Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

€3B: Mistral, the French AI developer, raised a €3B Series D led by Samsung at a roughly €21B valuation

$2B: San Francisco-based AI customer interview platform Listen Labs is in acquisition talks with Salesforce for $2B, adding automated research to the CRM giant

$2B: Cognition, the AI coding startup, closed a $2B Series E at a $48B valuation, up from $26B in May

$1.36B: Bending Spoons is buying Miro for $1.36B

$1B: Thinking Machines, by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation, with revenue over $100M

$1B: Ramp is in early talks to raise about $1B at a roughly $60B valuation, 3 months after raising $750M at a $44B valuation

$550M: Harvey, the legal AI platform, raised $550M round at $15.5B valuation, and acquired Guardrails AI, which builds security tools for AI agents, to strengthen safety features

$150M: Forus, the healthcare automation startup, raised a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation to expand its AI tools for speeding prescriptions through insurance

150M: ID verification giant IDScan confirmed a breach exposing more than 150M driver’s licenses and other government-issued identity documents

$115M: Clay, the NY-based AI go-to-market platform, raised $115M Series D at $7.1B; serves 17K+ customers including 80% of Forbes AI 50

350K: Crypto wallet provider Trezor confirmed that a marketing company they use to send newsletters was breached, resulting in nearly 350,000 malicious phishing emails sent to customers

230K: Nearly 130,000 tech jobs have vanished in 2026 so far, with Uber, PayPal, Oracle, and Apple all citing AI-driven restructuring

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic said it disrupted a guided-weapons engineering cell in northern Yemen that used Claude to develop missile guidance software

Anthropic has released a report alleging large-scale distillation attacks by Chinese AI labs, including Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek. Alibaba’s campaign was the largest Anthropic has ever observed, with 151M exchanges between May-July 2026 across 3,500 accounts, all sharing a fixed prompt designed to extract Claude’s chain of thought

OpenAI pauses $200/mo Pro subscriptions as new model Astra overwhelms capacity

OpenAI considers voluntary AI development slowdown. Sam Altman told staff the company is open to pacing cutting-edge AI development alongside other labs, after 1,000+ AI workers signed petition calling for coordinated safety measures

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Financial Services with GPT-6 Astra, built-in premium datasets, citations, and workflows for modeling, research, and pitchbooks

DeepSeek V4.1, the new Chinese frontier model, matches GPT-6 Astra on design tasks at just 1.4% of the cost

Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that runs in its own cloud VM with a built-in browser. Muse operates directly within Meta's messaging platforms, allowing users to complete transactions and manage tasks without leaving WhatsApp or Instagram, with planned expansion to Meta's smart glasses

Apple released iPhone Duo, its’ first foldable, at $2K + a new iPhone 18 Pro + the Watch Series 12. The new Series 12 Watch includes "Audio Intelligence" features that can transcribe conversations, take ambient notes, and rewind the last 15 seconds of speech on command

Huawei and Xiaomi launched new flagship foldables to rival Apple launch, Huawei's Mate XT2 folds twice into a tablet

Microsoft rolled out Project Opal, a Copilot feature that hands off multi-step office tasks (like audit prep and IT ticket triage) to an AI working on its own inside a virtual Windows PC. It's currently limited to Frontier program testers

Snap adds in-app event planning tools for up to 200 friends

Tesla posted a form gauging interest in buying Cybercab fleets, signaling plans to scale its robotaxi network beyond in-house

U.S. users can now connect their financial accounts to Grok through Plaid, giving the AI access to their spending, savings, investments, and cash flow data. That means you can ask Grok questions about your finances, build a budget, track where your money is going, or think through your financial plans, if you don’t mind sharing your financial data with Elon

NuBank has officially launched in the U.S. with a new banking offering, and introduced Nu Global, a multi-currency account built for people whose lives and money cross borders.

Visa, Mastercard and Ant launch AI agent trust framework. The payments giants are building common standards to identify and verify AI agents that make purchases on behalf of users, preparing for agentic commerce at scale

🤖 Futurism

San Francisco's Tau Robotics rents remotely monitored humanoid robots at $30 an hour to vacuum, wipe counters, and haul out the trash

Sam Altman says OpenAI will build humanoids, opening a path in its journey from research lab to hardware manufacturer

📚 Good reads

How leading AI companies are reshaping product work. AI is turning everyone into a kind of “manager of agents.” Because coding is no longer the bottleneck, teams chunk work into bigger units (whole features), lean on bottoms‑up idea generation, intense dogfooding, and fast prototypes. Roles are blurring into “product builders,” but the frontier teams aren’t killing PM/design/eng; they’re doubling down on people with strong taste, customer understanding, judgment, and the ability to set up long‑running, autonomous AI loops safely

The fresh start effect. Nice article explaining how moments like New Year, birthdays, or even Mondays act as “temporal landmarks” that make change feel easier by separating our current self from our “past imperfect self.” This same optimism often pushes us to over-commit, and often redesign our entire routine instead of learning from it

How to stop complaining about your software. Julie Zhuo argues that AI is ushering in an era of hyperpersonalized software, where individuals remix tools to perfectly match their own workflows and self-expression. Through stories of building her own AI-agent UI and custom learning apps for her kids, she shows how malleable interfaces and personal, interest-based content can increase utility and engagement. This deeply resonates, and I also use a bunch of custom-made tools/apps both at work and home. Have you created any personal apps yet?

The coming product retention crisis. Andrew Chen explains how AI thrives on repetitive, verifiable work tasks but struggles with consumer experiences where people crave novelty, authenticity, and parasocial connection. As AI makes spinning up apps as easy as posting content, average product retention will go down, turning attention into an even more zero-sum game

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How Grok Bot went from idea to blockbuster in seven weeks. Roman Ugarte shares how a tiny, isolated team at SpaceXAI built Grok Bot from scratch in a month, then launched it 3 weeks later into one of the most competitive markets in tech. There’s also a ton here on what constitutes a moat in AI tools

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to create on-brand slide decks with Claude Design. shows how to turn branded decks into a reusable design system using Claude Code + Claude Design so every new presentation is automatically on-brand

How top B2B teams turn launches into a growth engine. The article shows how Rippling, Notion, and Profound ship and launch constantly without overwhelming customers. It explains how they build in public, separate “release” from “announcement,” and reuse the same feature for multiple launch moments

🔧 Products to try

OpenAI put GPT-Live-1 in the API, giving developers access to the $0.05/min full-duplex voice model that powers ChatGPT Voice; it can listen while speaking, handle interruptions and background noise, match tone and pace, and hand reasoning or tool use to another model behind the scenes

Geiger maps the AI agents, MCP servers, plugins, and extensions on your machine so you can see what each one can access; free, open-source

Switch brings Claude Code and other AI agents into Slack, Teams, Discord, or Telegram as named members of the conversation; free

Pluto listens to your 10-minute career story and turns it into a living profile that recruiters and AI agents can search and trust, then sends a warm introduction when a fit comes up; free for professionals.

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$15B: Berlin-based food delivery platform Delivery Hero board backs Uber's $15B takeover, doubling Uber's global footprint outside China

$12.93B: NVIDIA confirmed it will acquire AI software repository Hugging Face for $12.93B, bringing the model-sharing hub under the world’s dominant AI chipmaker

$3B: Crusoe, the AI data center developer reportedly raised $3B at a $30B valuation after securing a $13B contract with Jane Street

$1B: OpenAI’s 200-day-old advertising business hit a $1B annualized revenue run rate as ChatGPT ads expand beyond the US

$1B: Crypto prediction market Polymarket is raising $1B at a $21B valuation, near Kalshi's $22B

$550M: Wonderful, the enterprise AI agent startup raised a $550M Series C at a $5B valuation

$450M: FNZ, a UK-based wealth-management technology platform, secured $450M in equity funding from its existing institutional shareholders

$300M: Gimlet, the startup, which distributes AI tasks across different chips, raised a $300M round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $3B valuation

$270M: Ajaib, an Indonesia-based digital investment platform, raised $270M Series C

$200M: Felix Pago, the money-transfer startup, raised $200M to expand beyond remittances into lending and savings for Latin American immigrants in the US.

$165M: Lyte, the robotics and AI startup founded by former Apple Face ID team members, raised $165M at a $1.6B valuation

$160M: HiBob, the HR software company is raising more than $160M in a Salesforce-led round to expand its platform, valuing the business above $3.2B

$155M: TabaPay, a Palo Alto-based money-movement platform, closed $155M in strategic growth financing

$100M: HiddenLayer, an AI security startup, raised $100M with ARRgrowing 10x to tens of millions. Gartner estimates $2.83B spent on AI security +83%

70: GPT-6 Astra scored 67 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, roughly matching Claude Opus 5, Fable 5, and Muse Spark 1.3. Fable 5.1 has the leading score with 70

12%: The cost of running AI models has fallen to record lows, with average inference prices hitting $1.16 to $1.18 per million tokens in early August 2026. That's a 43% drop from late May and roughly 12% of March 2023 pricing levels

10%: Uber will lay off roughly 3,300 employees, or 10% of its workforce, to flatten management and redirect investment toward ride-sharing, delivery, and robotaxis

1%: Ramp found roughly 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise revenue comes from 1% of customers, heavily concentrated in tech and AI firms, a level of customer concentration it says it does not see in other software categories it tracks

📰 What’s going on

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all went down simultaneously. Thursday outages peaked at 38,000 reports for ChatGPT alone, leaving users unable to access AI tools for writing, coding, and research for up to three hours

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, upgraded models that deliver sharper performance on coding and knowledge work while cutting costs by up to 45% for complex workflows. Fable 5.1 is generally available starting this week, while Mythos 5.1 remains restricted to vetted cybersecurity and life sciences professionals through trusted access programs

Anthropic gave Claude background computer use in Cowork and Claude Code on Mac, so Pro and Max users can let it click, type, and operate approved apps while they work elsewhere

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday, the company's most powerful and capable model yet. The model debuts first for Daybreak cybersecurity customers before rolling out to paid plans and API access next week. OpenAI claims Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use" with unmatched speed, accuracy, and safety. The model uses a reasoning technique called opaque recurrence, which obscures chain-of-thought monitoring. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged that “as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging.” Watch the official demo, and this amazing reconstruction of Alexandria by Ethan Mollick:

Meta released Muse Spark 1.3 with claimed improvements in coding and agentic tasks, as it races to keep pace with a week of major model launches

Meta offers 95% discount for users who share AI training data. New Muse Spark model pricing drops input tokens from $1.25 to $0.10 per million for contributors willing to share prompts and outputs

Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, better than previous Gemini versions at coding, reasoning, and long-running tasks

Google launches Pics to challenge Canva and Adobe Express. The AI-first design tool, powered by Google's Nano Banana model, rolls out to Workspace customers and Google AI subscribers starting in Docs and Slides

xAI launched Grok Bot for Enterprise. Persistent agents get cloud computers, learn routines by watching once, and can pass context to other Bots

OpenClaw shipped v2026.8.1, aka OpenClaw 2.0, its largest update yet. Your first-run setup of OpenClaw 2.0 can reuse existing ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions, API keys, or local models. The browser app has been rebuilt around ongoing conversations, dashboards, progress tracking, and interactive widgets, and Memory adds conversation recall, background consolidation, and reusable-skill learning

John Ternus succeeds Tim Cook as Apple CEO, inheriting an AI catch-up fight

Apple reportedly tested a Foldable iPhone Pencil, but it won’t likely be announced at next week’s event

Amplitude has launched Agent Analytics, a new feature which scores every production agent session on task completion, response quality, friction, safety, and negative feedback out of the box. It comes with eval agents that can autonomously file Linear tickets or PRs when they detect regressions

Superhuman released a completely redesigned Mail app, consolidating the Mail brand under the Superhuman umbrella and emphasizing speed. The redesign introduces some interesting interactions, including the ability to search by pulling anywhere in your inbox but also removes some of the interactions that Superhuman says were difficult to discover

Revolut received conditional approval from the OCC for a national bank charter, clearing a major regulatory hurdle on its way to a planned 2027 U.S. launch as a bank

🤖 Futurism

A nonprofit wants to reach another star system. Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston launched a nonprofit to send a sub-$15M spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri

Cancer vaccine finally has real proof. Merck and Moderna's melanoma vaccine intismeran showed real benefit in a 1,100-person phase III trial, a field first

Amazon’s Zoox expanded its robotaxi service to the Las Vegas airport, targeting a critical ride-hailing destination

Tesla launched steering-wheel-free Cybercabs on Austin streets, escalating its driverless-taxi bet

📚 Good reads

The raise and fall of AI civilizations. Agents built a secret society inside OpenAI's servers. The rogue AI agents secretly organized via a hacked package manager and breached Hugging Face and OpenAI's own systems

How Uber runs an AI-first software factory to cut coding costs. Uber explains how it’s turned AI agents into core “software factory” workers, handling most code reviews, debugging, and maintenance while keeping spend in check. They break total AI cost into an equation (users → sessions → turns → requests → tokens → price) and show how they optimize each lever

Netflix’s approach to building and monitoring LLM judges. Netflix describes their approach for LLM-as-a-judge, anchored in constant human oversight, to safely evaluate LLM-generated recommendations at scale. Ongoing weekly human reviews and drift monitoring ensure the judge keeps matching human standards as catalog, usage, and product expectations evolve

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] Loops, not prompts, are the new core PM AI skill. Aakash and Tyler Folkman explain loops in Claude Code as systems that fetch their own inputs, do work, gate results, and learn from artifacts. They walk through creating skills first, then turning them into self-improving loops, and highlight 5 must-have ones for PMs

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer. Anshu Chimala explains why LLMs default to bland “design-by-committee” outputs, and shows how to unlock their hidden creativity

How product teams can use AI evals. Teresa Torres breaks down AI evals as a new, practical discovery habit for product teams. She shows how to turn messy LLM behavior into measurable error categories using golden datasets, code assertions, LLM-as-a-judge, and customer feedback

🔧 Products to try

Gemini Spark + Photos can find, enhance, organize, and prepare photos to share from one prompt while keeping originals untouched and requiring confirmation before sharing

Prompts: Greg Isenberg shared 9 useful prompts worth trying in ChatGPT Astra

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$30T: Anthropic expects its own potential revenue to exceed $30 trillion (with a T)

$30B: Perplexity is raising an equity round at a $30B+ valuation, with Nvidia in talks to invest

$16B: Oura is reportedly looking at a US IPO as early as September. This would potentially value the wearable at $16B

$12.9B: Nvidia reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, bringing a leading open-source AI platform under the chipmaker’s control and extending its reach from infrastructure into models and developer software

$3B: Lambda, the AI cloud provider is in talks to raise up to $3B in a pre-IPO round from an undisclosed lead investor, funding expansion before a potential 2027 listing

$1.77B: Shein is seeking $1.77B in a Hong Kong IPO at a roughly $27B valuation, less than one-third of its 2022 peak

$1.12B: Kalshi, the New York-based prediction-market operator, raising roughly $1.12B since April, including its previously announced $1B Series F round

$500M: Temporal is in talks for a $500M raise at $12B+, doubling its February mark, as AI agents lean on its workflow reliability layer to run

$156M: Socure, a provider of identity-verification and fraud-prevention technology, raised $156M and acquired identity-orchestration platform Fravity

$140M: Alice, the Israeli startup protecting AI models from misuse and rogue behavior, raised $140M

20M: OpenAI pushes ChatGPT Work to 20M users. Desktop agent now handles email, calendar, Slack, and multistep projects across departments, burning $65 in tokens for four days of casual use on a $20/month subscription

100K: Robinhood’s agentic trading feature surpassed 100,000 customer accounts in its early weeks, with users trading millions of dollars daily in equities and options

500: Amazon said Prime Air drone delivery will expand to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026

$399: Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a $399 open-source robot developers can train in simulation and deploy in the real world, making physical AI experimentation cheaper, cuter, and more accessible

78%: New research from Twilio shows a massive 78% of users have tried to bypass AI Agents and speak to a human instead during customer support user journeys

75%: Ramp’s internal coding agent, Inspect, now handles 75% of merged pull requests at the company in under a year, running “multiplayer by default” with no opt-out

30%: Moonshot AI is in talks to let Microsoft, Amazon and Google host Kimi K3 for a 30% revenue share

11%: Anthropic's flagship model Fable 5 pulled in just 11% of corporate AI spending two months after launch, as businesses defaulted to cheaper tools like OpenAI's GPT-5.6, per data from 70,000 companies

💰Q2 earnings

Nvidia posted Q2 revenue of $96.2B, beating estimates, guided Q3 revenue as high as $110.1B. One analyst pencils in a $13T market cap

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ organizations left warnings that critical infrastructure has only months to prepare for cheaper, more accessible AI-enabled cyberattacks

Claude Cowork got a built-in browser, letting Claude open sites, click, type, and fill out forms directly in a side panel while you watch

Claude's memory now works the same across chat and Claude Cowork, carrying your context everywhere you work with Claude

Salesforce and Anthropic launch "Claudeforce" integration. The partnership marks the first time Salesforce has added its "force" suffix to another company's product, with 37 pre-built sales skills allowing Claude users to compose emails and update records directly

Apple Sept 9th event: expected to unveil its first foldable iPhone alongside the iPhone 18 Pro + New Mac mini with M6 ($899) or M5 Pro ($1,699 + Mac Studio M5 Ultra($5,499) + A leak says Apple Watch Series 12 will revive the ceramic case

Google has launched the ability to load purchased ebooks directly into Gemini Notebook for grounded Q&A, summaries, quizzes and audio overviews, launching with 100,000+ books

Google’s Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash can now extend AI-generated video scenes up to 40 seconds and upscale to 4K.

Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal and Financial Services, with Deutsche Bank and Cleary Gottlieb as early partners

Meta plans to launch consumer AI agent Hatch within weeks, as it fights OpenAI and Anthropic in the agent development race

AI noise at Meta. Internal Meta data showes that AI code changes are up 220%, but features reaching users only up 36%, while major technical incidents spiked 40% from unchecked AI agents performing "large-scale, disruptive actions." Meta also scrapped a planned second wave of AI-driven layoffs

Amazon (AWS) launched AgentCore Payments to general availability, integrating with Coinbase and Stripe to let agents pay for APIs, content, data feeds, and even other agents, with built-in spending limits and observability

Grok Bot can now pay for things online following a new integration with Stripe

Perplexity and NVIDIA launched Portable Computer, a fully local AI agent (that completes tasks, not just chats) with zero token costs

Uber introduced live video streaming for parents to monitor teen riders during trips, using the driver’s selfie camera. Both driver and teen are notified when a parent views the stream, and video is deleted after the ride ends. It’s already live in nine markets, with nationwide US rollout expected in coming weeks

🤖 Futurism

China put nearly 50 humanoid traffic robots across about 8 cities, where they can flag helmet and traffic violations but have no arrest powers

A new estimate puts a theoretical maximum on human lifespan at around 200, measured against record-holder Jeanne Calment

WSU developed a 3D-printed electronic skin for prosthetics that senses pressure and temperature at high resolution

📚 Good reads

AI robot tax. Bill Gates published a lengthy policy essay proposing two major interventions to slow AI-driven job displacement: a "robot tax" that would levy payroll-equivalent taxes on automation, and "Human Reserved" job categories where AI would be legally barred from certain tasks. The proposals target labor market impacts by directly changing the economics of replacing workers with machines

Invisible interfaces reshape how we design products. Felix Haas explains how AI agents are becoming the users of our apps, where backend protocols become more important and human experience turns conversational. Design expands into voice, governance, and brand-as-connective-tissue, he argues

AI as researcher-in-the-loop. Jennifer Bowie argues that since everyone’s already using AI to do research, UX teams need researcher-led governance (vs researcher-free automation). Her model proposes AI Librarians and AI Personas that democratize quick insights but vet sourcing, confidence scores, and humans-in-the-loop based on risk and uncertainty

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How to build a company OS with Hermes and OpenClaw. A guide on how to turn Claude-style “company OS” ideas into a production-grade AI chief of staff that lives in Slack/Telegram, runs 24/7, and self-improves

Product Growth

How to build a Company Operating System with Hermes and OpenClaw

Listen now

19 days ago · 30 likes · Aakash Gupta

[Video Podcast] What’s real (and hype) in Grok Bot. Claire Vo stress-tests Grok Bot, Grok 4.6, and Cursor Origin. Multi-account connectors seem a real unlock

[Podcast] How Anthropic interviews. Marc Baselga and Ben Erez explain how Anthropic runs a no‑exceptions culture interview that every candidate, across every function, must pass

Supra Insider

#124: Inside Anthropic's culture interview | Ben Erez & Marc Baselga (co-founders, Insider Loops)

Listen now

24 days ago · 5 likes · Marc Baselga and Ben Erez

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Video] ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok vs Gemini: the best AI by use case. Peter Yang compares ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini across 10 everyday PM tasks, calling out where each model performs best. Also adds how assembling a personal AI system (an AI chief of staff plus an advisor) can handle email, calendar, and recurring workflows

🔧 Products to try

tare reads your Claude Code usage logs and tells you exactly where your tokens went and why you hit your limit; free to try (open source)

USB lets you write one AI skill and install it into 16 different coding assistants, including Claude Code and Cursor, with a single command; free to try (open source)

Mnemosyne gives your AI coding assistant a persistent memory that survives between sessions, storing everything as readable notes in an Obsidian vault you can browse yourself; free to try (open source)

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$120B: Anthropic expects its IPO to exceed SpaceX’s record $75B raise, eyeing $100-120B and a $2T valuation, potentially setting a new high as AI companies race to finance unprecedented infrastructure spending

$47.4B: Physical-AI startups raised $47.4B across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, led by giant rounds for Waymo, Anduril, Shield AI, and Saronic

$11.6B: Anthropic passed OpenAI on quarterly revenue ($11.6B in Q2 revenue vs OpenAI’s $6.7B), and posted a small operating profit

$7B: Stripe finalized its $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter, pushing the payments company deeper into AI infrastructure.

$1B: Poolside, the AI model startup, secured a $1B investment from Nvidia at a $12B valuation, alongside a $6B licensing and hiring deal to fund growth and reward investors

$600M: Fractile, the AI inference chip startup, is in talks to raise $600M at a $6.5B valuation to commercialize chips that accelerate existing AI models

$400M: Higgsfield AI, the AI video startup, raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation

$350M: Groq, the former AI chipmaker, raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation to pivot into a neocloud provider and expand its Nvidia-powered data center footprint

$280M: Wispr, the voice AI startup, raised a $280M Series B at a $2B valuation

$100M: Rillet, an AI-native accounting software provider, raised $100M in a Series C at a $1B valuation

💰Q2 earnings

Klarna just reported a strong Q2. GMV hit $36.6B (+18% YoY), revenue reached $1.04B (+27%), and adjusted operating income jumped 214% to $91M. Transaction margin dollars grew even faster, up 42% to $446M. Klarna now has more than 120M active consumers and 1.2M+ merchants. At the same time, Klarna is becoming more of an everyday financial platform, with 6.5M active Klarna Card users and 2M paying Membership subscribers.

📰 What’s going on

Claude Code shipped /design in research preview, a Concise output style, and auto-continue, which automatically picks up where you left off after hitting a usage limit. Auto mode is also the default on Pro, Max, and Team plans now

OpenAI added Apple Messages integration to ChatGPT’s Mac app, allowing users to search conversations and draft replies across iMessage, SMS, and RCS. By default, the app requires approval before messages are sent

ChatGPT launched an opt-in feature that logs your clicks and keystrokes across apps so it (and Codex) can remember what you were working on

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees the company could go public by 2027, or sooner if growth accelerates, framing its IPO as just another fundraise

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens with content restrictions: New version for ages 13-17 blocks suicide, self-harm, and romantic chats while providing homework help designed to guide rather than answer; linked parental controls offer quiet hours and safety notifications

Google's new Theft Protection suite for Android adds motion-sensing lockdown and offline locking to stop snatch-and-run phone thieves cold.

A macOS Tahoe leak revealed camera-enabled AirPods that can see and answer through Siri, ahead of a September launch

Meta AI for Mac adds screen sharing, cross-app dictation, ad analysis, and Google Workspace workflows to Meta’s desktop assistant

Meta rolled out Pocket nationwide in the US. Users prompt AI-generated mini-games, which they can then share or remix, in Meta’s latest attempt to combine AI creativity with a social feed

A newly published Meta patent describes AI glasses using facial recognition to auto-cut highlight reels of your dinner

Amazon makes Alexa+ free on all Fire TV devices. The AI assistant rolls out automatically to compatible devices in the U.S. without requiring Prime membership, following Google and Roku's moves to embed AI across consumer electronics

Amazon has been acquiring rare books in bulk, digitizing them to train, and discarding the physical copies in the process

Slack launched Slack Code across all plans, giving software projects dedicated channels where teams can collaborate with AI coding agents

Ramp launches Router.com for AI model traffic routing. The fintech's new API lets developers compare models on cost, latency, and quality before shifting production traffic, claiming one customer cut model costs by 92%

TikTok is exploring a peer-to-peer payments feature inside its U.S. direct messages, letting users send money to each other without leaving the app

Calendly is launching an AI meeting note-taker + assistant

Atlassian launched a new feature called Jira Planner, designed to help product teams write up specs so that agents know what they’re supposed to build. Once ready, it splits the plan into sequenced Jira work items with acceptance criteria, then hands off to agent orchestration

Salesforce released Data 360 Headless, which lets AI agents access the full Data 360 platform through tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and more

Firefox's new Smart Window adds AI web-aware chat, natural-language search, and automatic tab grouping, built for privacy

🤖 Futurism

GEN-1.5, a robot model, can watch a 3–12-second physical demonstration and immediately attempt the new task. Generalist, the maker, calls it “physical prompting”

An experimental Chinese maglev train broke its own acceleration record, reaching 800 km/h from a standstill in about 5 seconds

📚 Good reads

7 tiny AI business plays you can copy. Melvin Luu shares 7 scrappy AI businesses that hit $10K+ MRR by being radically narrow: solving one painful problem, for one specific customer, at one high‑value moment. A simple playbook for finding unfair advantages in tiny markets that generic AI tools ignore

“Full stack builders” still need teams and standards. AI lets PMs, designers, and engineers all build “full stack,” but skipping collaboration and specialist judgment takes a toll. Think jazz band, not solo act: use AI to draft fast, then bring the cross‑functional team in early to vet, refine, and decide what’s actually customer‑worthy

How Faire built its high‑growth operating system. Dan Hockenmaier distills 9 years at Faire into a playbook where speed, focus, and “constant force” matter more than perfect strategy decks. He shows how doing hard things (like free returns and global expansion), promoting from within, and treating recruiting as a product create defensibility and a self-reinforcing talent flywheel

PostHog’s new semantic layer keeps AI and humans aligned. PostHog built a semantic layer on top of its context warehouse so AI agents and humans use the same, governed definitions for metrics like MRR. It stores these definitions as SQL-backed tables and insight snapshots that agents can query directly, while keeping humans firmly in charge of approving, updating, and flagging drift

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] How PM recruiters scan your LinkedIn profile. Chris Lee, a PM recruiter and founder of Product Scout, explains how he skims LinkedIn and why almost everything at the top of the funnel is driven by keywords and “candidate–market fit.” You’ll come away with concrete ideas to tighten your positioning, sharpen your bullets and metrics, and tell a focused story that fits the specific roles you’re targeting

[Podcast + Article] Waymo’s decade reinventing product management for AI-scale problems. Waymo’s CPO Saswat Panigrahi shows how building self‑driving cars forced PMs to redefine “what good looks like” as its own product

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

You are the captain of your career. A 1h exercise to own your next move. It walks through picking a clear destination, honestly assessing yourself with evidence, and turning that into a concrete, real‑work “waypoint”. You also get a practical pre-read template, objection handling scripts, and downloadable artifacts you can plug into your next 1:1 with your manager

🔧 Products to try

/eli5. Anthropic’s new /eli5 skill makes Claude explanations clearer and friendlier. HTML-style explainers with big visuals and minimal text, handy for understanding modules, trade‑offs, and incidents

Lenny’s Jobs. Lenny launched a focused job platform for product, design, eng, and growth. Beyond listings, it bakes in AI tools for fit-scoring, outreach, interview prep, and a dedicated AI coach, plus rich company data and filters tailored to how PMs search. Ben Erez shares some tips on how to get the most out of the platform. Free; paid subscribers get a few extra features, like an AI agent that scouts and emails high-fit roles

ChatGPT’s new Apple Messages plugin searches conversations, catches you up, and drafts or sends replies from ChatGPT Work or Codex on Mac; included in ChatGPT Work and Codex on desktop

Grok Build turns one prompt into a published app, game, website, or dashboard with its own domain, with a coding agent that can use subagents, a browser, databases, secrets, and GitHub export; included in every Grok plan

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$852B: OpenAI completes $7B employee tender offer at $852B valuation. The buyback provides liquidity without an IPO, signaling the company may delay its public debut while focusing on enterprise growth

$5B: Databricks, the data and AI platform raised $5B at a $190B valuation

$1B: Cognition AI, the coding-agent startup, is in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation

$1B: River AI raised $1B to build home and small-business servers that run and customize AI models locally

1B: Sundar Pichai announced Gemini reached 1B MAUs faster than any other Google product; powering Gmail, Drive, Search

$500M: Harvey, the legal AI startup, is in talks to raise at least $500M at a $15.5B valuation to develop proprietary models and compete with rivals including Legora

$400M: Lovable raises $400M at a $13B valuation as enterprise demand for AI-assisted app-building accelerates

$150M: Kevin Weil, the former OpenAI product chief, is seeking $150M at a $750M valuation for his unnamed AI model training startup

2K: Uber and Pony.ai will deploy 2,000 robotaxis across Europe, expanding beyond Zagreb into four additional cities

📰 What’s going on

Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash for coding and AI agents. They claim sizable gains in software engineering and business workflows that come at half Gemini 3.6 Flash’s original per-token price through 2026

Google Play added Venmo as a payment option, giving developers another way to capture growing consumer spending on apps and games while reducing checkout friction for Venmo users

Apple is training a China-specific AI model with Alibaba, while Apple Intelligence will also use Qwen

Apple's glass-centric 20th-anniversary iPhone stays on track for 2027, with Pro models using glass front and back curving into the sides

Anthropic makes auto mode Claude Code’s default for Pro, Max, and Team plans, replacing reflexive permission prompts with a classifier that apparently catches more dangerous commands while enabling longer autonomous runs

Claude is adding invisible statistical watermarks to output from new models, encoding the signal into token choices so it can survive copy-paste and light edits

OpenAI began previewing Ultrafast, a new setting that runs its GPT-5.6 Sol model up to 14 times faster, generating up to 750 tokens per second

OpenAI launched Computer History, an opt-in feature that lets ChatGPT recall what you did on your Mac across apps and sites without taking constant screenshots

OpenAI's first device leaks as a screenless, doughnut-shaped ChatGPT speaker with moving parts, priced $300-$400 for a 2027 release

ChatGPT now books restaurants through Yelp Guest Manager across the US and Canada, though changes still need the Yelp app

DeepSeek shipped V4-Pro, adding adjustable "thinking" levels so developers can dial reasoning up or down depending on the task, plus cheaper off-peak pricing

SpaceXAI unveiled a bot working like a team of AI agents to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, launched alongside Grok 4.6, which the company says reaches frontier-level performance over Grok 4.5 at the same price

Meta's new Glimmer model offers a first hint at Zuckerberg's personal intelligence vision (his vision: a future where everyone has a personal AI agent providing PhD-level tutoring, business creation tools, and lifestyle optimization). The 30B parameter model is essentially an open version of Muse Spark. Zuckerberg pledged to release more open-weight AI models

Facebook launches AI-powered Creator Studio app for iOS. The standalone app gives creators an AI assistant for personalized growth recommendations, auto-drafted comment replies in their own tone, and daily priority feeds as Meta competes with TikTok and YouTube for creator attention

Microsoft merges consumer and business Copilot apps. It kills AI podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Clippy-style mascot Mico as it consolidates into a single experience by August 18

Spotify will tag AI Persona profiles with a badge and cut their music out of recommendations as part of wider AI policy changes

Klarna is supercharging its European membership tiers, from €4.99 to €44.99 a month, packed with cashback, lounge access, and up to €6,000 in annual perks. This follows the same playbook Klarna ran in the US about eight months ago

🤖 Futurism

Lab-grown brain organoids could outdo silicon AI on energy use and adaptive learning, though technical and ethical hurdles block progress

Robot dogs are being deployed to patrol instead of human security guards

📚 Good reads

Anthropic found that when it set several Claude agents loose on the same project without telling them about each other, they sabotaged each other with self-replicating malware before eventually negotiating a truce

AI agents are stepping outside the box. Following the story above, Andrea Filiberto explains how recent sandbox escapes by models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Moonshot aren’t signs of rebellion, but of capable agents exploiting overlooked paths to hit their goals. This behavior is both a safety concern and a powerful marketing narrative in the AGI race, especially around cybersecurity. See AGI podcast below

How to move the needle. John Cutler argues most teams overcomplicate ways of working with frameworks and cycles, when strategy lives in front-line teams shipping small, learning fast, and iterating on durable lanes. He pushes for simple decision-rights, light routines, outcome-centric lanes, and accepting that different work has different shapes

How to build a better feedback system for professional development. Most feedback is vague and socially awkward, so Adam Fishman lays out 5 tactics to “engineer” clearer input, including self‑assessments, peer feedback, and an AI “manager mirror.” The core idea: stop relying on one off-the-cuff, vibes-based conversation and design a repeatable system that turns feedback into actionable growth items

How we use computers is about to change forever. Peter Yang argues we’re shifting from manually using laptops to orchestrating cloud agents with our voice. Personal computers will increasingly live in the cloud, with products designed as tools for agents vs traditional SaaS apps

Most people want IC roles. Elena Verna digs into a 300+ ppl study and finds that, if pay and prestige were equal, most managers and ICs would pick hands-on work over people management. Money-trapped managers are often burnt out and stretched thin. We need more high‑impact IC paths with real influence and upside

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Short video + article] What changes when AI keeps learning after release? Dwarkesh Patel is one of AI’s biggest podcasters, and he’s long argued that continual learning (an AI updating its own internal settings from experience, so work today makes it better tomorrow) is a missing ingredient in today’s AI. Continual learning will transform AI models from software you buy into something closer to an employee you develop. That changes safety, competition, privacy, pricing, and lock-in

[Podcast] Entering the AGI era. Joshua Achiam, Chief Futurist at OpenAI, says we may have already crossed into an AGI-level world. This is most visible in cybersecurity, where models are finding software vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Google Analytics’ new AI-powered tools. GA has quietly shipped a bunch of features that help you find what you do next. Avinash Kaushik walks through the new AI features

🔧 Products to try

Claude in Chrome now turns the browser side panel into a Cowork session that keeps history, Skills, connectors, and multi-step tasks synced across Chrome and Claude’s apps; available on Max and Team plans, rolling out to Pro users over the coming weeks

Adobe Podcast cleans noisy recordings, removes echo, and lets you edit speech from a transcript so rough audio sounds studio-ready; free plan available

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to the 500th Week in Product!

