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Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas.

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What’s cooking this week? 🥘 

Corporate hierarchies are flattening faster than you can say "AI transformation," while the platform wars heat up and retail scrambles to adapt to new trade rules. Plus, the AI reality check continues as adoption outpaces actual business impact.

On the menu:

• Not Boring → Google's manager purge, NVIDIA's record quarter, and why 95% of AI pilots still fail (spoiler: it's not the tech)

• Productivity Tapas → AI employees for your inbox, instant APIs from any website, and virtual societies for testing product ideas

• Blog Bites → Why your company needs "minimally viable consistency," China's electric stack dominance, and the leadership trinity that's confusing your team

• Pod Shots → How Intercom's CEO led a radical pivot from SaaS to AI-first when growth hit zero

Let's go 🚀

📰 Not Boring

The Great Corporate Flattening

• Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year, exec says. Although many of these "managers" were overseeing fewer than three people, so probably just good efficiency practice.

• Unsure if this is important to review or a couple of decades late, but nevertheless here's some interesting thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

AI Product Blitz 

• NVIDIA announces record-breaking financial results for second quarter

• Google announces AI avatars in Vids. Just write a script and choose an avatar to deliver polished content. Perfect for training, demos, etc.

• Google's nano banana image model is pretty damn impressive. See here for what people are already doing with it

• Anthropic released a preview of Claude for Chrome. Interestingly they're not going to create a browser of their own. They're also focusing heavily on security; super important as we flagged last week where Brave called out how Perplexity's Comet browser is vulnerable to prompt injections.

• Counter to loads of news about how Apple is messing up and missing out on AI, they've just released models 85x faster and 3.4x smaller than before, enabling things like real-time video captioning in your browser.

• Taco Bell is rethinking AI voice at the drive-thru after a stack of errors and customers (obviously) trolling the AI

• Hot off the back of the official prompting guide for GPT 5, here's a six, sorry seven critical prompting techniques for you

• Anthropic released a report about "detecting and countering misuse of AI"—basically a mirror on humanity (some people are bad and will do bad things with your product)

The AI Reality Check

• A16Z releases its latest edition of the top 100 consumer AI apps. ChatGPT still #1 across web & mobile; Google Gemini, X/Grok and Perplexity are rising fast. Gemini's strong on mobile, Grok's surging after model updates, and image/voice/video editors plus niche "vibe-coding" apps show big consumer stickiness. Interestingly, Claude is present but being outpaced by Perplexity in some metrics

• On the business side…check out The GenAI Divide STATE OF AI IN BUSINESS 2025. Employees are heavy users of those consumer apps ("shadow AI" i.e. usage at work doesn't match corporate licence numbers)—so consumer usage drives expectations—but enterprise pilots still fail to scale because businesses need memory, auditability and deep workflow integration

• Last week we talked about the adoption of AI vs. impact on output. Seems in the detail/lower level impact is definitely being felt—e.g. Salesforce swaps out 4,000 support jobs for AI agents (podcast), Harvard study shows 22% reduction in junior hiring by companies adopting AI and this Stanford report calling canaries in the coal mine. Buuuut this group from MIT seems to suggest 95% corporate AI pilots fail. Can  all be true?

• One thing are confident on - we can now say pretty definitively that AI progress is well ahead of expectations from a few years ago

Platform Wars, Digital Shifts & Everything else

• Bluesky now platform of choice for science community - study shows scientists fleeing Twitter en masse. The kicker: someone with 50k Twitter followers gets 5 likes per post, while 5k Bluesky followers deliver 100 likes

• Perplexity shipped a redesign of the iOS app last weekend—focus was on removing friction and improving navigation

• Spotify launches a new way to share what you love on Spotify with friends and family. Looks like they're becoming more social by the day.

• Samsung's tri-fold phone, XR headset, and AI smart glasses to be revealed at Sep 29 Unpacked event—AI wearables are definitely hot

• Google unveils a layer one chain for banks with Python-based smart contracts. People are still building interesting blockchain things. But do we need ANOTHER L1?

• Retail panic: US ends de minimis—global e‑commerce scrambled

  • Immediate shock: the sudden removal of the $800 de minimis (first for China/HK, then all countries) with one month's notice throws ~1.4bn small shipments/year into customs limbo—many post offices have paused US‑bound parcels because there's no routing or inspection capacity.

  • Big structural fallout: retailers built D2C logistics around the rule—Tapestry says 13–14% of sales exposed, niche players (e.g., Ssense) already collapse, and tariff/classification confusion means higher costs, delays, and wholesale reengineering of supply chains.

• Also on e-commerce, consumers are warming up to AI Shopping Tools across generations, with bridge millennials leading adoption at 38%

• India bans real-money gaming, threatening a $23 billion industry

• OnlyFans owner paid $701m in dividends as platform readies for potential sale. Plus $5.8bn to creators on $7.2bn revenue, up from $6.6bn previous year. Big business

How 433 Investors Unlocked 400X Return Potential

Institutional investors back startups to unlock outsized returns. Regular investors have to wait. But not anymore. Thanks to regulatory updates, some companies are doing things differently.

Take Revolut. In 2016, 433 regular people invested an average of $2,730. Today? They got a 400X buyout offer from the company, as Revolut’s valuation increased 89,900% in the same timeframe.

No wonder 10K+ everyday people are taking the chance on Pacaso.

