforce outcomes vs output OKRs, and run cadences that create momentum. Leaders who invest in building these muscles—often through communities of practice and structured coaching—transform the operating environment for product trios and cross-functional teams.

The episode’s discussion of pilot teams is spot-on. Start small to surface hidden blockers—the corporate “immune system”—before going broad. Pilots expose decision bottlenecks, misaligned incentives, and policy friction that standard training never reveals. Tools like the Product Leadership Wheel help set clearer expectations for the craft of product leadership, while a coherent Product Operating Model makes the path from pilots to full transformation explicit and durable. I’m particularly excited about resources like the Discovery Habits Toolbox because they give leaders practical ways to coach continuous discovery without reverting to feature policing.

Here are the big takeaways I’m carrying forward. Skills training isn’t enough—if leaders still manage through feature requests and static roadmaps, teams will abandon discovery even if they loved the training. Leaders need training too—they must know how to evaluate discovery work, talk about outcomes, and create rituals that reinforce new habits. Discovery will surface conflicts—plan for stakeholder management, alignment with sales and account teams, and executive sponsorship. Product leadership is a craft—seniority alone doesn’t create clarity, systems, or culture. And transformations should start with leaders and pilot teams—because that’s where the real blockers live.

If you want to go deeper, listen to this episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5cBTEbYX1YW3BF6icAPXzi or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/kh/podcast/role-of-leadership-in-transformations/id1794203808?i=1000740342572. It’s a concise masterclass on why leadership behaviors—not just team skills—determine whether continuous discovery thrives.

For further exploration, I recommend these resources. Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org. Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com. Product Talk Academy’s Train Your Team by Teresa Torres: https://learn.producttalk.org/train-your-team. Melissa Perri’s “Train leaders first, not last.” Linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melissajeanperri_train-leaders-first-not-last-most-product-activity-7380927349732839424-sqBJ/. Coaching for Product Leaders/Executives by Petra Wille: https://www.petra-wille.com/coaching-packages. Product Leadership Wheel by Petra: https://www.petra-wille.com/plwheel.

To get hands-on with discovery skills, check out Story-Based Customer Interviews: https://learn.producttalk.org/course/story-based-customer-interviews. For visual management, see An idea board—do we see enough potential?: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/…/idea_board3.png and Four Taskboards in a simple illustration: Idea Board, Product Overview Board, Product Discovery Board and Development Team Board: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/…/boards.png. Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?: https://www.petra-wille.com/blog/opportunity-assessment-do-we-want-to-invest-in-discovering-this-idea?rq=taskboard.

If you’re preparing your organization to adopt a product operating model, read Is Your Organization Ready to Adopt the Product Operating Model?: https://www.producttalk.org/organizational-readiness/ and The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation: https://www.producttalk.org/the-product-operating-model/. Communities of practice can accelerate leadership growth: Community of Practice by Petra: https://www.petra-wille.com/community-of-practice. For foundational texts, see TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model: https://www.svpg.com/books/transformed-moving-to-the-product-operating-model/ and EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products: https://www.svpg.com/books/empowered-ordinary-people-extraordinary-products/.

I’d love to hear how you’re enabling continuous discovery in your context. What leadership behaviors have made the biggest difference? Where does your corporate immune system show up, and how are you addressing it with pilot teams, clearer expectations, and a consistent product operating model? Share your perspective—I read every comment.

Inspired by this post on Product Talk.

December 9, 2025
Make Every Answer the Last: Building a Self-Improving AI Support Engine for 2026

Once I’ve defined the right roles on my team, the next move is to design an operating model that makes progress a habit. My goal is simple: every interaction should strengthen the system so the AI Agent keeps improving over time.

I anchor the team on a mantra that has never failed me: “The first time you answer a question should be the last.” That single statement reframes support as a compounding system rather than a one-off activity.

The ambition is to ensure every resolution makes the next one faster and more accurate, so fewer issues repeat, quality compounds, and support scales naturally. That doesn’t happen by accident—it requires intentional design.

