🧩 AI + Human Judgment / PM Snacks 89
SaaS products becoming AI-mediated data services • Systematizing "taste" • Prioritize with intuition • Blend AI with traditional UI • Customer mindsets impact on product strategy
Hey everyone,
There's a fascinating shift happening in product building right now: as AI accelerates development cycles, the differentiator between a good product and an excellent one, is increasingly, human intuition and taste.
This edition explores how SaaS products might become AI-mediated data services, how successful companies systematically operationalize "taste", how prioritization frameworks can embrace intuition, and discover emerging UI patterns that blend AI with traditional interfaces.
As machines handle more of the "how," humans must get better at the "why" and "what" of product building.
Please support this newsletter by sharing it with your colleagues or liking it (tap on the 💙).
Enjoy!
🍭 5 snacks
1️⃣ Do SaaS Founders Dream of System Prompts? • Apr 2025 • 8 min read • #AI #strategy
- The author outlines how the SaaS stack might be evolving from rigid applications to a new paradigm: System of Record + AI Middleware + Dynamic UI/Agents. Instead of forcing users into predefined workflows, AI middleware would dynamically interprets rules, might generate interfaces on-demand, and even adapt to user intent.
- Last week, the Claude System Prompt reveal shocked most people because of the amount of intelligence encapsulated in it. If business logic can live inside a system prompt and UIs can be generated dynamically, the path forward for SaaS companies could be: to start viewing your product as a flexible data service rather than a rigid interface, before someone else does.
2️⃣ The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste • May 2025 • 13 min read • #mindset
In today's AI-accelerated world, shipping fast isn't enough to win. We might need to apply finely-tuned intuition, aka taste, to build remarkable differentiated software. First Round just published a rundown on how companies like Linear, Stripe and Square operationalize this skill through concrete systems:
- Systematized review processes: Stripe used "20% and 80% reviews" with designated "red pen holders" to maintain quality at scale
- Minimum remarkable products: Square and others build for "high-expectation customers" rather than settling for merely viable products
- Opinionated design: Linear intentionally limits flexibility, believing "you can't build the optimal tool if it's endlessly customizable"
3️⃣ Dynamic Framework for Making Product Decisions • Mar 2025 • 6 min read • #prioritization
Tired of frameworks like RICE that reduce complex decisions to arbitrary scores? VICE (Vibe, Impact, Confidence, Effort) offers a refreshing alternative where the V emphasizes human judgment and intuition. Instead of scoring in isolation, you compare features in pairs, with winners gaining Elo rating points while losers drop.
- Upside: it naturally captures contextual nuances, forces explicit trade-offs, and aligns with how we actually make decisions (A vs B rather than absolute values). Also, on top of vibe coding, we can now vibe prioritizing ;)
- Watch-outs: "vibe" adds needed intuition, be careful not to let it become a backdoor for HiPPO-driven decisions or hype-chasing features
🤖 Post-Chat UI • Apr 2025 • 8 min read • #AI #design
Traditional apps are starting to feel broken compared to new AI-enhanced interfaces that blends AI capabilities with traditional UI. Read this article to discover 9 emerging patterns, from “Generative Right-Click” and natural-language search to inline daemons and AI-driven clean-up.
⏳ The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework • Apr 2024 • 11 min read • #strategy • Most clicked link 1y ago in PM Snacks 81.
To identify how to better compete and serve users, start from your customers’ mindsets:
- Hair on Fire: You solve a clear, urgent need that your customers have identified. As a result, they already employ a solution (a competitor or even Excel), the market is crowded and to win, you will need to build a best-in-class differentiated product. The latter part being the most important.
- Hard Fact: Customers may not even be conscious they have a problem, you will hear them say “it is what it is”. As a result, you’ll need to overcome their habits and start educating the market. For example, when Hubspot started, they had to invent the term “inbound marketing” to explain what their product was for. Square decided to tackle the “cash only” hard fact by turning every smartphone into a credit card reader, and distributed their solution for free in order to stand a chance.
- Future Vision: You enable a new reality through visionary innovation, requiring endurance and lot of investment beforehand. Customers will first be skeptical you can even deliver the solution you are pitching. Think of products like the iPhone, Figma or ChatGPT.
🗄️ Recently saved
Links worth reading that I saved, but did not highlight:
- ChatGPT o3 can reverse engineer intelligence from a picture of a whiteboard
- Collective’s CTO handled 95% of support tickets for 3mo to learn more about their users, and automate what could be
- Trust is not binary but a spectrum: enter the “trust battery” metaphor
- AI Prompt Patterns Cheat Sheet
- Microsoft Generative AI lessons for beginners
—
Thank you for reading this far.
Until next time!
Olivier
Share → Please help me promote this newsletter by sharing it with colleagues (tap the refer button) or consider liking it (tap on the 💙, it helps me a lot)!
About → Productverse is curated by Olivier Courtois (15y+ in product, Fractional CPO, coach & advisor). Each issue features handpicked links to help you become a better product maker.