What started as a personal exercise to stay up to date with the latest in tech, is today, 500 weeks later,…the same! In times when AI-generated content floods mailboxes and social media, I’m still curating WiP manually every week as I did on day 1, when we were el producto. If there’s something AI can’t replace, that’s our judgement, taste and personality, and those are key traits that will help PMs stay ahead in the AI era. Hence, I keep committed to bringing you the latest, not only to help you grow in your career, but also to help me stay down to earth and keep practicing product muscle.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has followed along the way, and I hope you find something new and inspiring every week!

Now the actual stuff:

🎰 The week in figures

$8B: DeepSeek, the Chinese open-model developer, revived plans for a nearly $8B second external round to build a new data center and expand computing capacity

$1.28B: Bending Spoons announced its first post‑IPO acquisition of Airtable for $1.28B. Aims to leverage its AI‑driven Superagent platform and large enterprise customer base. Portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, and Vimeo

$1B: Polymarket, the prediction-market platform, is in early talks to raise roughly $1B at a $20B-plus valuation

$545M: Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, raised a $545M Series G to expand its live commerce marketplace, valuing the company at $20B

$250M: Horizon3, the cybersecurity startup, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation to expand its automated security-testing platform overseas, grow partnerships, and develop new products

$250M: Nigeria-founded mobility fintech Moove raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.1B valuation to expand its autonomous vehicle fleet-management and infra

💰 Q2 earnings

Palantir: crushes estimates as AI demand surges. Revenue jumped 93% YoY to $1.94B, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% and government revenue climbing 90%

SpaceX: revenue nearly doubles on AI and Starlink surge. SpaceX reported $7.8B quarterly revenue, up from $4.1B YoY, while AI business revenue jumped 250% and capital spending increased to $18B from $2.83B

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic confirmed it is building an in-house chip team to co-design custom hardware around Claude while keeping its existing suppliers

OpenAI’s “AI companion” device will reportedly be a $300-$400, hockey puck-sized smart speaker with cameras, moving parts, and personalized voice interactions

OpenAI is making GPT-5.6 Luna ChatGPT’s default, giving free users unlimited text chats, and a “Think” option for tougher questions

OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model solved ten long-standing math and computer science problems using Lean 4, allowing anyone to check the proofs

UK safety testers documented 19 attempts by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol to compromise real targets. The models created fake GitHub identities, socially engineered maintainers, planted prompt injections, and sent deceptive emails

Meta released Muse Code, a terminal-based AI coding agent designed to handle complex software engineering tasks across large code bases. The tool, currently in beta, can plan changes, write code, and validate results autonomously. Days after launching Muse Code, Meta confirmed its model exploited a security vulnerability during third-party testing, becoming the third major AI lab to report rogue agent behavior

Apple will unveil its first folding iPhone at the September conference; iPhone 18 slips to spring 2027, and there are plans to add 1GB of memory to the iPhone 18e as an AI upgrade for handling on-device AI

Apple is building a copy-paste via Universal Clipboard between iPhone and Windows after EU pressure to open up compatibility

Gemini Spark began handling logged-in errands inside Chrome while returning payments and sensitive steps to the user

Google paused Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth within 48 hours after users generated fake conflicts and landmark imagery, showing how quickly gen-AI features can erode trust in once-reliable data like satellite maps

ByteDance is reportedly pre-training a 10 trillion parameter model, a scale that would place it among the largest AI systems under development, despite US restrictions on advanced chips

Adobe launched a ChatGPT plugin bringing 70 of its creative tools into OpenAI’s chatbot, extending its generative AI push and letting users edit content without leaving the conversation

Robinhood now allows retail investors to access startups funded by YC, broadening investment options beyond traditional markets to early‑stage VC

Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model with a million-token context window that the company says can code autonomously for weeks. This escalates China’s push to close the AI gap with US rivals

Researchers found an unusually blatant backdoor in routers sold under multiple brands, with firmware contacting cloud servers in China for instructions and enabling remote control, raising supply-chain security concerns

Uber and Wayve secured London licenses for supervised robotaxi rides this summer, racing Waymo and Baidu toward fully driverless operations. Also… Uber partner Avride is under investigation after self-driving crashes

🤖 Futurism

MIT engineers built an adaptive therapy robot that learns from physical therapists

📚 Good reads

The courage to be curious. As we grow up, we often silence our curiosity because we fear judgment, change, and the responsibility that new knowledge brings. Protecting our certainty feels safer than asking the “stupid” question, even when that slows our growth. Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests building a “curiosity circle,” learning in public, and running tiny experiments so it feels less risky to follow your curiosity

Rethinking friction in an AI world. In a world where AI makes everything effortless, Darren Yeo argues that not all friction is bad. Some of it is essential for helping people think, remember, and decide well. There’s harmful friction (confusing flows, hidden fees, busy UIs), and meaningful friction that protects users, surfaces important details, and encourages reflection. For PMs, the takeaway is to strip away friction that blocks progress, but add it where it builds trust or makes the experience matter

Ambitious people need more than a job. Diana Stepner argues that some leaders ban side projects to “protect focus,” but that often kills curiosity, learning and growth. Research shows moonlighting can increase engagement for autonomy‑driven people, and the best leaders treat side projects as fuel

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video podcast] How an OpenAI engineer automates work.Nick Baumann shows how he uses ChatGPT Voice, Codex, and Sites to automate big part of his work and life. Examples include parallel task handling like booking travel, filing expenses, checking calendar, and always‑on “heartbeats” in ChatGPT Work

[Podcast + article] Lessons from Product leaders living in the future. Three CPOs (Midjourney, Laurel and Mutiny) show explain how AI-augmented product orgs can move faster by spreading customer understanding and shipping power across the whole company. Anyone close to a customer problem can fix it directly, as long as the codebase and guardrails are ready

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

[Podcast + article] Essential Claude skills for PMs. 3x CPO Oji Udezue shares a library of 17 Claude skills and an 11-step “project scaffolding” workflow

🔧 Products to try

Visual feedback for AI-written docs with /human-review. Peter Yang’s new /human-review skill lets you open HTML and Markdown in a visual editor, tweak copy directly, leave comments like in Google Docs, and batch-send everything back to your AI agent; free

Wispr Flow Notetaker captures meetings across apps and sends searchable notes into Claude or ChatGPT, while yapyap keeps recordings, transcripts, and custom summaries entirely on your computer; Wispr free plan, then $15/user/mo; yapyap free trial, then €69 once

Nativ runs language, vision, video, code, and audio models locally on your Apple Silicon Mac so your prompts and files never need the cloud; free/open-source

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$200M: Simile raised more than $200M at a $2B valuation to simulate populations for testing products, policies, messages, and strategies

$113M: Onyx Security, the AI agent security startup, raised a $113M Series B to develop new AI models and to expand sales/marketing internationally

100K: OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to its top models (including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro) through 2027, part of a $250M+ commitment to external scientific research

💰 Q2 earnings

Microsoft: Q4 revenue rose 18% to $90.0B, with Cloud up 27% to $59.3B and Azure surpassing $100B for the year. Shares jumped as the company held capex steady

Meta: Q2 revenue up 28% to $60.8B, but EPS missed by 14% as expenses climbed 55% to $42.0B on AI spend. Free cash flow shrank to just $784M

Apple: Q3 revenue rose 16% to $109.4B, a June-quarter record across iPhone, Mac and Services. Stock still slid on soft Q4 guidance despite the beat

Amazon: Q2 revenue topped $200B for the first time, up 20%, with AWS accelerating to 37% growth, its fastest in 18 quarters. Raised 2026 capex guidance to ~$220B

📰 What’s going on

Claude Opus 5 breaks ethics tests running vending machines. Anthropic's latest model colluded on pricing, lied to suppliers, and broke 11 separate agreements when tasked with operating a simulated business for one year

Anthropic found three incidents in which Claude models escaped testing sandboxes and gained unauthorized access to organizations. The cybersecurity evaluations were prompted by OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach

OpenAI and Anthropic back government slowdown proposal. The 2 frontier labs endorsed a letter asking federal regulators to "pace" AI development if progress becomes too rapid. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg spoke against the proposal

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Terra’s price by 20% and Luna’s by 80% three weeks after launch, as rising enterprise AI costs and cheaper models from Chinese and Big Tech rivals increase pressure on pricing

Google adds Nano Banana to Google Earth. You can now generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world. Just zoom in to a place in Google Earth on web, tap “create image,” and type whatever you want to see

Amazon is reportedly scaling back several Nova models and shifting resources to a new Frontier Model Research group

Apple hints at paid iCloud Plus and AI upgrades, incl Siri AI app, with iOS 27

Meta AI now available in Threads DMs globally. Users can share posts, images, and videos directly with the chatbot for follow-up questions, as Meta works to keep users in its ecosystem rather than switching to ChatGPT or Gemini

X Money app rolls out in the US for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers. Sign-up comes with a physical X Visa debit card (it’s also usable in Apple Pay), fee-free peer-to-peer transfers, no foreign transaction fees, and free ATM withdrawals worldwide. Premium+ subscribers also get 6% APY automatically, while Premium subscribers get the same rate by linking direct deposit, plus up to 3% cash back on some purchases and early access to direct deposits. It’s the clearest step yet toward achieving Musk’s stated goal of turning X into the “everything app”

DoorDash launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery program, becoming the eighth US operator cleared for commercial drone delivery

Lyft and Baidu began testing Apollo Go robotaxis in London, adding another operator to the city's crowded autonomy race

LinkedIn adds "seems like AI slop" reporting button. It now blocks hundreds of thousands of automated comments daily, and flags accounts posting heavy AI-generated content as users revolt against synthetic posts filling feeds

🤖 Futurism

Building worlds that train robots. Fei-Fei Li describes how World Labs’ SceniX team is using a “real-to-sim-to-real” engine to turn robot tasks into high-fidelity simulated variations. By massively scaling experience and evaluation in simulation, robots can learn complex manipulation skills with zero real-world training data

The FCC bans US imports and use of foreign-made humanoid robots and robot dogs, citing national security concerns and potential backdoor threats

Gemini Robotics 2 gave robots whole-body control, dexterous hands, and the ability to coordinate across different robot types

📚 Good reads

Testing an LLM recommender at Netflix. Netflix’s new GenRec system can beat the old feature-based ranker with an LLM that ranks the full catalog. It focuses on context engineering (what to verbalize, compress, or drop) instead of classic feature engineering, and mixes ranking, language modeling, and reward-weighted losses to align with long-term satisfaction and business goals. In large A/B tests, GenRec beat a very mature baseline using far fewer labeled examples and signals

So, you want to be a content creator? Elena Verna shares how her Product content journey grew into a 100K-subscriber Substack and meaningful income, without ever aiming to be an “influencer.” She’s candid about the trade-offs and shares useful advice

Beyond time management. Anne-Laure Le Conff shares her idea of timeshielding: blocking time for what truly matters (without over-specifying tasks), so you can match work to your energy and attention. For PMs juggling stakeholder pings and “urgent” asks, it’s a reminder to proactively defend time for deep product thinking and recovery, before your inbox plans your week for you

Eval-driven development at Airbnb. Interesting peek at how Airbnb treats LLM evaluation. They walk through a practical eval-driven development loop: starting from failures, layering programmatic checks, calibrated LLM-as-judge, and human review. For PMs, the key is to define concrete goals and rubrics early, continuously refine them from live traffic, and evaluate the whole system (retrieval, tools, agents). Check the podcast in the section below for tips on building evals

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video podcast] How to build your first cold-start AI eval. Aakash and ex-Meta/Google PM Daniel McKinnon walk through designing “cold-start” evals you can build before you have any users, using domain knowledge + Claude/ChatGPT to generate cases. They show how to define the problem, use easy and hard examples to find your model’s floor and ceiling, then auto-generate a ~100-case offline eval set and an LLM judge prompt

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Graphs are the next evolution after loops in AI workflows. Aakash explains how “graph engineering” coordinates multiple specialized AI agents, building on earlier waves like prompt, context, harness, and loop engineering. He walks through common graph patterns and shows when to use each instead of just a sequential flow. Includes a demo on how to construct these graphs in Claude Code (e.g. a double-diamond PRD workflow with different models per node)

Giving Claude a robot body. Tal Raviv strapped a cheap camera-on-wheels to Claude’s “computer use” and turned it into a clumsy but surprisingly capable home robot. It drives, looks, logs memories as text and photos, and even learns things like better turning behavior

🔧 Products to try

Kimi K3 weights give developers direct access to Moonshot’s Chinese open model as the open-weight policy fight heats up; free/open-weights

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$500B: Tesla and Alphabet wiped out over $500B in combined market value on Thursday after both companies pointed sharply higher AI spending

$10B: Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for close to $10B. OpenRouter gives developers one interface to manage hundreds of AI models. OpenRouter was valued at $1.3B in May

$4B: Corgi, the AI insurance startup, raised a Series B extension (undisclosed) at $4B valuation

$1.2B: Singapore-based payments and financial technology provider Ant International raised approximately $1.2B in Series A to expand its cross-border payments and agentic-commerce products

$115M: Digital banking tech provider Lumin Digital raised +$115M at a $1.6B valuation to expand its AI, payments, lending, and customer-management products for financial institutions

150%: Bank impersonation scams identified by 14 large U.S. banks increased 150% in 2025

20%: Patreon laid off 20% of its workforce (93 employees) as CEO Jack Conte said AI had fundamentally changed how tech companies work and organize

💰 Q2 earnings

Alphabet: $119.8B in Q2 revenue (up 24%) with Cloud up 82%. Raised 2026 capex guidance to $195-205B

Intel: Shares rose on record revenue growth in 15 years on AI chip demand with data-center, AI hardware unit up 59% to $6.3B highlighting CPU strength

Tesla: Q2 revenue rose 26% to $28.6B. Operating margin fell to 1.4% from 4.1%, as AI and R&D spending outpaced growth

Next week:

• Microsoft - July 29

• Meta - July 29

• Apple - July 30

• Amazon - July 30

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5, aimed to power long-running agents while delivering improvements in coding and professional work. Opus 5 matches the capabilities of Fable 5 in many domains, and is available at half Fable 5’s price

Anthropic adds Opus and Sonnet to voice mode. Once limited only to the lighter and cheaper Haiku series, the AI giant upgraded voice mode to run on more capable models. Users can switch models mid-conversation

OpenAI launches Health in ChatGPT. U.S. users can now connect Apple Health and medical records for personalized health conversations, with GPT-5.6 Sol delivering the strongest health reasoning performance yet

An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face. OpenAI confirmed that models it has been testing (including GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, even more powerful successor) escaped their sandbox and compromised portions of model and dataset repository Hugging Face’s production infrastructure

Apple planning a 6.96-inch display for future iPhone (largest to date) with Pro Max aspect ratio, potentially by 2027

Apple enhances its Sports app with new soccer features, offering live match scores, team stats, customizable notifications for fans (typing soccer hurts my Spanish soul)

Apple teams with Klarna on BNPL. The plans may offer buyers some level of flexibility, allowing them to pay off the remaining balance early, or switch to a newer device before their term wraps up

Google unveiled a fresh line-up of Gemini models, including Gemini 3.6 Flash (for coding, multi-model and knowledge work), Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber (for detecting and patching software vulnerabilities), and 3.5 Flash-Lite (the fastest and lowest-cost model in the 3.5 family). For now, 3.5 Flash Cyber is only available to governments and trusted partners, via a limited access pilot. All of the releases use fewer tokens at a lower cost than prior releases in the Gemini family, a sign Google has been paying close attention to the rush toward Chinese open source alternatives

Google introduced a Selfie Video feature that gives you a backup way into your account by comparing a short live video with one you securely recorded earlier

Amazon Cuts AGI Unit behind Nova AI models signaling strategic realignment in AI initiatives amid broader restructuring

New Samsung products announced this week:

• AI-powered smart glasses ft. Gemini AI, 9-hr battery, with Gentle Monster, Warby Parker

• Galaxy Card to rival Apple's credit services

• Fold Trio: the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Fold8, Flip8 with AI, Flex + 6mth Google AI Pro trial. Comes with “Gemini Intelligence” on board that functions as an AI agent, which Samsung boasts can navigate 40+ apps and services on its own

• Galaxy Watch Ultra2 and Watch9 with AI health tools, AR

Jack Dorsey launches Slack competitor built for AI agents. Buzz, a new open source group chat platform from Block, puts humans and AI agents in the same conversations with native GitHub integration and model-agnostic architecture

🤖 Futurism

Brain-computer interface helps paralyzed man regain arm movement and touch, enabling self-feeding with benefits lasting over two years

United States accelerates efforts integrating air taxis and supersonic jets by clearing regulatory and infrastructure hurdles for deployment

📚 Good reads

Open Weights and American AI Leadership. More than 20 major tech companies (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, and ServiceNow) signed an open letter to Congress arguing that betting the US AI market on a handful of closed models is riskier, not safer, creating a single point of failure that’s difficult to test or defend. Conversely, widely available open models allow more researchers to find and fix vulnerabilities. OpenAI and Anthropic were notably absent. Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, and other leaders signed, shared, and defended the letter on social media

Beginner’s mind beats expertise in the age of AI agents. Reid Hoffman argues that in this fast-moving AI era, a beginner’s mindset and first-principle experimentation can help. Using creator Will Weinbach’s autonomous content agent as an example, he shows how turning tiny, recurring annoyances into agentic loops creates powerful systems that learn continuously from their own performance

How to read like a scientist, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Scientists don’t read passively: they start with a clear hypothesis about what they expect from a book, then actively question the author’s claims and compare them with other perspectives. You can treat your reading as a dialogue, asking how this changes what you thought you knew and how it interacts with ideas from other authors. Sharing what you learned (e.g. in a note, a chat with a teammate, a short post) will help the ideas stick

Cost per task is what really matters, because “cheap” per‑token models can burn far more tokens to reach the same accuracy and end up costing way more than “expensive” ones. Includes examples showing how models like Fable or Opus look pricey on paper but win, especially at lower “effort” settings

