Marty Cagan: "Fundamentally good product work is about thinking. I did not appreciate the lengths that people would go to in order to avoid thinking."

Watch the full talk here

AI makes this a little sneakier too. You can have a convincing prototype before you’ve worked out whether anyone needs the thing. Harder to stop and question it once everyone’s excited.

meetings are the first thing people reach for

the lengths people go to is the best part of that quote

And now there's a chat box that will happily do the avoiding for you, in perfect bullet points.

Yes the deck porn era of product management needs to die asap. You cannot think when you’re trying to simplify everything into a deck. Explore, take notes, make diagrams, connect them all like a crazy person, connect feedback to living ideas, etc. the deck & insufferable process comes after the discovery of the problem space not just the problem in front of us. You want real progress and not illusions. Lots of product people are great at making illusions.

agents made avoiding it a lot cheaper

Marty is so good.

You can perhaps think less from a technical perspective but you have to think a f load more from a product perspective especially for user facing products. Imo UX is >70% the bottleneck for a great AI product because it has to take into account that AI responses take more time.

This makes sense until you look at what AI did to it — avoiding thinking used to cost you a sprint; now a prompt produces the artifact in seconds, so the avoidance is invisible until the rewrite bill arrives. The expensive part isn't thinking, it's thinking late.

Yeah, I think that's the problem people like Cass Sunstein point out. In Manipulation and Algorithmic Harm, Sunstein writes that people who use AI without enough language just become products of the algorithm...

was working with a client who realized the same issue. they had a "we haven't decided what we're saying" problem. that's mostly always the case

The most expensive way to avoid thinking is to make five people implement the first idea.

the backlog is how you postpone it

Avoidance is usually structural, not lazy. Real thinking surfaces answers nobody wants -- the project that shouldn't ship -- so orgs route around it.

So real