Blow Up Your Assumptions: Rethinking Product and Engineering in the age of AI

This was a thought experiment: what would it take to really dramatically rethink what AI can do all the way through the product lifecycle?

I assume we have all heard or are hearing a lot about product prototyping tools. Certainly you have on this Substack. And rightly so! They are cool. Tools like Lovable are changing how we prototype, and sparking talk about merging and blurring roles between design and product management.

Essentially, getting ideas in at the top of the product pipeline has never been easier. By the way this is not unique to product! Getting ideas with AI at the top of the marketing pipeline has also never been easier.

In both cases, getting AI to really shift workflows through the rest of the the way we develop product is harder. Cursor is working on AI-assisted code as an unlock, and that’s massive. But that’s not how we build product. That’s how we write code, which is a tiny part of the overall process.

So what does it look like when we toss our assumptions about how it is supposed to work in the air and dare to ask ourselves how it might be much simpler? I don’t know that I have the answers here, but I think the conversation is worth having…