Product people are generators, by profession and perhaps by personality. If you have made a career of working in product, you probably aren’t intimidated by the empty canvas, the blank page, the unsolved user and business problem. You see them as opportunities to make something. So you scribble a start; you doodle an idea; you ideate, prototype, and refine.

When I write a Pollinator essay each month, I start in chaos. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I think about things I’ve read, observations I’ve made, or problems I’ve encountered. Then I hammer out half-notes and random blurts, riddled with missteps and dead ends. For example, this essay you’re reading started with the truly dumb idea that I affirm my existence by writing sentences, but my dog is a terrible writer, and he exists, so perhaps my affirmation through writing is foolish. I quickly deleted it; it made little sense.

In the early stages of making, we rip through ideas quickly. “My dog is a terrible writer.” No, that’s silly. “Making things like sentences is an act of thinking.” That’s better, but too broad. “Product people are generators.” That might be promising; follow it. That’s how generative work (like product management or essay writing) often happens: start broad, test and reject, get narrower, then follow a line of thinking, armed with language and logic. Write it out. Test it. Write it again. See how a user or reader responds. Make it better. Follow it. Chase it. Snare it, probably with words.

That messy process of generating, testing, rejecting, and refining ideas may be more important than we realize. Which brings me to a new concept I've been thinking about: cognitive surrender. The concept was recently studied by Wharton School researchers Steven D Shaw and Gideon Nave. It’s the notion that we humans, working with AI, might be predisposed to simply accept what the AI tells us, even if its output is shallow or illogical.

I know I’ve experienced the temptation to just receive what an LLM gives me—or, worse, to copy an LLM’s output and paste it as if it were my own. After all, an AI-prompt session can be an efficient and even delightful way to work through a business, technical, or personal predicament. But I wonder: if we succumb to the LLM’s soothing syntax, are we dodging the necessary, hard work of fighting through challenges of logic and voice while maintaining sovereign decision-making? The struggle against surrender is how we get to understanding and mastery.

Make no mistake: of course I use AI-based tools quite a bit. To ignore them would be malpractice for someone in my role. But I think it’s critical that product people resist the allure of easy cognitive surrender. I try to enforce the proper relationship between my mind and the LLM. The LLM is there to suggest and assist, not to generate and perform. I think of it this way: I want the LLM to speak to me, but I almost never want it to speak as me. 

A lot of product and technical professionals begin tackling a problem with an AI session. And for some challenges, maybe that’s the best way to get out of the starting blocks. But for other problems, the best beginning is to stub out a clumsy draft, away from the AI, with the pen firmly in your own hand. If you confront the blank page yourself, alone, you’ll know the thinking was yours before the machine ever encountered it. So write a word. Make a mark. Trust yourself. Never surrender. 

On to the Garden,

Welcome, OSN Subscribers

At the end of May, I had the pleasure of speaking at a Twin Cities technology and innovation conference, Open Source North. I invited attendees to subscribe to this newsletter and join our Pollinator garden. SDG and Sweet Harvest Foods even offered a container of honey for anyone who subscribed that day.

Maybe it was my boyish charm, maybe it was my earth-shattering content, and probably it was the free honey, but that day was the Pollinator’s single biggest subscription day ever. It also made May 2026 our biggest single subscription month ever. So thank you to all who subscribed that day or that month. We’re glad you’re here. Feel free to share this newsletter with others in your networks. And I’d love to learn what you hope to get from this newsletter or to hear your impressions of it. Feel free to shoot me an email ([email protected]) or even to leave a comment below.

Around the Garden

Don’t give up the fight

Check it out: Giving up your thinking to AI, by Jeff Gothelf

Once again we recommend a post from Jeff Gothelf, a popular product and UX consultant and advisor. Here Gothelf addresses the notion of cognitive surrender without ever using the term. He advises a rigorous discipline of pushing back against an AI's recommendations, lest we fall victim to something called "intellectual leveling"—which is quite similar to the cognitive surrender notion. Gothelf borrows this concept from the neuroscientist Sarah Baldeo, who has studied how human cognition changes when we’re engaging with AI.

Here’s Gothelf describing the concept and referring to Baldeo’s work:

Gothelf has a practical suggestion: start writing (or other generative work) outside an AI, noting what you want to express before you fire up a chat session. I'd write much more than the 3-4 bullet points he recommends. I also like the suggestion from Dr. Baldeo, via Gothelf, to take intentional breaks from using AI in your writing, lest you become numb to its flattening effects. For example, if you’ve gotten in the habit of always using AI when you write, commit to writing entirely on your own at least one day each week. And that day might as well be today.

The longest hour

Check it out: The work that doesn’t get faster, by Noa Ganot, product coach, Infinify

Product pros are pressured to use AI to compress nearly every product task. In this post, Israeli product advisor Noa Ganot offers a useful corrective, noting that some essential product work resists this compression by its very nature. Discovery conversations, trust-building with stakeholders, learning a messy domain, and even just thinking hard about a problem can’t be sped up. The hour it takes to truly listen to a user is still an hour. Ganot's point is more structural than nostalgic. Speed offered by new tools is real and often welcome, but it applies unevenly. The work that can't be hurried is often the work that matters most.

Ganot recognizes the risk of mistaking velocity for progress: we might just fill the time freed up by AI with more fast work, crowding out the slow. The smarter play: use that reclaimed time to go deeper where depth is needed. For product people, that means more time with users, more presence with partners, more time “holding the initiative end to end.”

Compound interest

Check it out: Cognitive Surrender. Addy Osmani, engineering leader, former director at Google Cloud AI

Addy Osmani is a serious technologist and engineer who has worked extensively on Chrome and Gemini for Google. In this post he offers a cogent summary of cognitive surrender and similar human/machine relationships. He notes how developers surrendering to an AI’s output can produce structural weaknesses that later damage a codebase or a product. I like his use of “a tiny loan” as a metaphor, much like technical debt.

This post is squarely aimed at engineers, but strategists, designers, and product managers will find Osmani’s tips useful, too. I especially appreciated his techniques for resisting cognitive surrender. They include "introduce friction by design" and "solo time at the keyboard." (The latter is very similar to Gothelf and Baldeo's "spend time every week writing without AI" advice.)

More blossoms

• A tidy Instagram Reel from Avery Swartz summarizing Cognitive Surrender vs. Cognitive Offloading.

• Tech Policy Press article from Harvard student Evan Liu on how students are at risk of using AI tools to surrender their own thinking and learning.

• Amoeboids list of AI prompts for product managers. Pollinator readers will appreciate using them, as long as you maintain your generative autonomy.

• YouTube video of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast episode with innovator Tony Fadell on building taste—and avoiding cognitive surrender!—in product development.

Outside the Box

Most (though not all) Pollinator subscribers are Americans. As our nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, American Pollinators might appreciate this well-designed interactive examination of that foundational document. It’s provided by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

While it’s designed for schools and other educational uses, anyone will enjoy the quizzes and interactive games. My favorite feature: the “founder personality” quiz. It uses your responses to various scenarios and questions to match you with some Declaration-era American figure, from First Lady Abigail Adams to poet Phillis Wheatley. Apparently I’m most like Thomas Jefferson.

Check it out at https://www.gilderlehrman.org/declaration-independence/

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.