AI Insights from Product at Heart 7:04 AM (15 hours ago)
Product at Heart 2025 offered diverse perspectives on the AI era we’re experiencing – from practical frameworks for prioritisation to transformational strategy. Once the videos come out, I’ll pop back and link those.
Henrik Kniberg positioned AI agents as “permanent interns”, capable but fallible tools that need structured environments, human feedback, and shared spaces to operate effectively. He emphasized tight scoping, audit logs, and human review to manage agent risk and enable safe, useful delegation.
Dominik Faber described building AI agents for recruitment, emphasizing the importance of CAIR (Confidence in AI Results) to balance value, error impact, and correction effort. His company uses agents in a transparent, efficient, and practical way to address high-volume recruitment.
Zamina Ahmad challenged companies to move beyond using AI as a tool and instead reimagine workflows, roles, and organizational learning to become truly AI-native. She emphasized the importance of hybrid human-AI systems and warned against the “tool trap” of shallow automation.
Jonathan Evens contrasted the value-focused ML era of 2012 with the GenAI bubble we’re in right now, advocating for product-led AI integration grounded in core user needs and gradual experimentation. He urged companies to build trust through transparency, thoughtful UI changes, and user model elasticity.
Transform
Zamina Ahmed argued that gaining efficiency through AI is not a winning strategy. Competitive advantage will come from transforming workflows and roles, in order to achieve greater impact. Ahmad emphasised that tinkering was over — the goal must now be to evolve and transform.
Jonathan Evens harked back to the ML era, 2012-2023, when ML (AI) products needed to provide business value, typically by providing unique routes to solve high scale problems such as analysis of satellite imagery – the current AI bubble is not always iterating towards value or even focussing on outcomes.
(I was reminded of Gibson Biddle’s DHM model: product advantage comes from delighting users in hard-to-copy margin-enhancing ways. Efficiency is table stakes. Simple use of an LLM via an API is not hard to copy. You will win in your market if and when you find the route to transform the way you drive outcomes by combining AI capabilities with unique elements across your product or organisation.)
Designing for agents
Both Dominik Faber and Henrik Kniberg talked about agentic workflows and how to control and collaborate with them. You need a surface to instruct them and refine their instructions. You need to control tool access.
Agents also demand governance controls. Teams must tightly scope tool access and privileges as well as monitor agent actions. (I was reminded of Simon Willison’s Lethal Trifecta, it’s very easy to land in a state where you’ve compromised security and opened up your organisation to data theft.)
Kniberg likened agents to enthusiastic interns, promising, but in need of supervision and fine-tuning. Don’t expect to set and forget, you will need to iterate on their instructions and privilege.
Faber’s organisation has embedded Forward Deployed Engineers (for more on the FDE role, listen to this podcast) with their customers. The FDE role allows for really fast iteration on a product solution for a customer and fits the extraordinary pace of change in the AI world at the moment as well as the uncertainty for what works.
What and where to AI?
Both Dominik Faber and Henrik Kniberg offered different complimentary models to consider in prioritisation: Faber focussed on risk and reward, and Kniberg focussed on time and fit.
Faber outlined a Confidence In A I Results (CAIR) score, calculated by Value ÷ (Error Impact × Correction Effort) or “how much do I potentially get out of this vs what could possibly go wrong”. The model allows stack ranking your possibilities giving one perspective for prioritisation. A more product market oriented approach.
Kniberg’s model took into account “quantity of time required” and “is a good use of my time”, then blended the amount of intelligence required. Tasks that consume time, offer low value, but require moderate intelligence are ideal candidates for agents. The model allowed his tool, focussed on helping organisations leverage AI, to judge areas for greatest return.
Nascent pricing strategies
As a sidenote to all this: I’m observing most products are charging by token consumption plus a margin. I suspect this is natural caution on behalf of product companies, wanting to pass on the liability and risk of running up accidental bills. Will we see pricing shift toward value, aligning cost with customer outcomes? Perhaps this is a natural subsequent step that we’ll see after the product industry matures out of this initial gold rush period.
This being so, so what?
AI is now table stakes in terms of efficiency, in both the organisational and the personal realms. The challenge to product teams is to rethink what can be done to provide customer value and delight, and business impact using AI, above and beyond time savings and productivity.
