We track Product so you don't have to. Top Podcasts summarised, the latest AI tools, plus research and news in a 5 min digest.

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Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas.

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What’s cooking this week? 🥘 

GPT-5 drops with user revolt (nostalgia sells), browser wars get delusional (Perplexity's math doesn't add up), Google launches everything everywhere all at once (classic), and China casually breaks solar records while we weren't looking.

• 📰 Not Boring → Model wars drama, browser battles, Google's everything strategy

• ⌚️ Productivity Tapas → Enterprise AI security, business idea refinement, engineering intelligence

• 🍔 Blog Bites → PE decoded, zero-to-one strategy, OpenAI's leaked platform ambitions

• 🎙️ Pod Shots → Multi-agent coding revolution (manage AI teams, don't micromanage code)

Let's go 🚀

📰 Not boring

• The AI Model Wars Heat Up

  • OpenAI released GPT-5 last week claiming it's smarter, faster, more useful, and more accurate, with a lower hallucination rate than previous models. They've released a prompting guide to get the best from it, but it's quite the change from previous interactions and not everyone is happy. After user backlash, OpenAI is bringing back older ChatGPT models. Sometimes the future needs a bit of the past

  • The GitHub CEO doesn't mince his words on the future of engineering: The evidence is clear, either you embrace AI or get out of this career. Update: GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down. Timing is everything
    

  The Browser Wars 2.0

  • On the continued topic of browser wars and everyone battling for your access to the internet, Perplexity announced their "Book a Table with Perplexity and OpenTable" partnership. Interesting for those that win/secure the partnership, but brands lose direct customer relations and will people go in search of (the illusion) of choice?

  • Oh and on the subject… Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it's raised…

  Google Corner

  • Jules, the company's asynchronous coding agent (i.e. it works in the cloud on its own), is now available for everyone

  • The tech giant also launched Genie 3 its new frontier video model that can generate realistic 3D worlds in real time as you move through them - pretty much game-changing for game-makers and zero chance of anyone telling fiction from reality

  • They’re also bringing ads into the conversational AI search experience, reshaping how brands target consumers. Elon plans to do the same with Grok to get advertisers back on X/Twitter

  • The search giant also 'asserts' AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks; 'well-chosen' language in places to perhaps obfuscate the true volumes impact, but clearly shows LLMs change both the type and depth of search as well as type of sites they visit (i.e. distribution patterns)
    

  The Commerce Revolution

  • Shopify's Universal Cart, Checkout and Catalogue makes AI the new storefront. Three AI tools to make it easier for developers to embed eCommerce functionality (including product images) to whatever they are building, such as an app or chatbot The checkout is becoming invisible.

  • Stripe builds Payments blockchain Tempo with Paradigm in crypto expansion

  • Amazon launches same-day delivery of fresh groceries in over 1,000 cities, further tightening their grip on the last-mile delivery wars. When your eggs arrive faster than your thoughts, we’ll be at peak commerce

  Everything Else

  • According to A16Z analysis, users often bounce between LLM tools and "vibe-coding" apps. Roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 users cross‑browse multiple app‑gen tools over three months

  • Apple plots expansion into AI robots, home security and smart displays as the company continues its aggressive push beyond phones and computers. The hardware diversification strategy suggests Apple sees AI as the bridge to entirely new product categories

  • Same Product, different doors. Here's an interesting take on "multi-door products", or how to target new customers without changing features. Smart distribution beats feature bloat

  • Interesting analysis on The AI Boom's hidden risk to the economy. TL;DR the build-out of artificial-intelligence infrastructure is costing a fortune, straining companies and capital markets

  • China installed more solar power in April than Australia has in its entire history - and Australia is a global solar leader 🤯 

  • Finally, here’s a great take on why Apple cares about F1

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⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• North: enables enterprises that prioritise data security to deploy AI agents and automations at scale within their own infrastructure

• Cresh: Analyse and refine your business ideas with AI agents that deliver research, insights, and data-backed recommendations

• MCP-use: Build and deploy MCP agents; spin-up and aggregate MCP servers through a single endpoint and zero friction

• Weave: an engineering intelligence platform that combines LLMs & ML to tell you exactly how well you're using AI and shows you how to improve

  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

Private Equity: How It Actually Works (For Operators and Product Leaders)

Craig Unsworth from Chiefly Product breaks down private equity in plain English for operators who may work with or inside PE-backed companies. It’s a useful primer if PE feels like a black box: how funds are structured, how deals are done, how value is created (and measured), and what this means for leaders on the ground. Read the full article here.

