Week in Product #486 🚀
Anthopic's hypergrowth, Q1 earnings, Uber Hotels, Grok Agent Mode, Stripe Checkout Studio, Direction over speed, Hermes guide, Gemini app updates, Lovable app, & more
Hi folks 👋
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!
