The Product Midwife

Sharing an article I wrote during the week — critique it!

1. Artificial Intelligence is on a path to grow from “high-schooler” level intelligence (2024) to “Ph.D level intelligence” (2027) (www.situational-awareness.ai)

2. Tools like Microsoft CoPilot for GitHub already boost developer productivity. This will only increase, with experimental tools like Devin (with access to the browser and debugger) showing what will soon be normal.

3. 15 years ago, Amazon AWS and other IaaS providers reduced the complexity and cost of hosting your own servers, leading to a 10x growth in the number of technology start-ups.

4. IaaS made it possible for anyone with an idea and programming expertise to build a technology product that could reach millions of people, with a low cost of getting started (capex moved to opex).

5. In a similar way, Artificial Intelligence — especially for programming — is poised to lead to a 100x growth in the number of technology start-ups.

6. AI will make it possible with anyone with an idea to build a technology product: programming expertise will no longer be a requirement (or will dramatically reduce).

7. AI will make it possible for anyone with an idea to build a technology product that can reach millions of people, with a low cost of getting started & no (or dramatically reduced) people costs (capex and people costs move to opex).

8. With IaaS, the constraint to build a product was “product engineering team”, which led to the demand for “PM-Dev-Design” triads. Most software product and product-services companies are today structured in this manner.

9. With the growth of AI, and the only requirement to create a technology product becoming “I have an idea”, the constraint to build a product will be “idea to product translation”, or in other words, a 100x product manager.

10. The landscape in 18 - 24 months could be this: 100x the number of entrepreneurs, great tools for engineering and design, and a dearth of 100x product managers who can help start-ups translate their ideas into a product.

11. For software-services companies that are today staffed in the ratio of 1 PM : 1 design : 10 engineers in a pod, an inversion is impending.

12. In 18-24 months, the right structure for a product-services company could be 20 PMs : 1 design : 1 engineer. The growth in 100x PMs is to meet the demand from even more entrepreneurs; the reduction in design and engineering reflects the reality of great AI tools displacing engineering and design talent.

13. The product manager role itself must evolve in this from product management to “product midwife”: someone who can help birth a product and help a customer take a fledgling idea to a fully realized product. This is the role of a 100x PM: not to focus on scrum, user stories, and other artifacts (which AI will displace), but to have the right conversations with customers to help them translate their vision to a reality.

1. The AI Summer, by Ben Evans

2. The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, by NY Times

My wife and I went for this show that she booked that I absolutely loved! Great storytelling about Kabir’s life and wonderful music of Kabir in a simple setting. You can find Vipul Rikhi on YouTube and Insta.

The Steam sale was on, and I got too many games :-/. I’m looking forward to playing them all over the next few weeks though :-). The games I got are: Bloons TD 6 (I love tower defence games), Outer Wilds (Annapurna Studios makes some of my favourite games), Disco Elysium (I started playing this, and it’s good!), Castle Crashers, Frost Punk, Gorogoa, Dorfromantik, Baba is You, and The Binding of Isaac.

The trophy system reveal for the eSports world cup in Riyadh took the cake for most wild and fun video of the week!

Keep reading & sharing, till next week!