💡 "PE firms raise money from investors (Limited Partners) to create funds that buy companies, improve them over a 'hold' period (generally three to five, or up to seven, years), then sell them for a profit (with a typical target being to double in size)

Startup Strategy: How Sidebar Built a Leadership Coaching Empire from Zero

Zero to 1 is hard and very different to later stages of Product Development. I’ve not read many decent articles about it of late, but Bill Kerr recently covered the remarkable journey of Sidebar, the leadership coaching platform that went from a glimmer in founder Lexy Franklin's eye to a thriving community with a 35,000-person waitlist. Through interviews with founder Lexy Franklin and key team members, Kerr reveals how this ex-Facebook team systematically built and validated their way to product-market fit in the competitive leadership development space. Read the full article here.

💡 "We never go to bed on problems. We never go to bed with decisions hanging over their heads. They have a meeting, decide, and make progress." This Facebook-inspired principle of rapid decision-making became central to Sidebar's execution speed and early success.

AI Strategy: OpenAI's Leaked 2025-26 Roadmap Reveals Platform Ambitions

Tom Hunt from Strategy Breakdowns dissects OpenAI's internal strategy memo that was leaked during Google's antitrust hearing, revealing the company's ambitious plan to transform ChatGPT from a chatbot into humanity's primary interface with the internet. The document exposes OpenAI's existential fear of being boxed out by platform owners and their radical solution: building their own hardware device by 2026. Read the full article here.

💡 "All human-computer interactions can be mediated by ChatGPT. Just as the web intermediates much of our work, commerce, social, and entertainment activity today, ChatGPT will do that and more — it will be the way we interact with everything." This quote reveals OpenAI's vision to become the universal interface layer between humans and digital services.

🎙️ 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

🤖 The Multi-Agent Coding Revolution: How to Build Apps with AI Teams That Work in Parallel

This is a bit of a longer tutorial style this week. It’s based on a recent Peter Yang interview with Kieran Klaassen, founder of Cora AI, who goes deep on the art of managing multiple AI agents to code simultaneously. The less technical of you are definitely going to want to watch the full tutorial on YouTube but others can probably get going with my run-through below. Plus, given the hype and buzz around agents and vibe-coding I thought it a good one to include so you know what’s possible.

Oh and finally, I’ve included only the intro below moving the full piece to a separate article to try to shorten the copy in the newsletter itself.

Let me know what you think on the content and new style!

Here’s the TL;DR:

If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the technical complexity of building software, this might be the breakthrough you've been waiting for. While most of us have been doing "vibe coding"—that back-and-forth collaboration with AI on every line of code—Kieran Klaassen has evolved to something far more powerful: agentic coding.

"It's like I'm a manager and I have like a team of people that are very capable," explains Kieran, founder of Cora, a beautiful AI email assistant. "The work when doing software or building stuff is not code. It's way more. It's research. It's product marketing. It's even understanding what you should build."

Don't worry if you've never coded before or feel intimidated by AI development tools. This approach is actually more accessible than traditional programming because you're managing and directing rather than writing complex code. Think of it like being a project manager who delegates tasks to highly skilled team members—except those team members are AI agents that work 24/7 and never get tired.

In this detailed walkthrough, Kieran demonstrates exactly how to orchestrate multiple AI agents using Claude Code, complete with the specific commands, workflows, and mental models that let you ship production-ready features in minutes instead of weeks.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: July 20th, 2025

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 4mins. Time saved: 59 mins!🔥

🏗️ The Mental Shift: From Coding Assistant to AI Team Manager

The fundamental difference between vibe coding and agentic coding isn't technical—it's managerial. Instead of micromanaging every line of code, you're delegating entire features to capable agents and reviewing their work like a senior executive reviewing department reports.

What This Means for Non-Technical People

If you've ever managed a team or delegated projects, you already have the core skills for agentic coding:

• Breaking down big problems into smaller, manageable tasks

• Writing clear instructions that others can follow independently

• Reviewing work quality and providing feedback for improvements

• Coordinating multiple workstreams to avoid conflicts and delays

"If your directions are good, if you're clear in your communication about what problem needs to be solved and how to go about it, they can deliver results to you," Kieran notes. "You're still giving feedback, but you're giving feedback on a pull request or on like a larger change."

The Manager's Mindset

This shift requires thinking like a tech lead or engineering manager, but the skills translate from any management experience:

• Delegate outcomes, not processes: Tell agents what you want achieved, not how to achieve it

• Provide context and constraints: Share the bigger picture and any limitations

• Set up quality control systems: Create processes to catch and fix issues

• Orchestrate without micromanaging: Let agents work independently while maintaining oversight

Key Takeaways:
• Management skills transfer directly - If you can manage people, you can manage AI agents
• Clarity enables autonomy - Better specifications lead to better autonomous execution
• Parallel execution scales impact - Multiple agents working simultaneously multiply your output

As per the intro I’m moving full Pod Shots like this to their own separate articles - follow the link below to read on!

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 🍽️.