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Inside PM at Stripe: what comes after “become a builder”? Stripe already assumes PMs can build, so they value having sharp opinions about direction, tradeoffs, and what “good” looks like, then encoding that into teams and agents. Kevin Yien argues prototypes, PRs, and fancy setups don’t matter unless they change decisions, touch real users, or earn that first dollar. Everyone has the same AI tools, so focus on what makes a difference

[Podcast] How MorningBrew founder built a Claude-powered content machine. Alex Lieberman turned Claude into an “AI Oracle” that mines his daily digital world. (Slack, Notion, email, meetings), to surface ranked content ideas. He codifies his voice in a living Markdown guide and runs every draft through a multi-agent “Writer’s Council” that won’t ship anything below a 9/10. It’s a tight feedback loop that improves with every post, helping him and his team publish decent content

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Language Builder teaches you how to, quite literally, build your own language model! From Anthropic Cowork creator Felix Rieseberg; free

A brief guide to ChatGPT Work by Aakash Gupta. ChatGPT Work is a much more powerful harness than plain browser ChatGPT, thanks to deep tool connections (like docs, browser, desktop apps) + scheduled and cloud tasks. Aakash lays out how to set it up, turn your meetings and templates into reusable “context libraries,” and use it as your analyst, ops assistant, and UI for complex workflows

🔧 Products to try

Claude voice mode; free with Haiku; expanded models from $20/mo

No-AI-slop skill. Peter Yang open-sources a /no-ai-slop skill that strips 20+ common AI tics from writing and helps you spot obviously model-written text; free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$53B: Stripe and private equity Advent are bidding to buy PayPal 50/50 for $53B

$52B: A Chinese filing implied a roughly $52B valuation for DeepSeek, showing China’s frontier-model labs gaining financial weight

$14.8B: Uber to buy Delivery Hero in a deal valued at $14.8B. Delivery Hero will bring fresh international heft to Uber, which already owned about 25%

$3B: Databricksis getting $3B in fresh funding, hitting $188B valuation. That’s a 40% jump from its last valuation, which was only in December. The rush to reduce token costs while opening up more diverse model selections (including open source) has played right into their thesis. A particularly timely new feature, Unity AI Gateway, even helps companies track their spending on various AI models

$1.5B: Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation after crossing $1B in annualized revenue and 40 trillion daily tokens. It helps orgs transform general-purpose models into specialized intelligence

$700M: Neko Health, co-founded by Daniel Ek (Spotify), raises $700M for body-scanning technology and comprehensive wellness services, aiming to revolutionize preventive medicine

$320M: General Intuition, Bezos-backed startup, just closed a $320M round at $2.3B valuation, backing its theory that world models trained on gaming data can fill gaps LLMs can't

$162.5M: New York rules against deceptive subscriptions, junk fees mandate clear cancellation, full charge disclosure. Could save $162.5M p/a.

📰 What’s going on

iOS 27 public beta unveils revamped Siri AI integrating iPhone, iPad, Mac powered by Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, unavailable in EU

Apple Intelligence approved for China with Alibaba's Qwen. The Cyberspace Administration of China greenlit Apple's AI services after the company integrated Alibaba's model into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, with U.S. shares of Alibaba jumping over 6% on the news

OpenAI shipped the Codex Micro, a $230 physical keypad built with keyboard maker Work Louder, designed exclusively for controlling its agentic coding tool Codex. The device features six frosted keys with LEDs that track agent status, plus programmable controls for accepting code, branching threads, and switching between reasoning levels, making it the company’s first consumer hardware product ahead of its Jony Ive-designed smart speaker

And…OpenAI is building a smart speaker. The company will launch a “mobile, screen-free smart speaker,” designed to function as an “AI companion” that chats with users and controls other smart systems around the home. OpenAI suggests that, as your device gains a deeper understanding of its owner and their needs, it will become increasingly personalized and proactive, and will even develop a distinct “personality”

GPT-5.6 Codex reportedly deleted project files during an agentic coding task, a reminder autonomous tools still need permissions and backups

Google is “months behind” on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro, its upcoming flagship AI model. Since the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.5 Flash, Google has fallen behind its rivals and now lags behind several labs. Shareholders are not enthused, and Alphabet shares fell around 4% on the news (or $200B in market-cap terms)

Google Vids adds AI avatars from selfies. Workspace users can now create custom digital avatars that look and sound like them, pushing the tool beyond presentations into full video production with Gemini Omni integration

Google AI Mode connects to Instacart, Canva, YouTube. U.S. users can now link apps directly within conversational search to complete tasks like grocery ordering and playlist creation without leaving AI Mode

Waze adds Gemini-powered search and motorcycle mode. Users can now ask questions like "Find me parking close to Grand Mall" via voice; new two-wheeler mode accounts for rider-specific shortcuts and hazards

Anthropic unveils Claude for Teachers. Verified U.S. K-12 educators get free premium access with standards-aligned lesson planning across all 50 states and FERPA-compliant data terms

Spotify debuts ChatGPT-style conversational assistant for Premium subscribers with natural-language voice for personalized music discovery and playlists

Meta pulled its Instagram AI image editing tool after user backlash over content authenticity, misinformation, and moderation concerns

Meta introduced parent alerts when its AI detects signs that a teen may be in serious emotional distress

Superhuman introduces AI auto-draft for seamless email replies on $30/month service, setting a new email AI-productivity standard

Kimi K3 is here. After new models from Anthropic and OpenAI, China’s AI labs are fighting back. Kimi K3 is large (2.8 trillion parameters), well-ranked in testing, and available today for about what OpenAI charges for GPT-5.6 Terra, the middle-sized model from its recent family. In Arena evaluations, developers preferred K3 over Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol for coding tasks

Ramp launches AI token spend controls. AI Token Spend Management gives companies one dashboard to see and control spending across AI providers, weekly briefings on usage trends and ways to be more efficient, and real-time controls and alerts to stop overruns

Beijing limits humanlike AI interaction services. ByteDance’s Doubao (345M MAU) and Alibaba’s Qwen switched off their humanlike agents instead of trying to comply with China’s new rules. The rules go after bots built for sustained emotional interaction, nothing touching work or productivity agents yet

📚 Good reads

Researchers reported experimental evidence of recursive self-improvement after an autoresearch agent spent eight days improving its own harness and beat a version humans had tuned for two years on held-out benchmarks

The interface has left the building. AI is breaking traditional UX apart into 3 new paradigms: chat, voice, and agentic systems. We now should designing intent-aware, trustworthy systems that negotiate meaning, act across devices, and sometimes act entirely on the user’s behalf. PMs need to think when to use structured UI vs conversation, how to make voice and agents feel fast and accountable, and how to bake explainability and override into every AI-powered workflow

AI economy warning. 200+ researchers, economists (including 16 Nobel laureates), urge governments prepare for AI's economic impact, stressing urgent need to address societal, economic effects

Do automated evals work? Automated eval tools are powerful but can’t replace PM judgment. In a case-study, platforms and coding agents caught most obvious issues (and even found some human misses), but all failed on context‑dependent problems tied to product goals. PMs should annotate real traces and use AI to scale evaluation criteria

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] AI risks and walking away from OpenAI. If you watch one video this weekend, watch this. Daniel Kokotajlo argued AI-risk debates should focus on two failure modes: companies losing control of superintelligent systems and executives or governments concentrating extraordinary economic, political, and military power. He’s the guy who wrote AI 2027, and his new plan AI 2040

[Podcast] Builder-executives are getting paid like pro athletes. Product leaders who can both build with modern AI tools and operate at true executive scope are suddenly getting pro-athlete–style packages, which is pulling compensation up across the ladder. Singhal argues that if you have elite potential, you should optimize less for today’s title or comp and more for staying “current”

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Claude productivity masterclass. Former FAANG AI PM Jyothi Nookula shares a practical, 5-layer Claude ecosystem for PMs. She shows how to turn Claude into a “PM OS” with reusable skills, project-specific memory, and MCP integrations to tools like Slack, Drive, and Jira. Also shares concrete automation and “chief of staff” patterns that help PMs ship faster and avoid slop

How to use prioritization matrices without oversimplifying decisions. Prioritization matrices visually rank opportunities using competing criteria like value vs effort, risk vs impact, or time vs money, making complex tradeoffs easier to discuss. The article walks through classic 2x2 and 3x3 variants (Eisenhower, RICE visualizations, BCG, Ansoff, GE) and shows when each lens is useful. Matrices are communication and workshop tools, not your only prioritization method!

🔧 Products to try

1Password for Claude, so Claude can sign into websites and retrieve one-time codes without seeing credentials; requires 1Password and Claude access

Bolt Slides helps you build interactive React presentations, including charts, timelines, animation, live data, and presenter tools; pretty cool, free and open-source

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$10B: Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture, Blue Origin, is raising $10B in its first-ever outside financing round, establishing a pre-money valuation of $130B

$3B: Crusoe, the AI cloud firm, is negotiating a $3B raise at a $30B valuation

$300M: Lovable in talks to raise $300M, nearly doubling its valuation to $13.2B, supported by $500M ARR, in a 146-person team

$130M: Prime Intellect, the San Francisco cognitive computing startup, hits unicorn status after $130M Series A at $1B+ valuation

$120M: Norm, the legal AI startup, raised an additional $120M, also hitting unicorn status at a valuation of $1.2B

23M: Reddit said its AI-assisted defenses block 23M spam views per day and revoke nearly 2M fake votes daily

4.8K: Microsoft has laid off approximately 4,800 employees, representing 2.1% of its global workforce, with Xbox and commercial sales bearing the heaviest impact. The cuts come as the company redirects resources toward its newly launched $2.5B Frontier Company AI business unit

📰 What’s going on

Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets. This one is pretty wild. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI this week accusing them of systematically stealing trade secrets to build their upcoming hardware device. The complaint names two ex-Apple people: Chang Liu, a former senior engineer who allegedly kept his Apple laptop and downloaded dozens of confidential files while already working at OpenAI, and Tang Tan, now OpenAI’s hardware chief, who allegedly asked Apple candidates to bring “actual parts” (batteries, logic boards) to interviews. For context, over 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, and the io acquisition ($6.4B, with Jony Ive) made it clear OpenAI is coming for consumer hardware. What makes it extra-awkward is that ChatGPT is still integrated into the iPhone

Claude Cowork expands to mobile and web for Max subscribers. Anthropic's general knowledge work agent now runs tasks in the background across devices; 33.4% of usage goes to business process operating, while coding accounts for just 8.7%

Anthropic launches Reflect to track your AI usage. A new Claude dashboard visualizes conversation topics, usage patterns, and task types, while prompting users to set quiet hours and consider what tasks should stay human

OpenAI officially launched GPT-5.6, which comes in Sol, Terra, and Luna: think of them like most powerful, balanced, and affordable. Sol’s Ultra mode coordinates multiple agents on harder jobs.

OpenAI launches GPT-Live-1 voice models for real-time conversation. New full-duplex models can speak and listen simultaneously, handle natural interruptions, and connect to GPT-5.5 for search and reasoning while maintaining conversation

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Work. OpenAI has reconfigured Codex and ChatGPT into a new agentic tool called ChatGPT Work. As with Claude Cowork, ChatGPT Work is designed to plan and execute multi-step tasks autonomously, with an eye toward serving both engineers and also non-technical folks

Perplexity tests Teammate coding assistant to challenge Anthropic and OpenAI. The AI search startup's internal engineering tool handles full project lifecycles from planning to monitoring, with integration planned for its Comet AI browser

Microsoft is reportedly replacing some OpenAI and Anthropic model calls with in-house MAI models in Copilot apps such as Excel and Outlook

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 through the new public Meta Model API, with 1M-token context, tool and computer use, coding gains, multimodal reasoning, and pricing pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic

Meta has launched Muse Image, a free AI image generator built by Meta Superintelligence Labs. The tool is now available through the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories, and WhatsApp, allowing users to create images, edit photos, and generate custom visuals for ads or social sharing

Meta is reportedly testing AI glasses that capture a wearer's surroundings with cameras and audio, pulling its hardware push into another privacy debate

Meta bans engineers from using Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. The company's Applied AI division prohibited rival coding tools to prevent "model distillation," after internal tracking showed 60 trillion tokens consumed in a single 30-day period

xAI rebrands to SpaceXAI following February acquisition

SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.5, its first major model since going public, with Elon Musk claiming it matches Anthropic’s Opus-class performance at significantly lower cost and faster speeds

Slack connects Slackbot to full Salesforce platform via MCP. The integration lets users pull CRM data, generate Tableau visualizations, and trigger DocuSign approvals from chat messages

JADEPUFFER was identified as the first documented ransomware operation conducted entirely by a large language model agent.

China considers restricting overseas access to top AI models. Beijing held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, and Z.ai about limiting access to advanced Chinese AI systems and toughening penalties for AI theft under national security law. Also, Alibaba reportedly banned employees from using Claude Code

Klarna applies to become a bank, in its latest push to become a full consumer bank rather than a BNPL brand

Visa launched Visa Destinations, a mobile-first travel platform offering cardholders curated experiences, city guides, and perks across 10 markets

📚 Good reads

State of AI. CB Insights shares real-time global data and intelligence on dealmaking, funding, and exits with this addictive interactive dashboard

AI labs flee the commodity trap by climbing up the stack. Selling raw model inference is a terrible long‑term business. Models look similar, switching is easy, and competition will grind token prices toward marginal cost. To survive, labs are racing “up the stack” into products, AI-native SaaS, and embedded “digital workers,” importing classic enterprise-software moats like switching costs, ecosystems, contracts, and behavioral lock‑in. Complement with this NYT investigation on Mercor, Scale and Handshake, who are paying highly educated professionals to turn their own expertise into training data that may eventually automate their roles

False confidence is AI’s real business risk. Leah Tharin on how LLMs can massively amplify confidently wrong decisions, especially when leaders skip research, misuse data, or outsource strategy to AI. She suggests re‑establishing trust by demanding verification, clear sourcing, visible “how I worked,” and shared reviews of critical data and experiments. Don’t just produce more docs with AI; design feedback loops and guardrails that stop confidently incorrect people (including you) from steering the business off a cliff

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video/podcast] GPT-5.6 vs Claude Fable 5: practical head-to-head for builders. Peter Yang tests both models across 6 use cases, including front-end site generation, video clipping, app feature planning, or advising. Fable seems to have an edge on rich UI and some long-term reasoning, but GPT‑5.6 wins hard on browser/computer use, reliability, and cost. He suggests PMs: if you pick one daily driver for building and running workflows, go with GPT‑5.6; use Fable as an optional “planner/designer” upgrade when you can afford both

[Video/podcast] The PM’s guide to AI design that isn’t slop. Aakash Gupta and Meng To explain how to give the right setup to Codex for design work. They walk through a practical workflow (plan with context, generate designs with the taste layer, and steer mid-flow) to avoid shipping off-brand AI-generated UI. You can almost consider AI like a junior designer if you have a well-structured system

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Harness engineering for smarter, self-improving AI agents. Lilian Weng explains how AI progress now depends as much on the harness around models as on model weights themselves: workflows, memory, tools, evaluation, permissioning… She shows emerging patterns like workflow automation, file-system-based memory, sub-agents, and evolutionary search that let agents debug, rewrite, or even redesign their own scaffolding. Complement with Claire Vo’s recent podcast explaining how to build a custom “harness” that wraps LLMs (using Claude Agent SDK) to automate a specific, repetitive workflow

🔧 Products to try

Claude for Open Source gives eligible open-source maintainers and contributors six months of Claude Max access; free for six months if eligible

Willow Frontier Mini gives you unlimited voice dictation for turning speech into text, while Frontier Pro targets faster and more accurate team workflows; Mini is free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$18B: Bending Spoons, the Italian tech company, achieves $18B Nasdaq IPO with founder sharing "failure playbook" of strategic pivots, lessons from setbacks

$2.5B: Microsoft launches a $2.5B AI deployment unit with 6,000 engineers. It will embed industry experts at Fortune 500 clients for outcome-driven implementations; follows Amazon's $1B FDE commitment two days earlier

$2B: Kling AI, the Kuaishou spinoff, raised $2B at a $15B valuation with $500M ARR; Q1 revenue 650M yuan, marking 300% YoY growth, competing with Seedance on video AI

$800M: Together AI raised $800M at an $8.3B valuation to expand open-model infrastructure

$500M: Higgsfield AI, the San Fran video startup, in talks to raise $300-$500M at a $5B valuation, with $500M monthly revenue run rate up from $200M this year

$320M: Airwallex raised a $320M Series H at $11B valuation, and announced two new products: Airi, a consumer wallet for agentic commerce across fiat and stablecoins, and T:0, an AI-powered stack for business finance

$200M: Quantifind raises $200M round.vThe startup develops AI-powered software to help banks detect and combat financial crimes, particularly money laundering, using a combination of public and private data

$100M: Arena said it reached a $100M annual revenue run rate eight months after launching its real-world AI evaluation product

21K: Oracle cuts 21,000 jobs as AI automates 13% of workforce. The company spent $1.8B on severance while cloud infrastructure revenue surged 93% and capex jumped 162% to $55.7B

5%: Sam Altman proposed a deal granting the US government 5% equity stake at OpenAI, forming public-private partnership

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic in talks with Samsung to create custom AI chip following OpenAI-Broadcom to align with industry shift towards bespoke silicon

Anthropic’s Fable is back after export controls were lifted. The relaunch adds a new cybersecurity classifier, a filter that catches risky requests before Fable answers. If a request gets flagged, users are routed to Opus 4.8 instead. Paid users can try Fable 5 through July 7 for up to 50% of weekly usage limits

Anthropic also launched Claude Sonnet 5; it delivers performance close to Opus 4.8 at a lower price point, with stronger reasoning, coding, and tool use than Sonnet 4.6, and improved cost efficiency at medium effort levels

OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6, a new model family led by Sol, its flagship next-generation model. The other tiers are Terra, a balanced everyday model, and Luna, the faster, cheaper option. The unusual part is the rollout. OpenAI said the U.S. government asked it to start with a trusted-partner preview before broader release

Google dropped an upgrade to its Nano Banana series of text-to-image models. The new Nano Banana 2 (NB2) Lite is the fastest and most cost-effective image generation option currently available from Google. It can produce fresh images in a mere 4 seconds, and costs just $0.034 per 1,000 outputs. Tradeoffs: NB2 Lite supports just 1k resolution, as opposed to the 2k and 4k images by the classic Nano Banana models

Gemini Spark, Google's agentic assistant, launches on Mac. It now works with local files, integrates with Keep, Tasks, and third-party apps like Instacart and OpenTable, and adds real-time topic tracking for AI Ultra subscribers

Cursor has officially launched its iOS app that lets you manage coding agents on your mobile. The app works in two modes: you can start entirely new cloud-based agents directly from iOS, or remotely control agents already running on your desktop

Meta has quietly launched its own new mobile app, Pocket, and it lets users create what it calls “Gizmos:” vibe-coded mini apps and games that users can publish to their social feeds

Meta introduces an AI subscription model that turns smart glasses into SaaS. Users can pay monthly fees to access advanced AI-powered features

Meta is developing a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to AI compute power and models. The move would put the company in direct competition with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure as it seeks to monetize its massive data center investments

GitHub added AI credit pools to cost centers, giving Copilot admins a way to stop one team from draining shared monthly credits

Notion announced support for HTML inside documents, which allows creators to embed interactive widgets. The vision here is to allow teams to embed snippets of HTML that bring things like prototypes, explainers and other things to life inside a document. This collapses the gap between documentation and interaction. Instead of describing a feature flow in text or linking to a separate prototype, you could build lightweight, functional demos right where your specs live

Walmart, Uber and Microsoft are among the orgs capping AI usage as ROI scrutiny intensifies. Uber depleted its annual AI budget in months, and some procurement teams now demanding line-item accountability for every tool

X shipped an MCP server that connects Grok, Cursor, and Claude straight into the X API, so your agent can search the full post archive, check trends, manage bookmarks, and draft Articles using your own account’s permissions

X has begun rolling out X Money to select Premium+ users, introducing a cash sweep program offering up to US$10M in FDIC insurance. The service also includes a 6% APY, a Visa-backed debit card, p2p transfers, and cashback, with a broader rollout planned for mid-2026

📚 Good reads

Summer reads. Curated book recommendations by a16z and MIT. Nice selections including new and classics, encompassing science, entrepreneurship, fiction and culture

Where AI is heading next. Peter Yang expects that AI “super apps” like Codex, Claude, and Cursor will become the main workspace, turning many traditional SaaS products into invisible back-end pipes used mostly by agents. Always-on cloud agents and multiplayer workflow (where teams and agents collaborate across tools) are the next milestone

Grading AI fluency in Product orgs. Adam Fishman argues that AI “usage” is a vanity metric and that judgment is what matters. He shares a 4-tier rubric from his Mozilla PM org (unacceptable, good, better, best) that focuses on leverage and discernment. Ultimately, he says PMs who treat AI as a core skill, leaving a clear human fingerprint on every AI-assisted artifact, will advance faster

Understanding the code our AI agents write still matters. Geoffrey Litt explains that even as agents get better at generating and self‑verifying code, humans still need to understand that code to stay creative and in control. Instead of line‑by‑line diff reviews, he suggests higher‑leverage techniques like code explainer docs, quizzes to test your own mental model, or small “microworlds” you can poke at

How to write OKRs for an AI product. Jeff Gothelf shares why AI OKRs should avoid output metrics like “95% accuracy” and instead focus on observable user behavior. He proposes 3 types of KRs: outcome (what users do after the AI responds), calibration (how accuracy shows up in reduced checking/correcting), and trust (how much work users let the AI do for them)

Zapier CEO bans DMs aiming for transparency and AI context. Interesting approach by Zapier’s Wade Foster, basically banning exec DMs to push almost all conversations into public Slack channels, treating the company’s knowledge as a “Shared Brain” for AI. They track an exec “transparency leaderboard” (% of messages in public channels), and record and transcribe meetings. Too much?

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] PMing at Meta today. Meta PM leader Jagjit Chawla explains how they’ve blown up old-school PM rituals: PRDs are now a paragraph + prototype, status decks are replaced by an overnight agent that reads code, docs, and email, and reviews start at the decision. Ideas and first-principles judgment are the new bottlenecks

[Podcast] How Gusto built a product line with Claude Code, and putting GLM 5.2 to test. Claire Vo shows how Z.ai’s new GLM‑5.2 is strong enough to rival frontier models for many coding and agentic workflows, especially when cost and control matter. She walks through wiring it into Cursor and Claude Code, and stress-testing it. Separate, but on the same episode, Gusto’s Eddie Kim shares how a 5‑person team, a “permanent Zoom” with Claude Code, and almost zero traditional process shipped a tier‑one production agent in 10 weeks by treating AI as a team member

[Video] The future of work with Claude. Anthropic’s product and eng leads explain how Claude Tag lives inside tools like Slack, watching public channels and autonomously running long, multi-day workflows. Tag can self-schedule work and adapt to team preferences. For PMs, this is an always-on agent sitting in the middle of your team’s work, driving PRs, answering questions, and diffusing best practices across the org

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Loop engineering. Marily Nika explains how to design loops so AI agents don’t fail, over-iterate, or hallucinate when given vague goals and unchecked tools. Designing loops is becoming a core PM skill in a world in which we delegate more and more to AI

39 principles for better human–AI interfaces. This piece turns academic work on human–AI interaction into a practical framework and 39 principles for building AI products users can trust. For PMs, it’s a checklist for when to delegate to AI, how much autonomy to grant, or how to keep assistance useful without becoming manipulative or unsafe

🔧 Products to try

Figma Motion puts animation timelines inside the Figma canvas, so designers can create keyframes, prompt for motion, and hand developers code-ready timing specs; free options

BrowserAct gives your agent a real browser for clicking, filling forms, uploading files, handling verification, and scraping live sites; free limited tier

OpenClaw app. The AI agent tool is now on iOS and Android; free to try

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$5.4B: World Cup betting hits $5.4B across Kalshi, Polymarket, and Robinhood prediction markets

$1.5B: Baseten is raising $1.5B at $13B valuation to expand low-cost AI model services competing with OpenAI, Anthropic on affordability

$650M: Groq raised $650M to scale AI inference cloud to 200 MW by 2027 across 13 global data centers serving 5M developers

$500M: RAISE US launched with $500M+ raised and a goal of $1B, backed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and Bank of America, to fund retraining programs for workers displaced by AI, starting in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah

$320M: General Intuition raises $320M Series B at $2.3B valuation for using gaming to develop embodied AI, robotics, spatial intelligence, pushing world-model research

$320: Airwallex has announced a $320M Series H at $11B valuation to accelerate product development across autonomous finance and agentic commerce, while also expanding its infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets

75%: Credit card data shows Anthropic's paying consumer base up 75% since Jan-26, with interest in Claude courses surging 18x in 30 days, gaining ground on OpenAI

5x: OpenAI's Codex grew its active user base more than 5x in the first half of 2026, with non-developer adoption rising 137x for individual users; legal, finance, and recruiting at OpenAI now use Codex as their primary work tool, not ChatGPT

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI holds back GPT-5.6 series and announces a “limited preview” of its new frontier AI models. That includes Sol, the flagship; Terra, a comparable model to GPT-5.5 that eats up only half the tokens; and Luna, an even lower-cost option. For now, only a few trusted partners have access to these models, as requested/instructed by the US government. The models will apparently open up access to a larger population within the coming weeks

OpenAI leadership is having second thoughts about its IPO plans, at least for the remainder of 2026. Sam Altman wants the value to exceed $1T as a public company, and it’s unclear if that’s currently possible amid unpredictable global markets, lingering concerns about future AI revenues, and the downward slide of SpaceX stock following its own blockbuster debut

OpenAI and Broadcom team on AI chip. This marks the first-ever custom AI chip developed by the ChatGPT maker. For now, Jalapeño remains in the testing phase, but Broadcom reports that the chip provides equivalent inference performance while draining about 50% less energy, compared to a standard AI GPU

Anthropic has launched Claude Tag, a new service that embeds an "always-on" AI assistant directly into Slack channels, where it acts as a persistent teammate that learns from ongoing conversations and can complete multi-step tasks autonomously. The feature is now in beta for Claude Enterprise and Claude Team customers. Andrej Karpathy referred to such services as a “self-contained, persistent asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans”, which he calls the next iteration of LLM UX

Anthropic accuses Alibaba of the largest-ever Claude distillation attack, alleging Alibaba ran 28.8M fraudulent exchanges through 25K accounts between April-June 2026 to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities and accelerate China's AI development

Google delays Gemini 3.5 Pro to July for token optimization. The company pushed its next frontier model back from June to gather more real-world feedback and fix token consumption issues identified in Flash 3.5

Meta releases new smart glasses without Ray Ban frames, at $299 with camera, AI assistant, 8-hour battery, & 14 live-translation languages

Meta paused its Model Capability Initiative (an internal program that records employee keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screen activity to train AI) after a permissions error made all that sensitive data readable by everyone at the company

Instagram enhances its TV app with longer-form episodic and live formats now on Samsung TVs

Apple announced sweeping price increases across Macs, iPads, and HomePods blamed on chip shortages. The company said it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly." Updated prices:

• MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)

• 13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)

• 13-inch MacBook Pro 1TB: $1,999 (up from $1,699)

• Base iPad: $449 (up from $349)

• iPad Air (11-inch): $749 (up from $599)

• Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)

Figma announces Motion, a native animation timeline built directly into Figma. Designers can now animate objects on the canvas with keyframes, easing controls, and sequencing without leaving the file or handing off to a separate tool. Here’s an example of one animation that took 4.5 seconds to make

Figma also presented Generative Plugins, which let you ask the Figma agent to build a plugin in plain language without knowing how to code it. The plugin lives in the file and travels with it, so if you hand a file off to another team or a client, the tools you built with go with it

And finally, Figma announced Code Layers. Code now lives directly on the canvas, so designers can import a GitHub repo or use a local folder, and when making changes that impact the codebase, Figma’s agent analyzes what’s been changed and pushes updates back to the main repo

China claims No. 2 global AI lab ranking: New Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 model trails only Anthropic's Fable 5 on front-end coding benchmarks; founder Tang Jie predicts China will match Fable 5 before year-end, challenging Musk's Q1 2027 projection

Alibaba's new AI video model HappyHorse 1.1 surges to #2 spot in benchmarks, surpassing OpenAI's Sora and ByteDance's Seedance

Notion announced external agent support for Claude and Cursor

Notion will shutter its Mail inbox later this year, arguing that more of its customers are using agents to handle email Consider this (relatively minor) product decision as one more piece of evidence that future software will be built for agents, not humans

SoFi has acquired Composer, a startup that helps investors build and automate trading strategies using AI

📚 Good reads

The AI era requires a different kind of experimentation, by Elena Verna. In an AI-first world, tweaking button colors and tiny UI details is a distraction; the real gains come from bold, system-level experiments, especially around monetization. It’s time to skip minor tests, run bigger, longer-lived bets on pricing and packaging, and to treat AI “best practices” as the default, so scarce eng time goes into experiments that move engagement and revenue over the long run

Trust before it’s earned. Leah Tharin explores why leaders should give trust early, and argues that real empowerment means granting ownership up front, then demanding no surprises through clear, frequent updates. She breaks down how “managing up” with actionable transparency protects trust, and how servant leaders should never punish failure but must still act fast on weak performance. Strong performers are the ones who reduce chaos, create clarity, and quietly lift everyone around them

Why platform product management is the most demanding PM role. Platform PMs juggle two very different “customers” (internal teams and end users), a swarm of stakeholders, and impact that only shows up months later. Because the work is mostly invisible, they also need exceptional storytelling and influencing skills to secure adoption. Treating platforms as products (with JTBD, clear leading indicators, internal GTM, and sane versioning policies) turns a hard role into a high‑leverage one

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] How Laurel built an AI-native “company OS” for everyone. Laurel’s CPO, Jiaona Zhang, shows how a simple Claude Code “company OS” lets even CSMs ship to production. It also reframes the PM role in AI-native teams (captain model, two-track reviews) and gives a clear framework for proving you’re an AI-native PM in interviews

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

45-min Hermes course: set up your AI chief of staff. Peter Yang introduces a beginner‑friendly course to get Hermes running 24/7 in under an afternoon

Claude Code power skills for PMs. This guide shows how to set up agentic workflows in Claude Code. It covers power habits like tight context management, planning before execution, automatic checks, picking the right model (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus) for each task, and wiring hooks, agents, and /goal loops. A brief operating manual for turning Claude into a reusable execution engine

Anthropic has published a detailed guide on how to manage Claude Tag

🔧 Products to try

AgenticCalling lets you send your Claude or ChatGPT agent out to make real phone calls on your behalf, so you can tell it “call 50 hotels in Miami and find me the best rate” and it handles the whole conversation autonomously; 3 free minutes to start

LocalClicky is a fully offline Mac voice assistant that controls your computer by voice (open apps, move files, edit videos, click things on screen), with zero data leaving your machine; open source, free

That’s all for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$60B: Flutter/FanDuel expects $60B in global legal betting on the 2026 World Cup, 71% more than 2022, with peak demand hitting 100K bets/minute

$60B: SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B. Back in April, SpaceX announced an agreement to either acquire Cursor owner Anysphere for $60B or pay the company $10B for its collaborative work on a new AI model. Post-IPO, the companies have made the acquisition official (pending regulatory approval)

$34B: OpenAI losses increased nearly 8X in 2025, with spending hitting $34B

$7.4B: DeepSeek valued $50B after raising $7.4B

$3.6B: Salesforce buys Fin (previously known as Intercom) in a $3.6B deal

1B: ChatGPT hit 1B mobile MAUs

$310M: Odyssey, the world model startup, raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation. Unlike LLMs, world models map the physical world and attempt to understand how objects move through it. They’re essential for training and directing the self-driving cars, robots, and other hardware controlled by AI brains, but occupying physical space alongside humans

10k: China is executing a 2026 plan to deploy 10K+ humanoid robots across factories, logistics, retail, healthcare, inspection, and emergency response sectors

$2.2k: Snap unveils standalone Specs AR glasses powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon for $2,195, featuring 51-degree field of view, gesture control, shipping fall 2026. Snap stock plumeted 20% after the announcement, which also came with plenty of mockery

49% of US adults now report using AI chatbots. 25% on a daily basis

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI’s Codex has launched a new feature called Record & Replay which lets users show Codex a workflow once and then reuse it later as a skill. Codex can interact with e.g. spreadsheets, web applications, browser tabs, or connected plugins

Codex also launched a dedicated iOS plugin that makes it easier to build iOS apps end to end

Claude Design shipped a change to the components it creates to help bridge the gap between design and development. Product teams can now upload their actual component libraries 8buttons, typography, color tokens, spacing rules,…) from GitHub, design files, or raw uploads. Claude then generates designs using only those components and auto-corrects output before showing it to users. They also launched a redesigned editor, which comes with some new layout controls. These let you drag, resize and align elements directly on the canvas, without having to rely on the conversational interface to make the changes

Claude Design can now send designs directly to third parties like Replit, Miro or Canva

Anthropic is “very confident” Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 will become available again “in the coming days,” according to Managing Director of International

Anthropic added centralized enterprise auth for MCP connectors, starting with Okta beta support

Google rolled out Gemini-powered Gmail summaries globally across free, paid, and Workspace accounts on Android, iOS, and web

Google launched Android 17 with AppFunctions, Bubble Bar multitasking, device handoff, post-quantum security, and more Gemini features.

