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.

Hey Product Fans!

Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas!

If you’ve been forwarded this or just stumbled upon it, you’re in for a treat. For the best reading experience, check out the web version and sign up for future editions here.

What’s on the menu this week? 🧑‍🍳

📰 Not Boring: Browser Wars 2.0 is heating up as OpenAI preps their web challenger, whilst Hugging Face drops a $299 robot that could democratise robotics. The AI talent shuffle continues with weekend acquisition battles and casual $2bn seed rounds, because apparently that's normal now. Plus, enterprise AI gets serious and Claude for Financial Services wiping out a host of startups.

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: An Excel agent that beats world champions, customer profiling research that works, and workflow automation that lives up to the "automate anything" promise? Well just maybe. This week's tools are all about turning tedious tasks into one-click wins.

🍔 Blog Bites: Wireflows bridge the gap between static mockups and dynamic user journeys, Elena Verna shares her battle-tested 90-day playbook for growth roles, and John Cutler exposes the "big picture" loop that plagues leadership teams everywhere.

🎙️ Pod Shots: We cover Peter Yang interviewing Dropbox's VP of Product where he explains how he's systematically automated away the parts of his job he hates, turning busy work into strategic advantage with AI

Ready to dive in? Let's go! 🚀

📰 Not boring

The Browser Wars 2.0: Everyone Wants Your Internet’s Front Door

• Hugging Face just launched a$299 robot that could disrupt the entire robotics industry. While everyone's been obsessing over chatbots, Hugging Face quietly decided to make robotics accessible to developers. At$299, this isn't a toy—it's a platform play that could do to robotics what Arduino did to electronics

• Hot on the heels of Perplexity and Dia, OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks. Everyone wants a piece of the front door to the internet. But as Ben Evans nicely puts it: "you want to see everything they do online. So you make a browser. But, of course, that doesn't help you on mobile, where most people's real computing experience moved a long time ago. You can see my Amazon orders on the desktop, but not on mobile, and you won't see my Instagram or my TikTok."

AI Goes Enterprise

•  Anthropic launches Claude for Financial Services wiping out a stack of middleman AI startups. Simon Taylor nails it here—when the platform providers go direct to enterprise, the middleware layer gets squeezed. Every fintech AI wrapper just felt a chill

• Replit collaborates with Microsoft to bring Vibe Coding to enterprise customers. This will be a big space helping enterprise customers get over the security/scalability concerns of vibe-coded apps. The "just chat to build software" dream is getting enterprise-grade guardrails

The Great AI Talent Reshuffle

• The 72-hour M&A frenzy: How Cognition won big while Google and OpenAI fought over Windsurf. The AI talent wars are getting so intense that acquisition battles are now measured in hours, not months. When the biggest tech companies are bidding against each other for the same startup over a weekend, you could be excused for suggesting the market has lost all sense of normal valuation.

• On that point… Ex OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's secretive startup Thinking Machines closes casual $2bn seed round. Remember when$100M was a big Series A? Now former OpenAI executives are raising double-unicorn valuations before they've even announced what they're building

Corporate Chaos Corner

• OpenAI and Anthropic researchers decry 'reckless' safety culture at Elon Musk's xAI, citing recent examples such as Grok's anti-semitic comments, and hyper sexualised anime girl and an overly aggressive panda AI companions. When your product safety approach is "move fast and break society," maybe it's time to reconsider

• Brex overhauls procurement strategy, giving engineers monthly budgets and vendor choice (from a pre-vetted list). Finally, a company that understands engineers will find a way around your procurement process anyway, so you might as well make it official

Everything Else

• Google confirms it's going to be combining ChromeOS and Android. We teased this a few months back, nut now it’s official - after years of maintaining two operating systems that nobody could quite explain the difference between, Google is making them one

• Google's customisable Gemini chatbots (Gems) are now in Docs, Sheets, and Gmail. Google's strategy remains "put AI in everything and see what sticks," but this actually makes sense—your email and documents are where you need intelligence most

• Anthropic's Claude chatbot can also now make and edit your Canva designs. Creative tools are becoming more and more usable and conversational

• JPMorgan tells Fintechs to pay up for customer data access. The free lunch is over. Banks are realising their data pipes are valuable infrastructure, not charity projects

• Apple continues to tweak its Liquid Glass UI in iOS 26 moving back towards more traditional look and feel. Has it failed or are these still good tweaks? I like that Apple is listening to feedback but it’s also another sign that Apple is creaking a little

• TikTok is adding features for songwriters to its app

• My favourite all-in-one messaging app Beeper relaunches with an on-device model and premium upgrades

• Google rolls out AI-powered business-calling feature, brings Gemini 2.5 Pro to AI Mode

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• Shortcut: HIGHLY credible Excel agent. One-shot most knowledge work tasks on Excel. It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans. (Video)

• Atypica: Creates detailed customer profiles, facilitates user conversations, and identifies behavioral trends to streamline market analysis processes

• Runner: “Automate anything” - another (admittedly good) workflow automation tool - with extremely broad use-cases across scheduling, to job hunting (or anything you can think or really)

Remember, as a Product Tapas Pro subscriber you can access the full time saving tools database for over 400 time-saving tools relevant for product managers and founders 🔥.