Value, delight, and impact, ’twas ever thus.
What’s cooking? 16 May 1:11 AM (last month)
April 2025 edition, with recipe recommendations.
The wonderful Nigella Lawson’s “Old-Fashioned Sandwich Loaf” from her book “Cook Eat Repeat”. She gives the option of spoilt milk or yogurt, and as we’ve usually got Greek yogurt remains around I am using that. I can’t stop baking this loaf, just made some last night.
The woods round here are lousy with wild garlic. This was whipped up using the Riverford recipe. I’ve had this on pasta, of course, and also drizzled on pork chops.
We stayed in a cabin in North Wales which came with a chicken coop, and the eggs were ours to do with what we wanted. Naturally we wanted scrambled eggs (to Delia’s recipe).
We roasted some courgettes and corn-on-the-cob over the embers in the firebowl, brushing it with some of the wild garlic pesto I mentioned above.
A much-loved and now sadly closed local bistro, Man Bites Frog, used to do the best Dijon Chicken. This baked chicken thighs recipe from Simple Home Edit hit the spot when I had the urge one day.
Accompanied with some chargrilled purple sprouting brocolli.
focaccia
My friend Scott was in town, and to accompany a picking lunch I baked a lovely rosemary and olive focaccia. It came out well.
Nigel Slater’s “a tart for lunch, support or a party” is simple (lay some things on shop bought puff pastry) and delicious. There was no Taleggio cheese available locally, so I used brie.
I thought my tart of courgette ribbons, goats cheese, and caramelised onions was revolting. Eugh. Altogether too sweet with nothing to recommend it. Others in the house disagree (they’re wrong, it was awful).
A Sunday lunch of slow roasted pork belly per Recipe Tin Eats, with more purple sprouting broccolli, roasted with wild garlic butter… OMG so good. Roast potatoes are always to Delia’s saffron roast potatoes recipe, they come out intensely golden and crunchy. Carrots were braised with cider and thyme and came out delicious.
An evening meal of chargrilled vegetables with brown butter parmesan orzo. Orzo is so comforting.
Finally, some split pea dal. I “adapted” this slow cooker dal recipe, as our slow cooker is buried up in the loft somewhere (when I say adapted, I just put it in a pot on the hob for a few hours rather than in a slow cooker). This was portioned out and frozen for meals over the next few weeks.
Make feedback easy, make feedback effective. 1 May 9:00 AM (2 months ago)
Feedback is a gift. And feedback from customers is the best gift of all.
At Automattic in the enterprise B2B division we wanted to increase the amount of feedback we received. We then wanted to make sure our teams were reacting to that feedback… celebrating, discussing, reprioritising.
For our product we had fewer high value customers from organisations such as Salesforce, Capgemini, NASA than a B2C product company might have. For us, structured quantitative feedback was less important than frequent qualitative feedback and your mileage may vary.
I took and adapted the One Question Survey technique. Whenever we launched a new screen, or new functionality, and a little before we began work on a screen, we would add a “Give Feedback” button to the top right.
I implemented a Give Feedback button using a Pendo Guide, and we kept the design, user experience, and position of this button consistent for years. The first time a customer saw the feedback button it would pop a little dialog asking for feedback, with just a simple inviting text area… no numerical scales, no CSAT or NPS, just a simple text area where the customer could type “this is great”, “I wish I could do XYZ”, “this takes forever argh”, “wow we just launched, thank youuu!”, or any of a hundred other messages to our product team.
So yes, feedback is great… but you know what’s better?
Discussing that feedback in the product team.
Deciding if that feedback means you need to reprioritise the team’s attention.
Leveraging that feedback.
To spark discussion and action we piped every piece of feedback into a relevant Slack channel1. Small pieces of positive news would get Slackmoji reactions (
) from the team. When a customer was confused or frustrated I’d see the team pile into a thread off the feedback to discuss and brainstorm what could be done: “we need to speed up that API”, “can we get Simon to have a chat with them to dig in more”, “we need to rethink when we’re doing the advanced export options”.
Making it super easy for our customers to give us feedback, and then making sure the feedback was seen by the team was a real advantage for us. On one notable occasion we realised from a frustrated message that our backup process was hanging at a critical point during the launch flow, and the team was able to dig in, diagnose, and fix the issue. Without this direct feedback, we might not have uncovered the issue for some weeks.
