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Hey Product Fans!

Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas.

Welcome to Product Tapas 🌮 where we serve up bite-sized insights on product management, AI, and building better products. New here? Read online or get the app here.

This edition is again sponsored by Wispr Flow - the voice-to-text tool I genuinely can't stop using (top 1k users 😆). Speak at the speed you think, get clean text in any app. 4x faster than typing. If you haven't tried it yet, you're working too hard. [link]

What’s cooking this week? 🥘 🧑‍🍳

Block cut 40% of its workforce and the stock jumped 24% (the market has a weird way of saying "thank you"). Claude Code shipped a security scanner that crashed cybersecurity stocks, hit $2.5B annualised revenue, and launched remote control from your phone - all in one week 🤯 . Stripe is reportedly circling PayPal - the disruptor eating the company it disrupted. Meanwhile the freelance market lost half its client base in three years and nobody's talking about it.

Your menu:

  • 🔥 Not Boring - AI reshuffles the money, agents go production-grade, Anthropic vs the Pentagon, and who survives the software shakeout

  • ⌚️ Productivity Tapas - Figr AI for UX, Toolspend for AI cost tracking, Lunair for instant explainer videos

  • 🍔 Blog Bites - Metrics trees, MOFU content strategy, strategic juggling

  • 🎙️ Pod Shots - Boris Cherny on building Claude Code (20 PRs/day, 0% hand-written code)

Let's go 🚀

📰 Not boring

💰 Money Talks - The AI Reshuffling

There are two readings of the Dorsey move. The apocalyptic one: AI just ate 4,000 jobs and the market loved it. The sceptical one: Dorsey is a brilliant founder who chronically over-staffs his companies, the stock was under pressure, and "AI productivity" gave him cover for a restructuring he probably needed anyway. Either way, every cost-conscious CEO who watched Block's stock pop 24% will reach for the same playbook - whether the AI gains ever materialise or not.

🤖 The Agent Takeover - From Demos to Production

Claude Code hit $2.5B annualised revenue and shipped Remote Control, a security scanner that crashed cybersecurity stocks, and a Figma integration - all in one week. Absolutely smashing it continually. Notion has more agents than employees. Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js for $1,110. Perplexity went from search engine to Samsung's OS layer in 18 months. The AI-is-useless crowd and the AI-is-eating-everything crowd are both wrong. But JFC - the pace is incredible.

⚔️ The Anthropic / Pentagon Showdown

The Pentagon gave Anthropic a Friday deadline to drop its guardrails - and Anthropic said no. xAI slid Grok into classified systems as leverage, three Chinese labs were caught running 24,000 fake accounts to siphon Claude's data, and Benedict Evans asked the question nobody at OpenAI wants to answer: if your tech isn't unique and your users aren't sticky, what's the plan?

🔨 The Software Shakeout - Who Survives AI?

Accenture is tying AI usage to bonuses. A brokerage ditched its SaaS stack and saved $150K a year with Claude Code. The freelance market lost half its client base in three years. Anthropic went from 4% to 20% business adoption in a year. HBR says context is the moat. Linear's PM says AI already has better taste than 90% of PMs. The people deciding how AI changes their jobs are the ones who started a year ago.

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⌚ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & Workflow Automation

  • Figr AI: Product-aware AI that thinks through UX. Parses your live app, maps flows, spots edge cases, builds A/B variations. The PM's dream tool for sprint planning.

  • Toolspend: Track AI spend across your entire tool stack. Finally gives visibility into what teams are really spending on Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor etc.

  • Lunair: Studio-quality explainer videos instantly. No editing skills needed - perfect for stakeholder updates and feature demos.

    Remember. Product Tapas subscribers get our complete toolkit - 550+ personally tailored, time-saving tools for PMs and founders. Your shortcut to efficiency and what's hot in product management 🔥

Check the link here to access.

🍔 Blog Bites - Essential Reads for Product Teams

Product: Mastering Metrics Trees for Effective Decision-Making

Tim Herbig dives into the significance of MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) in constructing metrics trees that enhance decision-making within organisations. He outlines practical steps to create a metrics framework that not only clarifies goals but also tracks essential drivers for success. Read the full article here.

💡 "Understanding MECE is one thing. Actually building metrics trees that drive real decisions in your organisation is another."

❝

Key Takeaways

• MECE Principles: To be effective, metrics trees must be organised in a MECE manner. This involves categorising drivers for high-level goals such as Total Profit, ensuring that individual metrics do not overlap and collectively cover all necessary aspects.

• Driver Categories: Start with broad categories like Sales Volume, Unit Economics, and Coffee Quality to create a clear, actionable hierarchy. Each category should then have a representative metric that encapsulates its key components.

• Connecting Metrics: Each main metric should be linked to its underlying drivers to facilitate a deeper understanding. For instance, Sales Volume could be driven by metrics like Number of Website Visitors and Conversion Rate.