In practice, this comes down to four essentials: clear ownership of performance, guardrails that make iteration fast and safe, feedback loops that turn learning into routine upgrades, and a culture that celebrates the work of improvement—not just the outcomes. Here’s how I put that into play.

First, I start with clear ownership. Ambiguity is one of the most common reasons AI performance plateaus. When no one truly owns how the AI Agent performs, feedback gets lost, issues linger, and improvements stall.

On high-performing teams, I assign a single owner—often an AI ops lead—responsible for making the AI Agent better. They review resolution trends to spot underperformance, make targeted updates to content, configuration, and behavior, coordinate with product and engineering on systemic blockers, and set improvement priorities, targets, and timelines. The title matters less than the mandate; what matters is clear authority to drive change across teams.

Real-world example: At Dotdigital, AI performance plateaued after a strong start—resolving around 2,800 conversations per month for three consecutive months. To drive resolution rates up, the team created a dedicated support operations specialist role, filled by an experienced agent with deep product knowledge. This person will focus on refining snippets, improving content, and enhancing the AI’s resolution capabilities.

Second, I make iteration fast and safe. As the AI Agent takes on more volume and complexity, change can start to feel risky—so teams hesitate, and performance stalls. Lightweight governance fixes that by making the path from insight to action predictable.

I keep the rules simple and explicit: which changes need review (and which don’t), who the decision-makers are, how we test updates before they go live, where feedback flows so it’s seen and acted on, and when progress gets reviewed on a steady cadence. Governance isn’t bureaucracy—it’s what keeps improvement routine and safe.

Real-world example: Anthropic ran a focused “Fin hackathon” sprint to improve their AI Agent’s resolution rate. The team audited unresolved queries, identified underperforming topics, and created or updated content to close gaps. They converted frequently used macros into AI-usable snippets, monitored Fin’s performance during live support, and continuously refined content based on real interactions. This structured approach enabled rapid improvement while maintaining quality standards.

Third, I build a system that learns by default. AI performance isn’t static, but many organizations treat it like a one-time implementation. The most successful teams operationalize learning: they analyze where the AI Agent struggles and feed those insights directly into structured improvements.

The signals are straightforward: review common handoffs to humans, track unresolved queries by topic or intent, measure resolution rate trends over time, and use those inputs to prioritize fixes and content upgrades. Whether you follow a formal loop like the Fin Flywheel framework or something lighter, the goal is the same—make improvement inevitable.

Fourth, I treat content as competitive infrastructure. Your AI Agent is only as good as what it knows. As George Dilthey, Head of Support at Clay, put it: “That’s when we realized: AI doesn’t just come up with information out of nowhere, you have to feed it. We were spending all our time evaluating tools when we should’ve been focused on content.”

I operationalize knowledge like infrastructure: every topic has a clear owner, content is structured, versioned, and ingestion-ready, new products ship with source-of-truth content by default, and changes ship on a schedule—not when someone finds time. This is the backbone that differentiates teams who scale confidently from those who stall out.

In my organization, we’ve evolved our New Product Introduction (NPI) process by aligning early with R&D on a single, canonical source of truth that becomes the foundation for all downstream content—including what the AI Agent uses to resolve queries. By embedding content creation into launch readiness, not as an afterthought, we’ve consistently hit 50%+ resolution rates on new features from day one.

Finally, I make belief visible. Even the best system will stagnate if people stop believing in it. Belief can fade quietly unless you reinforce it on purpose. I keep it strong by sharing specific wins regularly, highlighting improvements with metrics, and recognizing the people behind the gains—then giving them space to lead. This isn’t just about morale; it keeps everyone aligned on the bigger play.

When you put it all together—clear ownership, safe iteration, a learning system by default, and content as infrastructure—AI performance compounds. As the AI Agent gets better, the entire support model becomes faster, more reliable, and truly scalable. That’s the foundation of a modern, AI-first support organization.

Next, I’ll take this a level deeper and share how capacity planning changes when AI handles the majority of inbound volume and your team shifts into higher-value roles. If scaling with confidence is the goal, this is where the operating model pays off.

Inspired by this post on The Intercom Blog.

December 9, 2025