Founded by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech reshapes the $1.3T vacation home market. They’ve earned $110M+ in gross profit to date, including 41% YoY growth in 2024 alone. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

The same institutional investors behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay backed Pacaso. And you can join them. But not for long. Pacaso’s investment opportunity ends September 18.

Invest While You Still Can

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⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• Marbelism: Another app that promises AI employees to scale your business (AI Team who run your inbox, socials, SEO, lead generation, calls, and support)

• apiJuice: Create a hosted API from any website in seconds. Paste any URL and describe the data you need in plain English and get Get clean JSON data via API, n8n node, or custom app

• Artificial Societies: Collectives of AI personas that allow you to run experiments (e.g. product ideas) in minutes, not months.

  Remember. Product Tapas subscribers get our complete toolkit - 460+ 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

Strategy: Why Your Company Needs "Minimally Viable Consistency" (Not Maximum Complexity)

John Cutler’s recent post explores the concept of "minimally viable consistency" (MVC) as a framework for designing company operating systems. He argues that organisations should strive for the fewest number of consistent concepts, terms, and phrases that still enable effective operation. Read the full article here.

💡 "People often look at operating systems from the outside. They see something that appears simple and assume the path is to also make their own operating system simple. But more often, people overlook the underlying forces at play in a company that make that simplicity possible in the first place."

Strategy: Why China's Electric Stack Dominance Could Trump America's AI Advantage

This is a bit off-topic, but it’s important in as much as how it’ll influence the global playing field. So it’s here. Bite me. TL;DR Packy McCormick and Sam D'Amico explore how China's control of electric technologies may prove more valuable than America's AI leadership. Their comprehensive analysis reveals a 99% cost decline in the "Electric Stack" since 1990, positioning electrification as the foundation of future economic power. Read the full article here.

💡 "Smart companies try to commoditise their products' complements. America is making a bet that whoever wins intelligence wins the future. China is making a different bet: that for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action."

This insight reveals why China is happy to open-source AI models whilst dominating the physical infrastructure that turns intelligence into real-world impact.

Strategy: The Leadership Trinity - Why Confusing OKRs, KPIs and CSFs Is Killing Your Team's Focus

Craig Unsworth is rapidly finding his way into this newsletter on a regular basis (and rightly so!). In this recent piece he explores the critical distinctions between three essential leadership frameworks that are often mistakenly treated as interchangeable. He provides a practical guide for product leaders and executives on how to properly use Critical Success Factors (CSFs) Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as complementary tools rather than competing methodologies. Read the full article and signup here.

💡 "The difference between OKRs, KPIs, and CSFs isn't theoretical - it's practical. It's the difference between a team that feels lost in numbers and one that feels energised by a clear mission."

🎙️ Pod Shots - Bitesized Podcast Summaries

Remember, we've built an ever-growing library of our top podcast summaries. 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

🤖 AI Transformation: How Intercom's CEO Led a Radical Pivot from SaaS to AI-First

🎯 The Wartime CEO: How Intercom's Radical AI Pivot Saved a Billion-Dollar Company

When your growth hits zero and you're staring at potential decline, what do you do? For Eoghan McCabe, CEO of Intercom, the answer was radical: tear down everything and rebuild as an AI-first company. The result? Finn, their AI agent, is projected to help Intercom become one of the fastest-growing public software companies next year.

In this recent conversation on Lenny’s Pod, McCabe reveals the brutal realities of leading a company through existential transformation. From rewriting company values, to achieving 8-digit ARR with their AI product in record time, this is an interesting tale of decisive leadership during technological disruption.

The stakes couldn't be higher. As McCabe puts it: "You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways."

🎥 Watch the full episode here:

📆 Published: 21st August 2025

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 4 mins. Time saved: 79+ mins! 🔥

🚨 The Crisis: When Success Becomes Stagnation

By 2022, Intercom had all the hallmarks of a successful SaaS company—hundreds of millions in ARR, 14 years of market presence, and a strong brand. But beneath the surface, the company was dying a slow death.

"We had five quarters in a row of sequential decline in net new ARR," McCabe reveals. "We were approaching zero net new ARR." For a company that size, flatlining growth signals existential crisis. The symptoms were classic: feature bloat, unclear strategy, and a team that had lost its edge during McCabe's two-year absence due to health issues from mould toxins and a tick bite.

The wake-up call came when McCabe realised the company ranked "in the 15th percentile for ARR growth" compared to 120+ public B2B software companies. This wasn't just underperformance—it was a company sleepwalking toward irrelevance.

McCabe's return wasn't planned as a permanent move, but pride and urgency drove him back to the CEO chair. "I couldn't bear to see this thing that we built just fade away," he explains. The timing would prove prophetic.

Key Takeaways:

• Even successful companies can drift into mediocrity without focused leadership

• Five consecutive quarters of declining net new ARR is a red flag requiring immediate action

• Founder returns often coincide with inflection points requiring decisive leadership 

🤖 The AI Catalyst: Perfect Timing Meets Preparation

Just one month after McCabe's return, ChatGPT launched. The timing was extraordinary, but more importantly, McCabe recognised the threat immediately. "I got whacked across the head by this AI thing. But it also ended up being a gift," he reflects……..

Continued here and on the link below 👇️ 

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CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING 👇️ 

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 🍽️.