AI and Automation
The Metrics That Lie: What Your Dashboard Isn’t Telling You About Your Product
DAU, retention, and activation rates are the metrics every product team tracks. They’re also the metrics most like...
James MitchellBlog
Latest articles on AI-native product development, shipping faster, and building better products.
James Mitchell
Engineering
The Context Window Is Not Your Problem: How Memory Architecture Becomes the Product
First-generation AI products got away with session-based interactions. As users build more complex workflows, that model...
Sarah Williams
Product Strategy
The Batch Size Problem: Why Your Team’s Speed vs. Quality Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question
Most teams that think they have a speed problem actually have a batch size problem. The framing of speed vs. quality is...
David Liu
AI and Automation
The Spec That Saved Six Weeks: How Writing It Down Before You Build Changes Everything
Teams that write detailed specs before writing code don’t slow down — they find out they were about to build the w...
James Mitchell
Engineering
The Prompt Engineering Fallacy: Why Optimizing Your Prompts Won’t Save Your AI Product
Most teams building AI products are optimizing the wrong thing. Better prompts matter — but they can’t fix distrib...
James Mitchell
AI and Automation
The Product Decision Gap: Why What You Decide and What Gets Built Are Never the Same Thing
There is a moment in every sprint that no one talks about openly. The PM wrote a ticket. The engineer read it. And somew...
James Mitchell
Product Strategy
AI Code Review Is Not a Reviewer: How to Actually Deploy It
Most teams have tried AI code review and gotten noise. The ones getting real value aren’t using it as a reviewer —...
Maya Chen
Product Strategy
Context Is Expensive: The Hidden Cost Your Engineering Org Keeps Paying
Your engineering team is context-switching 12+ times a day. Here is what that actually costs — structurally, cognitively...
James Mitchell
AI and Automation
The Velocity Trap: Why Shipping Fast is Quietly Making Your Team Slower
Every team celebrates sprint velocity. But there’s a version of fast shipping that compounds interest against you...
James Mitchell
AI and Automation
Your Incidents Are Product Research. You’re Just Not Reading Them.
Incidents are one of the richest sources of product intelligence most teams are systematically ignoring. Here’s wh...
James Mitchell
AI and Automation
The Spec Is a Lie: Why Modern Product Teams Are Moving to Living Systems
Most product specs are wrong before the first sprint ends. The best teams aren’t writing better specs — they’...
James MitchellW
Uncategorized
We Rebuilt Our Feature Flag System From Scratch. It Was Worth Every Hour.
Six months ago, our feature flag system was a mess—boolean toggles in env vars, a shared Google Sheet, and a Slack chann...
David Liu