The team also saw some really heartwarming messages from customers who appreciated their work, and that’s important too.
How do you facilitate feedback and taking action on feedback in your teams?
- The work to show customer feedback in team Slack channels was custom development by one of our talented engineers. We used Pendo’s webhooks to receive every Guide submission then choose where it needed to go. The routing was a bit of a hack, but I love it: you just added the #slack-channel-name to the name of the Guide.
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The B29 “Overexposed” crash site from Snake Pass 17 Jul 2022 4:08 AM (2 years ago)
This Peak District plane crash site features in the excellent latest Rivers of London novel, “Amongst Our Weapons” by Ben Aaronovitch. It crossed my Instagram feed a week or so ago, and then after I started planning the walk I saw Manchester Finest had written up a walk, Bleaklow: Downed Warplanes, UFO Moorlands, and a Spot of Cake, that included this site only a few weeks back. Clearly I am in tune with the zeitgeist.
For me, the crash site was an opportunity to tempt my boy out onto a walk with me… and the hook worked. We had a lovely hike, about the right length for him, with plenty of time to picnic, poke things, and take it easy.
The route we followed was from Peak District Walks “Higher Shelf Stones Short Walk (+ Bleaklow Plane Crash Site) | 4-Mile Route“, thanks Becky.
…and now onto photos of the walk, many featuring The Boy.
From the first section, along Devil’s Dike to Hern Clough:
A lovely lunch spot by a pool in Hern Clough:
The crash site itself:
Here lies the wreckage of B-29 Superfortress “Overexposed” of the 16th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron USAF. Which tragically crashed whilst descending through cloud on 3rd November 1948 killing all 13 crewmembers. The aircraft was on a routine flight from RAF Scampton to American AFB Burtonwood.
It is doubtful the crew ever saw the ground.
Memorial laid by 367 Air Navigation Course of RAF Finningley on 12th November 1988.
I believe from reading around, that the wreckage on this site is more complete than many other sites. Wandering around it’s easy to identify parts of the plane.
Onwards to Higher Shelf Stones and a mob of rams:
And finally the loop back to the Pennine Trail and the car on Snake Pass:
Pots & Pans from The Church Inn, Pobgreen 17 Jul 2022 3:01 AM (2 years ago)
Walked this on 7 July, with a friend. It’s been about ten years since the last time I was up here. It’s a lovely walk: a steep climb at the start, but then you just bimble around from view to view on the (mostly) flat top.
The walk is from “The Pennine Divide” by Andrew Bibby, a really excellent pocket sized book of walks.
Froggatt Edge and Padley Gorge 12 Jul 2022 5:18 AM (2 years ago)
I decided to do this one yesterday, on the hottest day of the year so far. Perhaps not my most sensible decision. I further decided to take in a bit of Froggat Edge, so I could check out the stone circle, rather than sticking to cooler woodland paths! A fine walk, nonetheless. Padley Gorge is particularly beautiful, and would be fun paddling and scrambling with kids.
My route took me 14km (approx 8.7 miles) in 4 hours and 15 minutes, including a brief segment of getting lost in Haywood near Nether Padley (so perhaps don’t try following my GPS trail precisely).
Including The Fox House at the start, this walk offers stops at some nice pubs (The Grouse Inn and The Chequers Inn) and at the Grindleford Station Cafe.
Parking is at the National Trust at Longshaw, with on-road parking available nearby if you’re not a member and prefer to avoid the parking charge. The walk takes in several different landscapes, starting in some classic wooded National Trust parkland.
The stone circle on Froggat Edge is just off to the north of the path, nestled into the bracken.
I do love a gritstone edge.
Below the edge, and then again further down the path through Bee Wood to Froggatt itself, I found a few abandoned millstones.
The woodland path between Froggatt and Nether Padley, leading to Hay Wood, is charmingly bucolic but looks like it could get pretty boggy in wetter weather.
The walk up through Padley Gorge was charming, lots of places to tuck yourself into, cool your feet, and while away some time.
Overall a great walk, and one I’d do again.