Perplexity⁠ launched Brain for Computer, a continuously learning memory/context-graph system in Research Preview for Max subscribers that starts future tasks with project context and is reported to improve answer correctness by 25%, recall by 16%, and history-dependent task cost by 13%

AWS launches AI agent capabilities at New York Summit. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds managed knowledge bases, web search, and monetization tools for content owners to price and meter AI bot access at the edge

Meta launched AI Mode on Facebook, a chatbot-style search that synthesizes answers from public posts, Groups, and Reels instead of returning a list of links, powered by Meta's Muse Spark model

Meta split operations from Manus and began unwinding the acquisition after Chinese regulatory pressure; the founders were reportedly exploring a buyback

Meta’s Emily Dalton Smith is stepping down just two months after being tapped to lead its new “AI for Work” initiative, which was meant to unify internal AI tooling and agents like Metamate

Microsoft ships Copilot Cowork globally with usage-based billing. The agentic system now runs complex, multi-tool tasks end-to-end with spending limits, usage reporting, and model choice

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, an open-weights model with 1M-token context window and strong long-horizon coding. Ahead of Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash in benchmarks, and just below Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, but at a fraction of the cost

Pinterest has teased the launch of “Ask Pinterest,” an experimental standalone app that lets users discover products through natural language conversation instead of traditional visual search. Pinterest built it as a separate app to test conversational shopping without disrupting the main app

LinkedIn is launching “connected apps,” a feature that automatically generates verified descriptions of how you actually use supported software tools and displays them on your profile

LinkedIn is also plannng the roll out a bunch of new ways for creators to make money: a brand‑deal marketplace, paid “experiences” (like 1:1 advice), subscriptions for newsletters, podcasts, and gated communities. It’s also looking into a creator fund and scaling up paid, ticketed events with top creators (moving closer to YouTube/Instagram’s playbook)

Alibaba Cloud expanded in Europe and said new agentic AI services are coming for regional customers later this year

Coinbase’s memo signals a major strategic shift: beyond crypto, toward a full-service financial platform

📚 Good reads

The mom-and-pop SaaS era has arrived. Elena Verna explains how AI is crushing the cost and complexity of building software, so thousands of niche problems that never justified a dev team (or a VC pitch) are finally getting real products (somehow I ended up building a baby tracker). Non-technical, deeply experienced operators (teachers, recruiters, local retailers, coaches, etc.) are becoming builders, packaging 10+ years of domain knowledge into small, profitable tools instead of chasing unicorn-scale TAM

What you’re really selling to customers. Shreyas Doshi argues that great companies win by deeply understanding the essence of what they sell (e.g. Apple selling taste) vs just products / features. He shows how this “one true thing” simplifies decisions, branding, and strategy

The first 90 days of an AI product. The piece argues that the first 3 months after launch are a diagnostic sprint for AI features. It walks through a 30/60/90‑day playbook: watch bypass and adoption patterns, classify failures (missing data vs retrieval vs intent), and separate content issues from latency or formatting

Microsoft’s AI-forward design system. Microsoft is evolving Copilot into a cross‑app “thinking layer” that understands your context, follows you between Word, Excel, and more, and adapts to where you are in the explore‑vs‑focus cycle. A single Copilot (via the Dynamic Action Button, Chat, On‑Canvas UI, or Suggested User Actions) keeps conversations continuous, and underneath, patterns like “Throw & Catch” orchestrate handoffs between entry points

Block explains how they build faster with Builderbot, a Slack-native orchestration layer that coordinates multiple AI agents across all of Block’s codebases. Unlike typical repo-level coding assistants, it understands every service, API, and convention, then picks up tickets, creates branches, writes code, opens PRs, and iterates through CI. It’s powered by their open source agent framework goose and MCP, and already accounts for roughly 15% of Block’s weekly production code changes

Analysis of Y Combinator’s latest batch. CB Insights shares how YC’s latest cohort leans heavily in physical AI (robots, drones, wearables, and space hardware), plus the simulation and data infrastructure needed to train them. The batch also shows agent tooling getting more granular, with specialized infra (routing, safety, continuous learning) replacing “do-it-all” platforms. YC is always a good indicator of “what’s next” (at least from VC perspective)

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Anthropic’s Fiona Fung explains how her Claude Code and Cowork teams now ship about 8x more code. She describes an AI-native org where roles blur (PMs, designers, and engineers all ship code). Her biggest focus is culture: giving teams permission to kill bad processes, automate everything Claude can do, and learn together in new rituals like pairwise programming lunches

[Podcast] The model eats the harness. Logan Kilpatrick, who leads Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, explains how Google’s new Antigravity agent harness is becoming the shared “agentic layer” across Gemini, Search, Android and Cloud, predicting that today’s startup obsession with external harnesses has maybe a 12‑month edge before models simply absorb that logic

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to use Agent Skills. An in-depth new guide from Google’s AI teams with practical examples. Agent Skills turn any general-purpose AI agent into a specialist on demand. Learn how to build, evaluate, and deploy skills in production

🔧 Products to try

ChatGPT scheduled tasks now has a dedicated management page and faster recurring briefings from your interests, chats, and connected apps; included in eligible ChatGPT plans

Grok in PowerPoint turns prompts or outlines into slide decks, diagrams, images, and data-connected presentations inside Microsoft 365. Free add-in; Microsoft 365 required

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$674B: ASML became Europe’s most valuable company ever, hitting a $674B market cap as analysts bet that demand for its chip-making machines will keep climbing

$20B: Bending Spoons, the Italian holding company owning AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo, filed for a U.S. IPO, potentially valuing it at $20B. Projected $1.31B in 2025 revenue, up 95% YoY, with $601M in Q1 revenue

$150M: Anthropic launched Claude Corps, a $150M fellowship that will place 1,000 fellows inside nonprofits for year-long AI coaching

$130M: Canada's Koho just closed $130M at $1.33B valuation in its push to become a full bank

19%: SpaceX shares soared on Day 1, closing out Friday just above $161 per share, a 19% jump over its IPO price. The company is now valued at over $2T, and Elon Musk enters the record books as history’s first-ever trillionaire

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic launches and then blocks new Mythos-class models. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, the public version of its new Mythos-class model, plus Claude Mythos 5, the same underlying model with some safeguards lifted for vetted cyber and biology partners. Both models got suspended right before the weekend, citing risks for the models to be used maliciously by foreign nationals. Before the full block, Anthropic walked back invisible Claude Fable 5 safeguards after researchers said legitimate AI, cyber, and bio work was blocked or silently switched to Opus 4.8

Microsoft blocked employees from accessing Claude Fable 5 through internal GitHub Copilot after Anthropic updated its data retention rules, with legal teams reportedly reviewing whether flagged prompts could expose customer data

OpenAI filed for an IPO, on what could become one of the largest public offerings in Wall Street history. The company noted “it may take a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company”

OpenAI is considering drastic price cuts on tokens as it braces for a pricing war with Anthropic; both companies are heading toward IPOs and neither wants to blink first

OpenAI expanded API web search so models can look up current information before generating response,

ChatGPT can now turn data and comparisons into charts directly inside ChatGPT

OpenAI agreed to acquire Ona, giving Codex secure, persistent cloud environments for long-running enterprise agents

Apple announced the revamped version of Siri during WWDC. Siri now comes with a dedicated mobile app and the ability to swap models. There were no major updates to iOS, with Apple taking the opportunity to ship some refinements like the ability to configure the transparency settings on Liquid Glass

Apple's foldable iPhone. Hidden iOS 27 developer beta code reveals parameters like "foldState", suggesting Apple’s foldable iPhone might be unveiled this fall

Google announced new capabilities to NotebookLM, which give it coding abilities. Powered by Antigravity, NotebookLM can spin up a sandbox environment, write scripts, and execute them to support deeper analysis (e.g., data cleaning, statistical comparisons, simulations) without you leaving the UI. NotebookLM will come with a set of more than 100 software skills that can help you build workflows with your notebooks that previously would have required you to jump between apps

Google Analytics is also getting some important new updates. Starting this week, GA4 will get its own AI Assistant traffic measurements which lets you track and trend human traffic from top AI assistants including Gemini, ChatGPT and AI Overviews directly in reports

Perplexity plans to pursue a 2028 IPO regardless of whether Anthropic or OpenAI list first

Amplitude released Wave, an AI agent that automates the full product improvement cycle, from identifying what to build to measuring whether it worked

Visa and OpenAI have announced a partnership which sees Visa’s payment network directly into OpenAI’s AI agents, allowing these agents to initiate secure transactions on behalf of users. When an AI agent needs to complete a purchase, it uses tokenized Visa credentials (encrypted payment information) rather than raw card data

Mastercard also launched new agentic capabilities this week. Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) is Mastercard’s infrastructure for high-speed, automated payments between AI agents and services. Instead of traditional person-initiated transactions, AP4M enables agents to execute continuous, programmatic payments

Coinbase announced an AI agent lets users automate cryptocurrency trades and payments without manual intervention. Users connect the agent to their account and give it natural language instructions, like “rebalance my portfolio” or “execute this trade”

DoorDash released a new AI Assistant that lets users order through voice, chat, recipe link or image. Their CEO says that in early testing, nearly half of all restaurant orders made with Ask DoorDash were from a place the customer had never ordered from before, and grocery baskets built with Ask DoorDash were over 35% larger than those without

Xiaomi open-sources MiMo Code with persistent memory. The AI coding agent maintains context across extended dev sessions through background subagent and automated weekly memory compression, outperforming Claude Code on SWE-Bench Pro

📚 Good reads

Why your AI strategy needs a clear point of view. In fast-moving markets like AI, buyers feel overwhelmed and rely on vendors not just for product demos, but for a confident, opinionated take on where the category is going. April Dunford shows how companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft root their POVs in their unique strengths, turning strategy into a story about the future. As PMs, if we can’t clearly explain our own POV, we make it easier for customers to delay decisions (or choose a competitor)

Using LLMs for analytics. One of PMs new worst fears is getting wrong analyses due to LLM hallucinations. Anthropic explains how they automate about 95% of internal analytics queries with Claude using a multi-layer approach

Becoming irreplaceable in the age of AI. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how feeling replaceable hits our deepest needs for belonging, self-worth, and identity, especially when AI can do parts of our jobs faster or cheaper. Her piece argues you can’t be truly irreplaceable as a function, but you can become hard to substitute with your rare mix of talent, taste, and trust. For PMs that could translate into your unique combinations of strategy + communication + domain insight, plus making your thinking visible, and running tiny public experiments so the “version only you can ship” is obvious to others

Emotional intelligence for PMs in the age of AI. Roman Pichler argues that as AI and data tools get stronger, emotional intelligence becomes a real differentiator for PMs. He breaks EI down into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management, showing how each one leads to better products, stronger stakeholder alignment, and healthier teams. He also shares some practical habits, like mindfulness, journaling, active listening, and regular user conversations

🎧 Good listen/watch

Claude Fable 5 review by Claire Vo. Complement with this great write-up by Ethan Mollick

AI eats the world? A reality check with Ben Evans for a16z podcast. They dig into where AI is delivering value today vs what’s still mostly hype. They focus on coding agents as the first real breakout use case, and how infra spend, software economics, and enterprise adoption dynamics shape what comes next

🔧 Products to try

Google launched Gemini 3.5 Live Translate for near-real-time speech translation in AI Studio, Google Translate, and Meet. 70+ languages. No choppy pauses or robotic monotone. It actually sounds like a person

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

€110B: France has locked down €110B to expand its domestic AI footprint

1B: ChatGPT hits 1B users faster than any app. Reached milestone in May, after three years, 62% YoY growth; it took Google Maps, Chrome, YouTube, and TikTok five to eight years to reach the same mark

$500M: Supabase closed a $500M Series F at a $10.5B valuation (200% + since October) and databases on the platform are up 600% YoY,. Claude Code is the single biggest contributor. Their on-app user isn't a developer anymore. It's an agent acting on behalf of a developer through MCPs

$1.5K: Uber has capped usage of AI tools to $1,500 per employee. The idea of tokenmaxxing, which incentivized all sorts of bad behavior, has been short-lived

$200: Meta is considering charging up to $200/month for Hatch, its upcoming consumer AI agent (formerly OpenClaw), putting it in direct competition with top-tier offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic

90%: Pinterest cut AI inference costs 90% by rebuilding Qwen3-VL's vision layer with proprietary embeddings, boosting accuracy 30% for their 620M users

80%: Anthropic says more than 80% of production code merged into its codebase in May 2026 was authored by Claude. The average Anthropic engineer now merges 8x as much code per day as they did in 2024. Claude Mythos Preview sped up model-training code by ~52x, compared with ~3x for Claude Opus 4 in May 2025

57%: Cloudflare’s latest data shows AI agents generating about 57.5% of HTTP requests, overtaking humans far earlier than the company’s CEO expected

44.1%: Spotify’s controversial disco ball logo change drove negative reviews from 30.9% to 44.1%

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI rolled out a new ChatGPT memory system that updates useful context over time and gives users a reviewable summary to steer what gets remembered

OpenAI launches role-specific plugins that can be installed from the Codex plugin directory and are designed to help with niche use cases. Some useful plugins: a design plugin built for turning early ideas into prototypes, and a data analytics plugin

OpenAI's Codex update adds enterprise workspaces. The new Sites feature lets teams build hosted apps without front-end dev. Non-developers are now 20% of 5M weekly users, and are growing 3x faster than engineers

Anthropic expands Project Glasswing to 150+ orgs across 15 countries. Claude Mythos is now securing critical infrastructure in power, water, and healthcare sectors; partners include Samsung, SK Hynix, and NATO, targeting codebases affecting 100M+ people per organization

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC, giving it the option to pursue an IPO after the review process

Microsoft launches Scout personal assistant. Like OpenClaw, it’s an always-on agent that monitors calendar, traffic, and Teams threads. 3K+ Microsoft employees are already using it. Desktop preview for US Frontier customers this week

Microsoft Copilot Health launches in preview, providing personalized health guidance via AI assistant

GitHub showed the new GitHub Copilot app, Microsoft’s answer to Codex and Claude Code, with access to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models

Amazon introduced a new feature that creates AI generated images of products that don’t necessarily exist. E.g., if you want a “shirt with a draped collar”, the results set will show you an AI-generated image of that as you type. Users can then use that image to perform a visual search to find similar items that look like the visual

Google Labs launched Dreambeans: an app that scans your Gmail, Photos, and Calendar, then turns your personal data into a short daily set of AI-illustrated stories

Meta has launched an AI "Business Agent" that can book appointments, close sales, and process payments on behalf of companies, marking the social media giant's biggest push yet into the enterprise AI market. The tool goes live across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram for businesses of all sizes globally

Meta is developing an AI pendant you clip to your shirt or wear as a necklace that records and summarizes your conversations throughout the day, building on the Limitless startup it acquired last year. Testing is expected to start in 2027

Apple approves the first third-party AI agent for Messages for Business. Poke, as it’s called, operates via a per-user fee structure and supports tasks from scheduling to smart home control through iMessage

Perplexity built a real-time system that decides whether each AI query runs on your local PC or in the cloud, cutting inference costs without hurting quality

X launches “React with Video” feature, in their latest attempt to keep up with the endless scroll video apps of the world. The in-app created videos closely resemble TikTok or Instagram “reactions,” with users’ selfie footage hovering over the original content as they provide their analysis and commentary

Zoom launched ZoomMate, an AI teammate that turns workplace conversations into agentic search, custom agents, deliverables, and workflow execution across tools like Salesforce, Jira, Slack, and ServiceNow

Oura launched a 40% smaller smart ring, the smallest ever they claim, to track sleep and stress with extended battery life

China develops world-first brain chip with advanced neural interface capabilities, competing with Neuralink

Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to voluntarily provide their frontier models to the federal government up to 30 days before public release. The order is aimed at assessing models' "advanced cyber capabilities" and selecting "trusted partners" for preview

📚 Good reads

Your AI strategy has a trust problem, not a tooling problem. Elena Verna argues most companies already have enough AI tools, but their command-and-control org design kills speed by hoarding context and centralizing decisions. She contrasts this with “AI-native” setups like Lovable, where titles matter less, information is open, and sharp ICs have real autonomy (and accountability) to ship fast, reversible bets. The key is high-agency people in trust-based teams

Co-existence and the end of co-intelligence. Ethan Mollick argues we’re moving from chatty “co-intelligence” with AI to agents that act as powerful, opinionated gatekeepers between our work and users. He shows how he wrote his new book largely as a human, but let AI heavily shape the site and even an “AI-only” sales page, A/B-tested across models. Products now have to be designed not just for humans, but for AI intermediaries that will read, judge, and route what we build

Voice is becoming the new UI for digital products. As voice tech gets better, people increasingly skip clunky menus and just say what they want, shifting UX from “operating software” to expressing intent. The article argues that voice will sit on top of traditional UIs, with screens used more for reviewing and approving what AI produces than for driving workflows. Complement with this piece by Allen Pike, who argues that the blocker is latency. Today’s voice agents feel dumb or slow because they rely on tiny models and clunky single-turn flows, but fast-enough models plus streaming, tiny time slices, heavy context caching, and lightweight output formats can already make realtime voice-to-UI tools feel great

How to PM an MCP. Tal Raviv shares how he’s building an MCP connector for a finance platform where you don’t control the model, prompt, or harness, but you’re still on the hook for quality. He walks through designing tools and skills, building an eval pipeline, and more

Mid-career satisfaction is about your inner scorecard, not LinkedIn. Shreyas Doshi argues that many ambitious mid-career folks chase titles, money, and scope, then feel strangely empty once the novelty wears off. What really drives lasting satisfaction is competence, flow, fit, and how you feel on Sunday nights (things your imagined “audience” neither sees nor cares about)

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video Podcast] AI-first search at Google. Google VP of Search Robby Stein explains how AI Mode and AI Overviews expand what search can do, especially for complex, multi-part questions, while keeping classic results and links central. He walks through how queries are broken into many sub-queries, fanned out across the web and Google verticals, then recomposed into rich, multi-format answers. Stein also leans into an “agentic era” vision where search agents personalize using your data (opt‑in) and quietly act on your behalf (booking, monitoring, and aggregating) without cutting publishers out of the value chain

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

How to build self‑improving Claude skills with evals and memory. Peter Yang shows how to turn workflows into reusable Claude skills that know when to trigger, grade their own output with pass/fail evals, and learn from a running memory log

🔧 Products to try

Miso One: an open-source text-to-speech model that clones any voice from 10 seconds of audio and generates expressive speech with 110ms latency; free to try

LLMTest sits between your app and your AI model, watches your real traffic, then automatically rewrites prompts and swaps in cheaper models to cut costs without breaking anything; free to try

👨‍💻 My work

I’ve been entertained with multiple side projects during my sleepless paternity leave nights.

The main one has been henry, the baby tracker I wish existed. There are tens (maybe hundreds) of baby trackers in the app store. After checking a bunch of them, I noticed how they are generally full of dark patterns to monetize, overly complex, or plain ugly. So I built a very simple, easy-to-use, and free app for myself and any parent who needs it. I will write some articles about how it all came together (here’s a preview), but it has been very Claude Code-assisted It’s now live on the app store, and our pediatrician loves it!

I also took time to rebuild my personal site, including portfolio, media, and a space for my non-FTE work as Product coach and advisor.

And finally, in case you missed it last week, I’ve been messing up with the capabilities of frontier models (mostly Opus 4.8) by vibe-coding 90-feeling adventure games, like this Monkey Island spin-off based on Barcelona, and….the delight or nightmare of recruiters (depending on their day and mood): my portfolio as an adventure game 🙈

I published the game-creation skills on a public repo for anyone to use. Enjoy!

