NotebookLM

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

Strategy3 steps

Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)

Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.

Productivity4 steps

Cycle-Time Is the Enemy (Ship Ship Ship)

The gap between knowing something is good and users seeing it is your biggest enemy — attack the decision time, not the work time.

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

Mindset3 steps

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Leadership4 steps

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

Strategy5 steps

Format Malleability: Any Input, Any Output

Stop shipping content in one format — give people the power to remix knowledge into the medium they're in the mood for

Productivity3 steps

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)

Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.

Innovation4 steps

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Communication5 steps

Read Before You Retract: AI Incident Triage

When your AI product goes viral for something alarming, diagnose the audience's reaction before you touch the product

Self-Mastery4 steps

Reps-to-Judgment (Building Product Sense)

Product sense isn't taught — it's earned through thousands of shipped micro-decisions with the shortest possible cycle time.

Innovation5 steps

Technology-First Discovery with a Shape Hypothesis

When you start from a capability instead of a problem, form a hypothesis about its shape before you ship it

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.

Innovation4 steps

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

Use your own product at scale, document every flaw with screenshots, then personally drive the fixes to closure.

Leadership4 steps

The Fixit OKR

Put a hard number on fixing known-broken issues and fund it alongside growth, so quality work never gets zero resources.

Leadership4 steps

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

Innovation5 steps

The Magic Test for Control Surfaces

Users ask for knobs and sliders; shipping them literally is how a magical product becomes an ordinary one

Innovation5 steps

The Person Is the Product

Find one person with an extraordinary workflow, shadow them, then compress their expertise into software

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

Strategy3 steps

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

Leadership6 steps

The Zero-to-One Enclave

Conditions that let a startup-shaped team actually ship inside a big company

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.