• Real-World Application: Building effective metrics trees goes beyond theory—it's crucial to link them to North Star Metrics, OKRs, and KPIs to inform product strategy and decision-making processes.

Tim Herbig

Marketing: Transforming Social Media into a Lead-Generating Machine

Will Free discusses how to effectively create middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content that leads to real business opportunities rather than just vanity metrics. He emphasises the importance of engaging directly with your ideal customer profile to build authority and trust before a purchase decision. Read the full article

💡 "Get this right and you’ll fill your audience with ideal buyers who see you as the default expert when they’re ready to purchase."

❝

Key Takeaways:
• MOFU Defined: MOFU content bridges the gap between awareness and conversion by addressing the specific challenges of your ideal customers and demonstrating your expertise in these areas. It should resonate well on social platforms while providing standalone value.

• Types of MOFU Content: There are two distinct types of MOFU topics: industry-related, which attracts a broader audience, and niche-related, which deepens alignment with specific buyers. A balanced approach helps in reaching a diverse audience while showcasing your expertise.

• Content Formats: The format of MOFU content should be tailored to platform dynamics rather than just sticking to funnel stages. Adapting to current trends on LinkedIn and other platforms can significantly enhance engagement.

• Content Mix: A successful content strategy should consist of 60-70% MOFU content, 20-30% top-of-funnel (TOFU), and 10-20% bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). This mix ensures that you build a trusting audience that is primed for conversion without overwhelming them with direct sales pitches.

Will Free, the growth playbook

Strategy: Mastering the Art of Juggling Different Approaches

John Cutler introduces a fresh perspective on strategy through a compelling model of juggling — strategic, lazy, and survival. By delineating these three forms of juggling, Cutler highlights the challenges and implications of each approach for teams operating under uncertainty. Read the full article here.

💡 "Slipping… Strategic juggling can easily slip into lazy juggling if your mechanisms for pruning, prioritisation, and learning break down."

❝

Key Takeaways:
• Strategic Juggling: This involves intentionally preserving options while understanding the trade-offs involved. It requires regular rebalancing and a commitment to exploration, much like a farmer who diversifies crops to mitigate risk against uncertainties.

• Lazy Juggling: Characterised by a lack of discipline, this approach sees teams scattering efforts across various projects without prioritisation. While individuals may feel busy, lack of direction means few connections are made, leading to half-finished initiatives.

• Survival Juggling: A mode of operation where teams must react urgently to immediate pressures, with no time for strategic thinking. The focus here is on avoiding failures and mitigating damage rather than on growth or innovation.

• Transition Risks: Cutler explains that the transition from strategic to lazy juggling can happen imperceptibly, as teams may fail to recognise the signs of drift into less effective modes until significant issues arise. Continuous reevaluation is vital to avoid this slip.

• Focus Types: Cutler outlines three types of focus that teams might adopt: strategic (deliberately choosing high-leverage paths), lazy (focused due to convenience without true engagement), and survival (concentration driven by immediate crises).

John Cutler, The Beautiful Mess

🎙 Pod Shots - Bitesized Podcast Summaries

Remember, we've built an ever-growing library of our top podcast summaries (120 or so). Whether you need a quick refresher, want to preview an episode, or need to get up to speed fast - we've got you covered.

Check it out here

Boris Cherny, "Inside Claude Code With Its Creator" | Y Combinator's The Lightcone

Key insights from the full article:

  • 💻 The Accidental Terminal - Boris built a CLI because "I didn't have to build a UI." Two days later, engineers were already using it without permission.

  • 🔮 Build for Six Months From Now - "Don't build for the model of today." The bet: the model would learn to code well before it actually could. Today Boris writes 0% of his code by hand.

  • 🎯 Latent Demand is Everything - Plan mode was built on a Sunday night in 30 minutes because users were already telling Claude "don't code yet" in their prompts.

  • 📜 The Bitter Lesson - Anthropic has Sutton's essay framed on the wall. Scaffolding delivers 10-20% gains that get wiped out with the next model. "Never bet against the model."

  • 💀 Plan Mode's Imminent Death - When asked if explicit prompting would still be needed in 6 months: "Maybe in a month."

  • 📈 150% Productivity Growth - The team doubled in size but productivity per engineer grew 150%. Boris personally lands ~20 PRs per day, 100% written by Claude Code.

  • 🤖 Agent Swarms Ship Features - Claude Code's plugins feature was "entirely built by a swarm over a weekend" with no human intervention.

EXPLORE THE FULL GUIDE →

That’s a wrap.

As always, the journey doesn't end here!

Please share and let us know what you would like to see more or less of so we can continue to improve your Product Tapas. 🚀👋

Alastair 🍽️.

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