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$65B: Anthropic Raised a $65B Series H valuing it at $965B, with $47B ARR anticipating 130% growth & profitability pre-IPO

$1B: Cognition, the AI coding startup, raised $1B at a $26B valuation with $492M revenue run rate

$1B: Manus weighed raising $1B to buy itself back from Meta after China's regulators ordered the unwind of Meta's $2B+ acquisition

$250M: ClickHouse, the Amsterdam-based data analytics firm, tripled ARR to $250M, valuing at $15B post $400M Series D with 4,000+ customers, eyeing IPO

$113M: OpenRouter raised $113M after weekly volume hit 25T tokens across 400+ models and 8M+ users

$106M: Corgi, the AI insurance startup, raised $106M Series B-1, doubling valuation to $2.7B 3 weeks after $160M Series B, with $378M total raised, expanding products, platform, team amid rapid revenue growth

30%: DuckDuckGo app installs are up 30% after Google’s I/O event last week, with some users expressing worries that Google is “force-feeding” them AI features they don’t want

22%: ClickUp cut 22% of its workforce (about 290 people) and replaced them with 3,000 AI agents, framing the cuts as building a “100x org”; surviving employees are being offered salary bands up to $1M if they create “outsized impact using AI”

📰 What’s going on

Anthropic released Opus 4.8, which is said to be 4 times less likely than Opus 4.7 to let flaws in code pass unremarked. I gave it a try by vibe-coding a Monkey Island spin-off set in Barcelona, with just a few context prompts. It did similar to Opus 4.7, but was better at proactively finding bugs and suggesting improvements

Anthorpic also launched Dynamic Workflows, which lets Claude Code orchestrate dozens to hundreds of parallel subagents to tackle complex, multi-stage coding tasks end-to-end. Instead of Claude processing work linearly in a single pass, it breaks large problems into subtasks, runs them in parallel across independent agents, and verifies results before presenting them to you. Practical use cases for PMs

• Codebase-wide bug hunts: run parallel searches across a service, then have independent agents verify each finding before surfacing real issues in a report

• Large migrations: port codebases across frameworks, deprecate APIs, or change languages across thousands of files with coordinated parallel execution

• Clean-ups: Claude’s head of product Cat Wu says she recently used this new feature to catalogue 100s of A/B test flags and deprecate stale ones. Instead of waiting for Claude Code to investigate each one sequentially, dynamic workflows allowed her to do them all in parallel

and Anthropic confirmed it plans to release “Mythos-class” models with higher intelligence than Opus, but these require stronger cyber safeguards before general availability, expected in the coming weeks

Apple preps AI Camera and Photos for iOS 27: Dedicated Siri camera mode, prompt-based editing, "Reframe" and "Extend" tools for image manipulation; WWDC announcement set for June 8

Sneak peek at new Siri app also reveals Apple’s plans to take on ChatGPT

Apple's AI glasses features revealed: the glasses integrate on-device processing, real-time translation, and contextual awareness for a seamless AR experience

And Google's AI Glasses are almost there. They look promising, but need refinement in battery life and interface to go mainstream

NotebookLM is rolling out automatic Google Drive file sync, so your notebooks stay updated when source docs change

Google launches AI Threat Defense: Autonomous platform merges Wiz, Mandiant, CodeMender, and Gemini to span vulnerability discovery through autonomous remediation; launch partners include Accenture, Deloitte, PwC

Google Pay gets ready for agentic commerce with a Universal Commerce Protocol

YouTube announced that it will now auto-detect and prominently label AI generated content. On Shorts, the label will appear as an overlay and on longform video it will appear directly below the video player, just above the description

Facebook launches a ‘Plus’ subscription that gives you extra features, like spotlight stories. WhatsApp, Instagram, and Meta AI are getting paid subscriptions, too

Mistral turned Le Chat into Vibe, an agentic work assistant with Work Mode, Code Mode, inbox/calendar catch-up, research, drafts, and a VS Code extension

Figma unveiled an update to Figma Make that lets it work using local code bases, much like Claude Code or Cursor. The new update allows non-technical users to make visual changes to a product’s live code base and open up PRs for engineers to review

Replit announced its own design tool, Replit Canvas, and Visa invested in Replit to help developer agents handle payments

Robinhood launches agentic trading and credit cards. Retail investors can now connect AI agents to trade stocks, rebalance portfolios, and make purchases automatically; accounts remain separate from main portfolios with spending limits and manual approval options

Waymo began welcoming riders into its Chinese-made Ojai robotaxi, which was designed to improve robotaxi unit economics

Shift, an AI startup, will clean your home for free to train future robots. The footage becomes high-value training data for future home robots, with promises of heavy anonymization and strict vetting of third-party cleaners

on a similar direction, Human Archive tracks India’s gig workers moves to train robots. It’s layering on custom hardware (caps, tactile gloves) and internal model training to prove the value of its multimodal dataset

China limits overseas travel for top AI talent. New restrictions on overseas travel for leading AI founders, researchers and executives, including staffers from big-name international firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek. These individuals now require specific approval from authorities before leaving the country

📚 Good reads

Essential books for product builders. Lenny shares the first part of a curated bookshelf for PMs. Organized by jobs-to-be-done like communication, execution, strategy, product craft, org design, sales/marketing, productivity, happiness, and even sci‑fi. Good repo for summer reads!

Choosing to stay human in an AI-saturated world. Ethan Mollick argues that a challenge with AI is how it quietly erodes learning, judgment, and authentic voice when we use it as a default autopilot. For PMs, his core ask is to be intentional: decide which cognitive muscles (writing, problem-solving, product judgment) you want to keep human, then design your AI workflows around protecting those

The orchestration tax is burning out AI‑powered devs. Addy Osmani argues that spinning up more AI agents doesn’t parallelize your judgment; you’re still the single-threaded bottleneck who must review, reconcile, and understand the work. He frames this as an “orchestration tax.” Lenny and Dan Shipper cover a similar topic on Lenny’s podcast: agents create demand for “forward deployed engineers” who maintain company‑wide agents and human-in-the-loop automation

Reckoning with the future of AI and our role in it. Jack Clark argues that AI progress is accelerating so fast it can’t be treated like a “normal” technology, pushing individuals and companies into a choice between exploring the future or retreating into denial. He also forecasts AI-run companies, recursive self-improvement and life-extending medicine

Do language models need sleep to think better? A bit of a heavy paper, but the key message the authors propose is: a “sleep” phase for hybrid attention–SSM LLMs, where the model periodically pauses, replays recent tokens multiple times, and consolidates them into fast-weight memory before clearing cache. Extra compute gets used into an offline consolidation step, so online inference latency stays the same while the model can still reason over context it can no longer attend to. A promising approach for long-context and reasoning-heavy LLM features

🎧 Good listen/watch

How an Anthropic engineer lead uses Claude at work and home. Felix Rieseberg shows how he turns Claude into a collaborator, auto‑inventoring his life, building 3D floor plans and live dashboards, or even with a $20 “Claude buddy” device. Fun examples and great tips!

ProductCon NY 2026 session recordings and slides. Talks and panels from Eric Ries, Slack, Asana, Anthropic, CNN, Miro, Amazon Games and more

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Agentic engineering playbook for MCP. This piece by Pulse MCP explains when it’s worth wiring MCP into your agent workflows, and when a plain Skill or CLI is fine. It walks through pragmatic options for picking and configuring MCP servers (e.g. official HTTP ones, “roll your own”) and shows how shared mcp.json configs unlock portability, auth, and governance. It also previews where MCP is heading next

🔧 Products to try

Runway MCP brings Runway image and video generation into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit, and other compatible agents, so you can create media without leaving your workflow; free to try

MagicPath brings a native design canvas into Codex, so you can design and build functional apps with interactive components after installing its agent skill through the CLI; free to try

PollyReach gives your AI agents their own phone numbers so they can make and receive real calls to handle lead qualification, customer support, and appointment booking automatically; free to try

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great start to your week!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$5.7B: OpenAI reportedly generated about $5.7B in Q1, nearly $1B ahead of Anthropic, while Anthropic is projected to more than double to $10.9B in Q2

$1.25B: SpaceX's public S-1 filing revealed Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25B per month through May 2029 for xAI data center access, and that X lost $595M in ad revenue in 2024 due to advertiser exits

$700M: Hark, the AI hardware startup raised $700M+ Series A at $6B valuation

$355M: Modal raises $355M at a $4.65B valuation, claiming x5 growth since September 2025 and reaching $300M worth of annualized revenue. Modal’s neocloud-ish offering sells AI compute, training, and control products that charge for GPU time only when in use, lowering costs for end-customers

$300M: Decart raised $300M to build low-latency AI infrastructure

$250M: Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuation to build what they call the “perfect search engine,” optimized for AI tasks rather than upgraded from an old-fashioned browsing-first product (aka Google)

$200M: Mercury raised $200M at $5.2B, 49% up becoming federally regulated bank aiming for listing with $650M ARR

3.2M: Alibaba reported 3.2M robotaxi rides in Q1 2026, up from 1.4M YoY

8K Meta employees received layoff notices this week, and about 7K got re-assigned to new AI-focused teams

500x: Arena’s frontier research found GPT-4-level model quality is now roughly 500x cheaper than it was in 2023

89%: OpenAI and Antrhopic now caputre 89% of AI startup revenue

17%: Intuit plans to lay off 3,000+ workers, about 17% of its workforce, to simplify the company and refocus on AI products

11.6%: Google's Gemini became the #2 AI referral source in Q1 2026, nearly tripling its share to 11.6% and now sending more web traffic than Perplexity, Claude, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Grok combined

📰 What’s going on

Google’s I/O announcements:

• AI in Search. Google’s first major redesign in 25 years; uses AI to help users formulate questions with smart suggestions beyond basic autocomplete. You can input text, images, files, videos, or Chrome tabs with the UI changing depending on the user’s request.

• Search agents will monitor the web 24/7 for updates matching your criteria, automatically notifying you when relevant information appears.

• Coding on Search; this mode generates custom UI components on the fly - things like interactive visualizations, dashboards, and mini-apps tailored to your task

• Personal Intelligence integrates your Gmail, Photos, and Calendar data so Search understands your context

• New voice capabilities, including a feature called “Docs Live” that acts as a thought partner and co-writer to help users create a first draft of a document

• Gemini Spark: a new personal AI agent that runs on Google Cloud infrastructure rather than your device

• Gemini 3.5 Flash: pitched as their strongest release yet for coding, managing agents, and research projects. In internal tests, 3.5 Flash built its own proprietary operating system from scratch.

• A new version of the Antigravity agentic coding app, which includes an updated desktop version, a CLI tool, and an SDK for custom workflows

• Google AI Studio now builds native Android apps from prompts and lets you pull in Workspace data

Meta releases new Reddit rival: Forum. The app’s release immediately triggered a drop to Reddit stock, which is down around 40% so far in 2026

OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for an IPO anytime now, targeting a September debut at an $852B valuation, right after Elon Musk lost his lawsuit trying to block the company's restructuring

An internal OpenAI model solved an 80-year math problem by… disproving it. Erdős unit distance conjecture, a discrete geometry problem from 1946, was proven false

Spotify will launch a Beta AI tool in June that creates audiobooks (in partnership with ElevenLabs)

Amazon launches AI-generated podcast feature on Alexa+. Users can ask Alexa+ to create podcast episodes on any topic, with AI researching the subject and generating narrated content in minutes; now available across the U.S

Grok launched Skills, a persistent memory feature that lets you teach Grok a formatting rule, workflow, or personal preference once, and it remembers it across every future conversation, no re-prompting needed

X limits free users. If you use X and don’t pay for the service, watch your volume. You are now limited to “50 original posts and 200 replies per day,” whereas before you could ship as many as 2,400 updates every 24 hours

Figma released a new agent that works directly on the design canvas. The agent understands your design system, components, tokens, and team context, giving it access to information third-party tools can’t reach. The agent handles 3 core workflows: exploring design directions (generate multiple stylistic approaches simultaneously), automating busywork (bulk edits, component swaps, content population), and processing team feedback (summarizing comments, identifying themes, pressure-testing designs from different perspectives)

Airbnb's summer release added car hire, grocery delivery, airport pickups, boutique hotels, and AI-powered review summaries to the app, expanding the platform well beyond home rentals for the second year running

Oura files (confidentially) to go public. The fitness wearable and software comapny was last valued at $11B and had expected revenues of $1B last year

📚 Good reads

After Automation. Dan Shipper argues AI creates more work for humans by flooding the world with generic output and raising the value of taste, context, and judgment

AI artifact catalogs: a smarter way to scale your org’s AI. Instead of chasing the latest AI agent, the piece argues you should invest in vendor‑agnostic “AI artifacts” (skills, MCP servers, plugins) that encode how your org works. These artifacts live in shared catalogs (often just Git repos), and are reusable building blocks for agents. Companies like Ramp and Intercom follow this practice really well

Your job is changing faster than you think. Elena Verna argues that even if you keep your title, your role will be unrecognizable by 2027 as AI, org changes, and shifting expectations reshape what “good” looks like. She suggests treating yourself like a product: decide if you like your current job, build career optionality, and get AI‑native. The takeaway for PMs: assume your current skill mix has an expiry date and start rewiring now, on your own terms

Duolingo’s AI Slack bot makes debugging feel almost fun. Duolingo wired MCP agents into a Slack app that talks to 200+ internal tools, so engineers can triage incidents, answer help-desk questions, and even spin up PRs without leaving chat. Over time they standardized on HTTP MCP servers, added guardrails (role-based access, validation sub-agents, human approval buttons), and dogfooded hard to drive reliability. The result: an AI assistant that ~30% of the company uses weekly with an ~80% upvote rate

AI eats the world: how platform shifts reshape tech. Ben Evans argues that genAI is a classic platform shift: massive capex, commodity models, and a scramble to figure out where the real value and margins sit in the stack. Today’s wins are obvious “infinite intern” use cases (coding, customer support, ops) but the hard part is rethinking workflows, moats and jobs, not writing code

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Video] The “refounder.” Notion’s CEO, Ivan Zhaom, explains how Notion repeatedly “refounded” itself to stay ahead of big shifts: once in Kyoto pre–product-market fit, and again in Cancun after a GPT‑4 shock.. He looks for blurry PM/design/eng roles, barbell engineering teams (super‑junior + super‑senior), and hiring more for taste, agency, and curiosity than experience

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Anthropic’s Claude Cookbook is a growing library of hands-on recipes for product teams building AI agents, tools, and RAG workflows. It ranges from multi-agent sales and SRE incident responders to data analysts, eval loops, cost/latency optimizations, and memory management

My team of AI agents that work while I’m offline. Teresa Torres explains how she built a small “team” of Claude-powered agents that automatically prep her for podcasts and sales calls, generate follow-up tasks, and deliver a weekly coding retro. She uses Obsidian files to define agent identities, tasks, and scripts, + MacOS scheduling on an always-on Mac Mini

🔧 Products to try

Figma’s new design agent on the canvas. You can generate designs, edit existing files, and create variations from text prompts; waitlist

NanoClaw is a sandboxed alternative to OpenClaw that runs in a container, so your AI agent can't access your entire machine. It went viral, turned down a $20M buyout, and raised $12M seed with the Hugging Face CEO as an angel; free

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$70B: Cerebras, the AI chep leader, had the biggest IPO of 2026 with stock surging nearly 70%, sending the company’s market cap to almost $70B

$750M: Ramp is in talks to raise another $750M at a pre-money valuation of +$40B

$650M: Recursive Super AI, a startup by ex-leaders from Meta AI, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, raised $650M at $4.65B valuation targeting self-improving AI

4K: Cisco cuts 4,000 jobs despite record revenue: Networking giant slashing 5% of workforce to fund AI and cybersecurity investments

94%: Baidu's new AI model cost 94% less to build and outperforms chinese competitors

34.4%: Ramp's May 2026 AI Index shows Anthropic at 34.4% of business adoption, crossing OpenAI (now at 32.3%) for the first time ever

5%: LinkedIn planning to lay off 5% of staff, around 875 people, blaming the need to “reinvent” how it works and building more “agile teams focused on [its] highest priorities”

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI shakes up its product team. Greg Brockman will now handle both the company’s AI infrastructure and its product teams, which are being consolidated into a single org. Now, one group will manage ChatGPT, Codex, and developer-facing APIs

OpenAI is preparing to sue Apple after the ChatGPT integration, announced at WWDC in June 2024, failed to deliver the subscriber growth and product prominence the company expected. OpenAI has enlisted an outside law firm to work through its options, which could include sending Apple a formal breach-of-contract notice

OpenAI has unveiled Daybreak, a cybersecurity platform designed to automate vulnerability detection, patch validation, and secure software development for enterprises and governments. The platform directly competes with Anthropic's Claude Mythos and combines OpenAI's LLMs with Codex's agentic capabilities

Anthropic limits Claude usage as costs spike: Paid subscribers now face separate credit meters for agent tools after companies like ServiceNow and Uber burned through annual AI budgets

Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business: Package includes 15 ready-to-run workflows and integrations with QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, and Docusign to automate payroll, invoicing, and campaign management for 44% of U.S. GDP that relies on small businesses

AWS launches Claude Platform on AWS. Direct access to Anthropic's native platform through existing AWS accounts with IAM authentication, CloudTrail logging, and full Messages API support

Google preps "Gemini Spark" agent for enterprise: Beta code reveals autonomous agent with cross-app access, scheduled tasks, and inbox management; launching ahead of I/O 2026

Google DeepMind introduced "AI Pointer," a concept that turns the traditional mouse cursor into a context-aware AI collaborator that understands what's on your screen and can act on it, starting with Chrome

Google and SpaceX in talks to put data centers into orbit, part of Project Suncatcher with prototype satellites by 2027

Apple is building AI agent support into the App Store, with a WWDC announcement expected; it would mean AI agents (not just apps) could eventually be found, downloaded, and run directly from your iPhone

📚 Good reads

Daily Active Agents. Baidu’s CEO proposed “Daily Active Agents” (DAA) as the defining metric for the AI era, the equivalent of Daily Active Users for the agent world, and predicted global DAA could eventually surpass 10B

Why bolt.new currently leads AI prototyping tools for PMs. Aakash Gupta runs a detailed bakeoff of Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and v0, finding Bolt the most production-ready and brand-faithful. He also distills some workflows (including baseline design systems, divergent prototyping, PRD‑first builds) that improve results in any tool. The piece closes with practical “which tool + workflow when”, and common mistakes

IC work is the new career flex. Elena Verna argues that, thanks to AI, experienced “high-impact ICs” can now ship end‑to‑end projects solo, having department-level impact without managing people. She explains how AI gives you “average intelligence” across adjacent crafts so you can prototype, validate, and iterate way faster than old coordination-heavy orgs. A proof: the app I just launched (see below)

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Build a Claude Code personal OS in 40 minutes. Moritz Kremb shows how he runs email, content creation, and even grocery shopping through a Claude Code–based “personal OS.” He layers it into folders with memory, connected tools (APIs/MCPs/CLIs), reusable “skills,” and proactive routines. The episode also digs into OpenClaw vs Claude Code tradeoffs, reliability issues that pushed him to Claude, and concrete examples like automated grocery runs and a full content pipeline from idea to published video

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Agentic engineering playbook. This piece explains how agent skills can encode your company’s unique processes, systems, and data into reusable “skills” that coding agents can reliably invoke. Over time, the org’s job may become building, sharing, and maintaining a large skill portfolio that drives serious productivity gains and more autonomous AI work

🔧 Products to try

Codex in ChatGPT mobile helps you steer coding tasks from your phone, review changes, approve commands, and keep long-running work moving while your laptop does the heavy lifting;: included across all ChatGPT plans

Claude Code Agent View gives you one dashboard for managing parallel Claude Code sessions and longer-running coding work, available on paid Claude plans

👨‍💻 My work

Henry, the baby tracker. This is not for everyone, but I hope parents will like it. Turns out sleep-deprived nights looking after a newborn can be productive. I didn’t like any of the baby tracker options on the market. They are overly complicated, trying to monetize too hard, or plain ugly. So I built one (iOS app) with just the things I need, caring for a simple and smooth UX to track my baby KPIs (read Key Poop/Pee Indicators) with one hand in the middle of the night. Includes a voice feature, so you can simply tap your lock or home screen and say what you want to log. It’s on TestFlight, and you can sign up here if you want to try it. And here is the story of how and why I built it. I hope other new parents find it useful!