I might also try looping around Froggatt Edge, Curbar Edge, and, above and to the west, White Edge and Big Moor. There’s a couple more stone circles up there, and I do like an edge. Looks fun.
Lud’s Church and The Roaches 4 Jul 2022 10:18 AM (3 years ago)
My walk on 7 June roughly followed Northern Stroll’s route.
While I was walking I kept crossing paths with a school group, and overheard the teacher telling them about the wallaby sightings in the woods and up on the roaches, you can read about this story (legend?) in “the English moor where wallabies roam“. Apparently these rocks are “Wallaby Rocks”.
Lud’s Church is an amazing natural chasm, and thoroughly recommended.
…and here’s the rest of my photos from the day.
A drone flight from west of The Roaches:
The last big feature of a walk full of features was The Hanging Stone:
Count and sort in Google Sheets using QUERY() 12 Nov 2021 1:43 AM (3 years ago)
When I’ve pulled some data into Google Sheets I often want a way to quickly chart the count of something, maybe it’s support tickets and I want to chart the incidence of particular tags or count tickets for each customer. In this situation I want a nice neat chart showing from ordered data.
Let’s say this is my data, and I want to see which are the most used names:
| ID | Name |
| 1 | Linda |
| 2 | Ahmed |
| 3 | Jenny |
| 4 | Lena |
| 5 | Ahmed |
| 6 | Stef |
| 7 | Simon |
| 8 | Terry |
| 9 | Terry |
| 10 | Ahmed |
| 11 | Linda |
| 12 | James |
| 13 | Stef |
| 14 | James |
| 15 | Steph |
| 16 | Carol |
| 17 | Alice |
| 18 | Lucy |
| 19 | Alice |
| 20 | Stef |
Previously I’ve been using =UNIQUE(Data!B2:B) to grab the unique names, then something like =COUNTIF(Data!B:B,D2) to count each row. This ends up with summary data which is not in order, so when I generate my chart it’s not as readable:
Using the Google Sheets QUERY() function I can retrieve the data, count, and sort it at the same time: =QUERY(Data!A:B,"SELECT B, COUNT(B) WHERE B IS NOT NULL GROUP BY B ORDER BY COUNT(B) DESC", 1). Which gives us this much more pleasing chart:
The Google Sheet is here if you want to see it in action. Improvements welcome!
Walkerwood Reservoir, Harridge Pike, and Wild Bank 27 Dec 2020 12:40 PM (4 years ago)
I did this walk some years back and don’t remember it particularly fondly, but today it was just beautiful. The light was a low, golden, winter sunshine, and everything looked magical.
Next time I do this walk, where I turn up north towards Harridge Pike I’ll try the west side of Dry Clough rather than the east.
Use Ordnance Survey map OL1. Here’s the route stored on Ordnance Survey to load it into an app. It claims to be 591m total ascent, 9.9km in length, and it took me about 3.5 hours including eating lunch and messing around with a drone.
…and naturally this was a great opportunity to play with my present to myself, a DJI Mini 2 drone…
In my ears 26 Nov 2020 10:09 AM (4 years ago)
For a while now I’ve been meaning to post about these three great podcasts I’ve had on regular rotation for the last few months since starting running again. The blend is really working for me, and giving this mix some longevity: current affairs slanted to the serious (The Intelligence) and the curious (Kottke Ride Home), with a chaser of strategic commentary (Stratechery).
The Intelligence, from Economist Radio provides an informed liberal world view covering diverse topics from the possibilities and limitations of green venture capitalism, trials with K-Pop, the rise of Korean Trot, and Shinzō Abe’s legacy in Japan.
The Kottke Ride Home, gives me the cool things from the news today. The stories picked by the presenter, Jackson Bird, range from a recently discovered lava planet, how many holes does a straw have, the discovery of water on the moon, tardigrade sunscreen, and a little known history of transgender people.
The Stratechery Podcast from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery provides insights into strategy in the internet age such as Kurian’s helming of Google Cloud Platform to target the enterprise from inside Google, how Slack might successfully compete with Microsoft, and a great series of interviews with leaders like Jeff Lawson of Twilio, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed, and Stewart Butterfield of Slack.
None of them are too long and with the judicious application of 1.25x playback I can keep abreast of this trio on my lunchtime exercise and from and to dropping off and picking up my boy from school.