Cross-functional product teams have a remarkable new shortcut: AI-enabled tools and processes. With the right prompts in the right sequence, we can conjure something that looks and behaves like a finished product. The journey from prototype to product that used to consume months of careful engineering is now an afternoon jaunt. Who could blame a team for racing ahead?

But in the rush to generate big things quickly, we risk skipping the small things entirely. And the small things are where the learning lives.

Remember the quaint notion of a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP? With AI at their disposal, some product teams are at risk of ignoring the MVP. Why start with minimum, when maximum is so easy?

But the purpose of starting with an MVP isn’t (never was!) to deliver the first release on a path to certainty. No, the purpose is the viable part: to figure out what we can test, what we can learn, how we can put something into the hands of a user and watch what happens when they encounter it. Our first gifts to our users shouldn’t be big; big may overwhelm them. Instead, they should be human-sized, specific, intentionally narrow to provoke a response. That’s why minimum matters.

So yes, move fast, think big, but don’t forget the small. In the haze of a prompt-session, we’re tempted—who wouldn’t be?—to immediately add the next thing, and the thing after that. Smart teams enforce a discipline of stopping at low fidelity, even when they don't need to. Use grayscales and rough edges. Keep some screens blank. Focus on exploring a small, specific hypothesis. Through the interface, remind the user that this is a true test artifact, intended to teach us while they explore it. Ask them, with genuine curiosity: Would this help you? Does this make sense? How would it help you more? How would it make more sense?

Some teams, including our teams here at SDG, are already doing something interesting: pulling users into the prompting process they’re using for prototyping. Call it proto-prompting. If you’re prototyping through prompting, include the user in the process. Sit with them. Give them time to react, to misunderstand, to frustrate you, to surprise you. There, the user’s language and reactions will shape the product in real time. The AI still moves fast, but the human is still in the center of the loop, and the scale is right for both.

AI is extraordinary at shaping and scaling a product for delivery. But humans—your users are humans, aren’t they?—are the ones who teach you whether a product is worth delivering at all.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

All aboard

Check it out: AI Can Make Software Now. That Changes Everything. Podcast with Paul Ford (Aboard, etc.)

I’m a sucker for anything from the great Paul Ford, formerly of Postlight, now of Aboard, an AI-product development firm. In this wide-ranging conversation on the Channels podcast, hosted by Peter Kafka, Ford demonstrates a mature and honest understanding of how AI might affect custom enterprise software.

I appreciate Ford’s humility. He doesn't make wild pronouncements. He speaks (and writes) like a thoughtful person. He recognizes that we get to good by building up. So much dialogue and conversation in these wild times tends toward broad statements of what is wrong, what is right, what no one notices, what everyone misses. I resist that mode of writing; others must like it, because they sure seem to use it a lot.

Ford is a professional technologist with experience as a professional writer, and he neatly integrates the two endeavors. I love what he says about human writing having jagged edges, and the same thing applying to code. Several times he talks about "software-shaped problems" or "product-shaped problems." I hadn’t thought about that framing for the work we do at SDG (or that you Pollinator readers do on your own products), but I like it.

Wait: we’re influencers?

Check it out: The Future Is Not Yet Invented: The Product Leader’s Influence on the World We All Will Live in. Petra Wille, product coach

German product management guru Petra Wille reflects on the duties and responsibilities of being a wise leader in the face of volatility about how AI will change our future. I think she has exactly the right blend of curiosity about possibilities and healthy skepticism about economic incentives and perceived inevitability.

My favorite part of her essay: the questions she poses. For example, a Pollinator could spend a life musing about questions like “Is all of this perceived volatility and uncertainty actually distracting us from some real underlying problems we’d be better off solving?” or “Who actually gains from the current mood in the software industry?,” both of which she raises—though doesn’t directly answer—in her essay.

The core of her argument is that software will have an outsized influence on the future, and product leaders have an outsized influence on what software does, so therefore the “chain of responsibility” for the future of the world runs straight at product leaders.

Responsibility for the future of the world is intimidating, sure. But we product folk aren’t ones to shirk responsibility. So I say bring it on.

Taste test

Check it out: Why taste won’t save product managers from AI. Jeff Gothelf, Continuous Learning

If you’ve read much product content, you’ve probably seen “taste” declared as the product manager’s superpower, especially given the speed with which AI tools can crank out product. “Ah,” this thinking goes, “we shall overcome the risk of slop through our superior discernment.” I don’t even disagree with this: our taste, our standards, and our judgment are important qualities for a product manager to cultivate.

But product and UX guru Jeff Gothelf offers a contrary opinion—and contrary opinions are often worth listening to. Gothelf frames his argument by recounting an ongoing discussion with his collaborator Josh Seiden.

I love his diagnosis of the “mysterious professional fog” of soft language. His broader point: what we call taste in product work is the result of serious, disciplined craft and an outcome of hard-won learning and experience. It should be valued, trained, and, yes, funded. Don’t dismiss it as a fortuitous accident or a little genetic quirk.

Outside the Box

One of my favorite subgenres of rhetoric is the college graduation speech. Every spring, right around this time of year, we’re treated to a handful of new entrants, but only a few rise to the level of classics. The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever website from NPR catalogs the best of them—though it ends at 2015. It includes speeches from lauded writers, world leaders, and accomplished artists and scientists. One of my favorites comes from Bill Watterson, the writer and illustrator of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, at Kenyon College in 1989. Thirty-seven years later, these words still ring true.

Check out the whole collection at https://apps.npr.org/commencement/.

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.