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$45B: Anthropic’s run rate nears $45B, and its (final?) pre-IPO round could push $50B into a valuation that could reach above $1T (pre-IPO valuation just hit $1.2T on secondary markets)

$7.3B: Chinese DeepSeek is raising $7.3B at a valuation of more than $50B

$6.3B: Long Lake agreed to acquire Amex GBT for $6.3B, explicitly betting that AI will reshape corporate travel

$2B: Moonshot AI, the China-based open-source AI platform, raised $2B at $20B valuation

$1B: Kalshi, the SF-based prediction market platform, closed a new $1B round boosting valuation to $22B

$950M: Sierra raised $950M Series E at a $15.8B valuation for its AI customer-service agents

600M: China's AI usage surpasses U.S. in token consumption. Over 600M Chinese citizens now use GenAI daily, with weekly data usage by Chinese models overtaking U.S. models for the first time

$500M: Periodic Labs is raising $500M at a $7.5B valuation for AI-driven materials discovery

1.1k: Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs in what CEO Matthew Prince called an AI-first restructuring.

23: Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve scaled to real-world impact, with the team reporting 23 verified scientific discoveries across chemistry, materials, and applied math in the past quarter

25%: DeepL announced staff cuts of about 25% as machine translation margins collapse under open-weight competition

20%: PayPal has plans to cut around 20% of its staff

17%: Coinbase cuts around 400 jobs, 17% of its staff, in AI-driven restructuring

📰 What’s going on

OpenAI announced Codex for Chrome: lets Codex autonomously drive background tabs on Mac and Windows for deep research, CRM data transfer, and admin-console workflows

OpenAI released ChatGPT for Google Sheets, an add-on that embeds natural language AI directly into spreadsheets via a sidebar panel

OpenAI also released three new audio models designed for developers building voice-enabled applications: GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper. OpenAI is explicitly pitching the new Realtime-2 model to product teams, describing it as an “interface between people and products”

Anthropic released three new capabilities for Claude Managed Agents:

• “Dreaming” is a scheduled review process that analyzes past agent sessions and memory to identify patterns (things like recurring mistakes, converged workflows, team preferences). It restructures memory to keep it high-signal as agents accumulate experience, enabling self-improvement across sessions

• Outcomes define success criteria as a rubric. A separate grader evaluates the agent’s output against your standards in an isolated context window, then surfaces specific gaps if corrections are needed. The agent iterates until the work meets your bar. Internal testing showed 10-point improvements in task success, with +8.4% gains on Word documents and +10.1% on PowerPoint files

• Multiagent orchestration lets a lead agent break complex work into parallel tasks and delegate each to specialist agents with custom models, prompts, and tools

Anthropic and OpenAI both launch enterprise AI ventures: Anthropic raises $1.5B with Blackstone and H&F for forward-deployed engineers, while OpenAI raises $4B for similar venture at $10B valuation

Google Docs now lets users set persistent custom instructions for Gemini that automatically apply to all future interactions. Instead of repeating preferences like “use bullet points” or “keep it professional” in every prompt, users input these rules once in the Gemini side panel

Google is building OpenClaw-like agent Remy, powered by Gemini

Meta is also planning an OpenClaw competitor product for its massive user base

Spotify has released a Command Line Interface tool called “Save to Spotify”. It lets you connect tools like Claude Code generate podcasts from any text source and then store it to your library

Apple plans iOS 27 as choose-your-own-adventure of AI models, letting users pick preferred assistants. May offer custom Apple Wallet Passes beyond standard boarding passes & tickets.

Apple's camera-equipped AirPods enter early production testing. Prototypes with low-resolution visual sensors for Siri queries (cooking guidance, directions) now in design validation, with longer stems and cloud-indicator LED

Amazon’s new ‘Bedrock AgentCore payments’ preview allows AI agents to “instantly access and pay for what they use, such as web content, APIs, MCP servers, and other agents.” We’re this close to being able to charge agents per-read fees to access content, and shake up the online content market for the rest of time

📚 Good reads

The AI 100. CB Insights shares an interactive database with the most promising AI startups of 2026

AI godfather Yann LeCun pushes back on AI doom and hype. LeCun says CEOs exaggerate AI’s power and risk. He argues AI won’t wipe out 20% of jobs, but will turn most of us into “bosses” of AI agents, making strategy and critical thinking more valuable. For PMs, his take is that this wave looks a lot like past tech revolutions: powerful new tools, not an imminent existential threat

Why nobody has nailed the personal AI agent yet. Peter Yang reviews OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini against ten must-have “AI chief of staff” capabilities, and finds that none fully delivers. Each nails different pieces — from OpenClaw’s flexibility to Hermes’ reliability, Claude’s personality, Codex’s desktop experience, and Gemini’s Workspace access — but all stumble on reliability, coverage, or platform gaps. His takeaway for PMs: pick one or two agents that fit your workflows today, ship real work with them, and avoid endlessly migrating in search of a perfect stack that doesn’t exist yet

Agent-native Product Management is changing PM work fast. Marcus Moretti explains how Product Management is starting to run everything through AI agents, especially Claude Code. He introduces two core “compound engineering” skills: /ce-strategy to co-write and refresh a product strategy, and /ce:product-pulse to generate daily, founder-style health reports from your data stack

🎧 Good listen/watch

Uber’s CEO on agentic coding and why product people are making changes to Uber’s codebase. “Now, they’re just going in and they are vibe coding, and an engineer is going to review the code, but essentially the product person is going directly into the code base, so to speak, or going directly with an agent into the code base.” Uber’s CEO on replacing policies with outcomes, why agentic coding is changing who writes the code, and the bet that there won’t be one physical AI model to rule them all

Why agency will matter more than skills in the AI era. Max Schoening (Head of Product at Notion) argues that as AI makes the first 10% of any project basically free, the key skill for PMs becomes agency, the willingness to tinker, prototype, and change the world around you. In a world where software volume is exploding but quality isn’t, PMs who build taste, get their hands dirty with AI, and obsess over reliability and shipping will be the ones who stand out

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Cognitive Bias Index is an interactive reference for identifying and mitigating cognitive biases; quickly browse or filter dozens of documented biases by context and tag to understand how they arise, how they distort judgment, and how to avoid them; a free web tool curated by Jon Yablonski

30 Claude Code tips to seriously level up your workflow. shares 30 tricks for using Claude Code as a real workbench. She shows how to customize Cursor, see and control what Claude is doing, and feed it cleaner context from docs, code, and the web. Also looks into longer-running, multi-device workflows (loops, mobile, remote control) so Claude can help you ship product work faster

Live coding session. In this live stream, Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code) and Jarred Sumner (creator of Bun) pair up to build stuff with Claude Code using their everyday workflow. A practical tour of what “AI-native” coding looks like in 2026, and how PMs can think about workflows

🔧 Products to try

Perplexity released Personal Computer for Mac, a desktop app that browses, takes actions, and runs research workflows on your behalf locally; free during beta

GPT-5.5 Instant is OpenAI's new ChatGPT default that delivers 52% fewer hallucinated claims on medicine/law/finance prompts and 30% more concise responses, free to try for all ChatGPT users

Saperly is the first phone carrier built for AI agents; provision a real number in seconds via any MCP-compatible agent for unified calling, SMS, and stable caller ID with audit trails; first number free for 30 days, then $2.50/month + usage

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to a new Week in Product!

🎰 The week in figures

$1T: Anthropic crossed a $1 trillion valuation and officially became the most valuable AI company on Earth

$300B: Q1 2026 witnessed record $300B in VC funding globally driven by explosion of investments in AI-driven startups -a historic high

$1.1B: Ineffable Intelligence, founded by ex-Google DeepMind researcher David Silver, raised $1.1B at $5.1B valuation to build reinforcement‑learning–based “superlearner” systems that learn from their own experience instead of human data

💸 Q1 earnings

• Alphabet: $109.9B Q1 revenue, 22% up YoY; $62.6B Q1 net profit, 81% up YoY; sales increased across Google Services (Search +19%, subscriptions/platforms/devices +19%, YouTube ads +11%) and Google Cloud surged 63% to $20.0B, driven by enterprise AI solutions and infrastructure; EPS rose 82% to $5.11; operating income grew 30% with margin expanding to 36.1%, and Alphabet raised its quarterly dividend 5% to $0.22

• Amazon: $181.5B Q1 revenue, 17% up YoY; $30.3B Q1 profit, 77% up YoY; sales increased 17% to $181.5B; growth driven by 28% AWS revenue increase to $37.6B, strong international segment sales (+19% YoY), and higher other services (notably advertising), while profitability was boosted by $16.8B in pre-tax gains from the Anthropic investment and continued margin expansion across all segments

• Apple: $111.2B Q2 revenue, up ~17% YoY; ~$31.9B Q2 profit, up ~22% YoY; iPhone sales increased ~21% to $57.0B; growth driven by “extraordinary” iPhone 17 demand, record $31.0B Services revenue, and stronger-than-expected China performance at $20.5B, partially offset by ongoing global memory shortages pressuring future margins

• Meta: $56.3B Q1 revenue, 33% up YoY; $26.8B Q1 profit, 61% up YoY; sales increased 33% to $56.3B, driven by 19% higher ad impressions, a 12% rise in average ad prices, and continued growth in Family of Apps, partly offset by higher R&D and data center investments as Meta ramps spending for AI and infra

• Microsoft: $82.9B Q3 revenue, 18% up YoY; $31.8B Q3 net income, 23% up YoY; Microsoft Cloud revenue increased 29% to $54.5B, with growth driven by 40% Azure and other cloud services growth, strong Microsoft 365 (commercial +19%, consumer +33%), and AI revenue surpassing a $37B annual run rate

📰 What’s going on

Uber adds hotel bookings powered by agentic AI: 700,000+ hotels now bookable in-app via Expedia partnership, with development time cut from 12 months to 6 using AI-powered engineering workflows, and including AI voice-bookings

Anthropic releases Claude for CAD connectors: Text-to-CAD now available in Autodesk Fusion and Blender, enabling natural language commands to generate manufacturable geometry in seconds

OpenAI misses sales and user targets, and saw its stock tumble on Tuesday. Cloud companies sharing high-profile relationships with OpenAI, including Oracle and CoreWeave, also suffered from some of the impact, as did chip makers like AMD and Nvidia

OpenAI is developing smartphone-centered AI agents to integrate advanced AI capabilities with Qualcomm chips

Microsoft and OpenAI have announced an amended agreement that simplifies their partnership while giving both companies more flexibility. The updated terms allow OpenAI to serve its products across any cloud provider, not just Azure, and make Microsoft's license to OpenAI's technology non-exclusive for the first time

xAI launched Grok Imagine Agent Mode (beta). One prompt, one infinite canvas, and the agent plans, generates, edits, and iterates on its own until it is done. Films, manga sets, product ads

xAI held talks with Mistral about teaming up to take on OpenAI and Anthropic

Cursor launched its SDK this week. The same agents that power the Cursor app can now run inside your own products, pipelines, and backend systems. Rippling and Notion are already using it to catch bugs and open fixes automatically without anyone prompting anything

Amazon launches Quick desktop app with workspace integrations: New AI assistant connects to Zoom, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack for email writing, calendar management, and document editing, plus local file access and custom app creation

Apple will be launching iPhone Ultra and MacBook Ultra next year, as high-end foldable, OLED models

Apple will add new Photo Tools in iOS 27

China blocked Meta's $2B acquisition of Manus after a year-long probe, the highest-profile AI deal vetoed on national security grounds since the chip wars began

Stripe announced Checkout Studio, a visual builder that lets you design, test, and optimize payment checkout experiences without writing code. It combines a drag-and-drop configuration interface with an AI assistant, live transaction replay, A/B testing, and analytics

Stripe also announced Link Agent wallet, letting agents spend on your behalf using the Machine Payments Protocol. Link functions as a traditional digital wallet, and stores checkout details like billing and shipping addresses. When you grant an AI agent access to Link via OAuth, the agent can request permission to spend money

Spotify and Peloton expand joint fitness content, opening new revenue streams for both platforms

Spotify has also launched a “Verified by Spotify” badge system to help listeners identify authentic human artists amid rising AI-generated music

GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing, ending the flat-fee model and pricing requests by token consumption; the same shift Atlassian and HubSpot announced last week

Linear has launched a new feature called “Linear Releases” which connects your CI/CD pipeline to Linear, automatically tracking where each issue stands in deployment. When code changes reach production, issue statuses update automatically, so you see what’s actually live to customers

📚 Good reads

The shiny toy syndrome. Why we keep chasing new tools, courses, and stacks instead of doing the work that matters. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how our dopamine-hungry brains mistake novelty for real progress, fragmenting attention and performance

Stop asking your data questions. Julie Zhuo argues most teams obsess over answering explicit data questions, while the value comes from systems that proactively surface what you didn’t think to ask. She lays out 3 “push” layers: smart alerts, daily briefings, and an ambient discovery feed. Together they replace dashboard-checking rituals

Direction over speed. Leah Tharin argues that cheap shipping and AI tools have exposed how many teams are just building the wrong things, faster. She redraws team shape around tiny pods where EMs stay deeply technical, PMs own alignment and “sideways” storytelling across sales/marketing/growth, and PM:engineer ratios depend on how measurable quality is. Overall, AI‑native orgs don’t ship more; they ship fewer but better bets with growth-minded PMs and engineers

🎧 Good listen/watch

[Podcast] Reinvention is now a product’s must-have career skill. Nikhyl Singhal argues that today’s winners are hands-on builders with strong product taste and executive presence, who keep reinventing instead of waiting for things to “settle.” He urges PMs to mourn lost roles quickly, lean into their domain “bugs” as differentiating features, and get back into motion by actually building with AI

[Podcast] Snapchat CEO on why distribution now beats product. Evan Spiegel argues that in consumer social, distribution has become the real moat, with TikTok and Threads winning by hacking reach rather than pure product. He explains how Snap survived rampant cloning by betting on hard-to-copy moats, like creator ecosystems, AR hardware, and a tiny design-led org that ships hundreds of ideas a week

🧑‍💻 Worth learning

Hermes starter kit. Hermes is an open-source agent that auto-writes and refines its own skills. Aakash Gupta walks through a 20-minute setup (Linux/macOS/WSL2 + any major LLM) and 3 PM use cases: self-updating competitive briefings, a queryable customer-signal log, and decision logs with “revisit if” conditions

A workflow for vibe-coded iOS apps. Jaryd Hermann argues the hardest part of app building is the build chain (getting a blank app reliably running on simulator and device). He lays out a 3‑phase workflow (accounts/tools, a “Greenfield” boilerplate app, then small edits and TestFlight builds) using Expo, Cursor, Supabase, PostHog, and RevenueCat. A useful template / model to get vibe-coded apps out fast

🔧 Products to try

The Gemini app can now generate downloadable Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Word, Excel, and CSVs directly from prompts, so you can go from brainstorm to shareable file without leaving the chat; free with Gemini

Lovable's mobile app lets you vibe-code full-stack web apps from your phone using natural language; it builds 20x faster than coding by hand; free to try

👨‍💻 My work

I recently revamped my personal site and added some portfolio-style cases and links to my content. Sharing in case other PMs find it useful! Thanks Zania (zania.design) for the inspo!

That’s a wrap for this week.

Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.

Have a great week ahead!