Up with people

AI has arrived, but don't forget the human beings

Author

Jason Scherschligt
September 29, 2026

I enjoy so many parts of digital product and UX work. I like being surrounded by talented people practicing their crafts at an expert level. I like that the job requires top-grade rhetorical skills and top-grade analytical skills. I like meeting interesting people doing things I hadn’t imagined, seeing their work and lives, and discovering how I might help them through technology, experiences, and services.

Mostly, I like that a product is how a group of people (a business, a non-profit) puts its talents together to solve a problem for another group of people (its customers or users). In short: I like working with people to improve the experience of other people.

Astute observers of tech and culture say that humanity has just stepped out of the starting blocks of a grand technical and social race that might change society forever: the rise of Artificial Intelligence. This moment in history is already being called the dawn of a new age, or an era. That’s a mighty declaration. Ages and eras are history’s big blocks.

I came across a great description of this type of transformative tech from an MIT researcher named Justin Reich. Reich says Artificial Intelligence is an arrival technology, not an adoption technology. AI is here, whether individuals want to adopt it or not. An analogue: the introduction of the electrical power grid in the late nineteenth century. It too arrived suddenly, changing economics, business, domestic life, communications, and labor. It was both potent and dangerous. It made life easier and more complicated. It required both breathtaking innovation and reasonable regulation. It was also inescapable; only a minuscule fraction of humans never encounter electric power.

Smart product professionals are thinking the same way about AI. It’s changing how we ideate, prototype, plan, document, test, measure, and deliver products.

But while AI is transforming the way product teams work, I’m hopeful that the heart of our profession will still be people. Pesky human beings—curious apes with social systems and inner lives and job descriptions and credit scores—should always occupy a prominent place in our product ecosystems. Sure, we can build agents and we can prompt-conjure code, imagery, and even language. But if we’re doing our job well, the agents and the prompts are all, at some point, for the benefit of some person, made of flesh and blood and soul and mind.

So when you, Pollinator community, contemplate how AI should affect your product practices, I urge you to focus on the people. What human problem are you solving? Are you making some fellow person smarter, healthier, safer, or happier? Something I love about working with SDG is that our AI, data, and machine learning consultants never forget the humans.

Yes, Artificial Intelligence has arrived. But human intelligence was already here. May it never leave.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

So what do you actually do around here?

This must have been an ambitious undertaking. Product consultant Aakash Gupta interviewed over one hundred product managers who are building AI-enabled features. I appreciate how he focused on foundational questions:

  • What do you actually do?

  • What knowledge do you need?

  • What skills matter?

  • What tools do you use?

This article is his analysis of the responses. Key insights include “The best AI PMs I interviewed spend 30–40% of their time on discovery” and “Multiple AI PMs told me the same thing: ‘The hardest part is telling stakeholders no when they want to use AI for something it’s not good at’.”

“The ones who thrive aren’t trying to know everything. They’re building systems to stay current efficiently. They’re focusing on fundamentals over hype. They’re saying no to the 90% of AI trends that don’t matter.”

-Aakash Gupta

If you’re working on incorporating AI capabilities into your product and your practice, bookmark Gupta’s article.

Everybody’s talkin’ at me

Irina Bulygina is a Madrid-based product manager who comes to product and entrepreneurship from a long career in marketing and business development. Here she reflects on her experience building a new business in the AI era. Many colleagues asked her about the tech she used, the AI model she chose, the way she built features using AI and other technology.

But to Bulygina, the more important questions were fundamentals of her business. And, she laments, the curious advisors, so interested in technology and tools, rarely even asked her about customers, markets, and problems worth solving. She diagnoses it as people confusing an application with a business.

“When I listen to founders talk today, I often hear people describe an application when they say they are building a business. Those are not the same thing.

An application is something people use. A business is the system that allows that application to create value over time. That difference sounds small, but it changes almost every decision you make.”

-Irina Bulygina

Product folks should remember Bulygina’s lesson. We are deeply engaged in the technical details of a product, but that product serves our business by satisfying a user or customer. So if you find yourself describing your application, also explain the problem you are solving, your competitive differentiation, and your economic thesis. Those are where your real opportunity lies.

When I fight authority

Check it out: Renegotiating done is the closest thing to authority most product managers actually have, by Jeff Gothelf

This is a useful, pragmatic piece from the consistently wise Jeff Gothelf. Gothelf describes the cold reality faced by product managers and product teams who want to "focus on outcomes, not output," but whose context might have dates and deliverables (that is, "outputs") assigned in a way that the individual Product Manager can't really change.

"The question is what do you do when you didn’t choose the outcome, can’t restructure the team and have a date on a slide with a feature and your name next to it?"

-Jeff Gothelf

That’s a very real question. His answer? Product managers faced with that challenge should negotiate and document a definition of done that includes an outcome connected to the assigned output.

"Write the goal you were handed at the top of a page, exactly as it was given to you, and underneath it write one question: who does what differently if we do this well? Turn the answer into an observable behavior with a number in it, so “the assistant is live for all reps” becomes something like “reps resolve 40% of tier-one tickets without escalating, up from 22% today.”

Then take both versions into the kickoff meeting and make a compelling request. Ask to keep the date exactly as it is and add the behavior change as the definition of done. You’re not asking to renegotiate the commitment, you’re asking what evidence the team and its leadership will accept after launch."

-Jeff Gothelf

Great stuff.

More blossoms

Outside the Box

Like many of my fellow SDGers, I’m nerdy in myriad ways. One way is that I dig vexillology, the study of flags and heraldry. Flagpedia is a fun site for those who share this particular brand of dorkiness. It features directories of flags of countries, US states, and international organizations. There’s a quiz where you can test your skill at matching flags to countries. It also includes technically well-made vexilloligical utilities like catalogs of flag emoji, Unicode characters for each emoji, and downloadable flag images in icon, bitmap, and vector formats. My only wish: that it included interesting city flags, like the flags of Glasgow, Scotland or St. Louis, Missouri.

Check it out at https://flagpedia.net.

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

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