Check the link here to access.

🍔 Blog Bites - Essential Reads for Product Teams

UX Design: Wireflows 101 - Bridging Wireframes and User Flows

This is an interesting concept - Megan Brown from Nielsen Norman Group introduces wireflows as a hybrid UX deliverable that combines wireframes with flowcharts to document complex user interactions and workflows. This approach helps teams communicate dynamic screen changes and user pathways more effectively than traditional static wireframes alone. Watch the full video here.

💡 "Wireflows combine wireframes with flowcharts to help document user interactions. They can aid in team collaboration, developer handoff, and help ensure clear communication for complex interactions."

Career Strategy: A 4-Phase Framework for Starting New Jobs in Growth Roles

Elena Verna recently shared her battle-tested playbook for navigating the first 90 days in growth, product, marketing, and sales roles, drawing from her extensive experience starting multiple positions. She outlines a strategic approach that balances immediate learning with delivery pressure, emphasising the need to protect existing momentum whilst identifying quick wins and bigger strategic bets. Read the full article here.

💡 "If you over-index on action, you'll likely misfire because you're missing context. But if you over-index on just learning, you'll create anxiety and unmet expectations around you (because they hired you to deliver… and revenue forecast is not known for its patience)."

Organisational Dynamics: Breaking the Wicked "Big Picture" Loop

It’s very hard not to include something from John Cutler in tis newsletter every week… That aside, he recently explored the destructive cycle that plagues leadership teams when they oscillate between demanding simplified "big picture" views and then panicking when reality inevitably surfaces. He identifies three approaches organisations take to manage complexity and argues that most teams unintentionally fall into reactive patterns that create more problems than they solve. Read the full article here.

💡 "The only time I have personally been able to break this kind of loop is when I hired a coach. Every week, he forced me to turn over every rock... It boiled down to staring at the whole picture long enough and often enough to stop lying to myself about it."

🎙️ Pod Shots - Bitesized Podcast Summaries

Remember, Product Tapas Pro subscribers get access to an ever growing database of ALL the Podshot Podcast summaries ever created

Check it out here

🤖 The AI-Powered Product Manager: How Dropbox's VP Turned Busy Work Into Strategic Advantage

Morgan Brown has spent his career at the intersection of product and growth, from Instagram to Shopify to his current role as VP of Product for AI at Dropbox. But what makes him interesting isn't just his track record—it's how he's systematically automated away the parts of his job he hates while amplifying the parts that create real value.

In his recent conversation with Peter Yang, Brown shared his playbook for using AI to transform product management, from pre-read analysis to meeting prep to relationship management. He also shared his views on how AI is reshaping the entire PM function and what that means for the future of product teams.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: January 13th, 2025

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins. Time saved: 94 mins🔥

🎯 The Three Pillars of AI-Powered Product Management

Brown has identified three core areas where AI delivers immediate value for product managers, each addressing a different type of cognitive load:

1. Pre-Read Analysis: Codifying Your Feedback Loop

"I give the same types of feedback over and over," Brown explains. "What's the job to be done? What's the customer evidence? What's the supporting data? Does this have strong logical rigour?"

Rather than manually analysing every document, he's created a prompt template that runs his pre-reads through a standardised evaluation framework. This isn't about replacing judgment—it's about ensuring consistency and catching blind spots when he's tired or distracted.

2. Meeting Prep: Steel-Manning Your Arguments

Brown's meeting prep goes beyond typical agenda review. He's built prompts that analyse stakeholders based on their past communications and decision-making patterns, then predicts the questions they'll ask and concerns they'll raise.

"I can run it through that prompt and it gives me anticipated perspective and questions that they might ask," he says. "Really trying to steel man some of my arguments."

3. Automated Intelligence: Staying Current Without the Overhead

Brown has ChatGPT operators running daily scripts that surface the top AI papers from arXiv, summarised and categorised by relevance to his work. It's like having a research assistant who never sleeps and never misses important developments.

Key Takeaways:

• AI works best when it amplifies existing good practices, not when it replaces thinking

• The goal is consistency and coverage, not perfection

• Automation should free up cognitive capacity for higher-value work

🔍 Building Dash: AI Search That Actually Works

Dropbox's Dash represents Brown's vision for how AI should integrate into knowledge work—not as a replacement for human intelligence, but as a way to eliminate the friction that prevents deep work.

The 160-Hour Problem

"Knowledge workers spend about 160 hours a year just looking for stuff and switching between different contexts," Brown reveals. "That's a month of time, and if you multiply it out, you and I are not cheap resources."

Dash addresses this by providing unified search across all work apps, but with a crucial difference: it handles multimedia content, not just text. For creative teams working with images, videos, and design assets, this capability is transformative.

Beyond Search: Templates and Tone

What makes Dash powerful isn't just finding information—it's the ability to create custom templates and maintain consistent voice across teams. Brown demonstrates how teams can build their own prompt templates and share company-specific tone guidelines.

"Being able to create your own custom template is like a super underrated feature," he notes. "I want to make my own template with my certain style, and that makes a huge difference."

Key Takeaways:

• The real cost of information fragmentation is measured in cognitive switching, not just time

• AI search needs to handle the full spectrum of work artefacts, not just documents

• Customisation and consistency matter more than raw capability

🏗️ The Visual-First Product Development Revolution

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you won’t find the next bit a surprise. Brown's team has embraced "vibe coding"—using AI to rapidly prototype ideas without traditional engineering overhead. This shift is fundamentally changing how product teams work.

From Static Mockups to Interactive Prototypes

"We're now moving prototyping further and further up the stream in terms of product development," Brown explains. "We're pretty much in some cases almost skipping static mock-ups and just going straight from idea to prototype."

This isn't just about speed—it's about quality of feedback. When you can hand someone a working prototype instead of walking them through static screens, you get real behavioural data instead of hypothetical responses.

The Death of the PRD?

Brown hints at a future where traditional product requirements documents become obsolete: "Maybe the PRD will finally die. Maybe we just should write some edge cases, some notes around that prototype."

The logic is compelling: if you're going to spend time crafting something internally, why not craft something customers can actually interact with?

Key Takeaways:

• Interactive prototypes provide exponentially better feedback than static mockups

• AI democratises creation tools across roles, enabling more collaborative product development

• The shortest path from idea to customer feedback is often through working code, not documentation

🎭 Learning from Legendary Leaders: Three Approaches to Decision-Making

Brown's experience working with Mark Zuckerberg, Toby Lütke, and Drew Houston has given him insight into how different leadership styles shape product culture.

Meta: Data-Led Decision Making

"It was very clear how they made decisions. You ran experiments, you had opportunity to run a lot of experiments. Everyone used that language of decision-making."

The Meta approach creates clarity through empiricism—when everyone speaks the language of metrics and experiments, alignment becomes easier.

Shopify: Vision-Led with Data Support

"They are data informed. They use a lot of data and understanding, but they are led by Toby's vision for the future of e-commerce and the hundred-year view."

Toby's approach was more philosophical: don't run random experiments just to move metrics, but have a point of view about how to help entrepreneurs and then experiment within that framework.

Dropbox: Technical Depth Enables Product Breadth

"Drew really wants to understand your rationale and argument very clearly. He is one of the most technical founders I've ever met."

Drew's technical depth allows him to think about product not just from the user side but from the capability side—understanding what's actually possible expands the option set for product solutions.

Key Takeaways:

• Different decision-making frameworks work for different companies and leaders

• The key is having a clear, consistent approach that everyone understands

• Technical understanding expands the possibility space for product innovation

🚀 The Future of Product Management: From Coordination to Creation

Brown sees AI fundamentally reshaping the PM role by eliminating busy work and enabling more collaborative, creative problem-solving.

The Two-Node Future

"Most PMs spend a lot of their time in the middle of that distribution—a bunch of project management, a bunch of busy work, a little bit of deep work," Brown observes.

He envisions a future where AI handles the coordination and administrative tasks, allowing PMs to focus on two extremes: deep customer understanding and creative problem-solving.

Blended Roles and Shared Vernacular

"It bleeds roles together a bit more and just makes it a lot more collaborative," Brown says about AI's impact on teams. When everyone can prototype and create, conversations shift from explaining concepts to solving real problems together.

The Council of LLMs

Brown already operates with what he calls "a council of LLMs"—Claude for writing, ChatGPT for general tasks, Gemini for large document analysis. He sees this expanding into more specialised agents that handle different aspects of product work.

Key Takeaways:

• The future PM role will be more focused on uniquely human skills: empathy, creativity, strategic thinking

• AI will enable more collaborative product development across traditional role boundaries

• The goal is to spend 80% of time talking with customers and solving their problems, not managing internal processes

🔧 Practical Implementation: Building Your AI-Powered Workflow

For product managers looking to follow Brown's lead, he offers specific guidance on getting started:

Start with Repetitive Analysis

Identify the feedback you give repeatedly and codify it into prompts. Brown's pre-read template focuses on job-to-be-done, customer evidence, logical rigour, and risk assessment—the fundamentals that apply to most product decisions.

Build Stakeholder Models

Create prompts that capture how different stakeholders think and what questions they typically ask. This isn't about manipulation—it's about preparation and empathy.

Automate Information Gathering

Set up systems to surface relevant information automatically. Whether it's industry news, customer feedback, or competitive intelligence, the goal is staying informed without manual effort.

Focus on Outcomes, Not Activity

"Moving fast is your rate of learning, your rate of understanding," Brown emphasizes. Use AI to accelerate the feedback loops that matter, not just to do more things.

Key Takeaways:

• Start with your most repetitive tasks and work outward

• Focus on consistency and coverage rather than perfection

• The goal is to free up cognitive capacity for higher-value work

Morgan Brown's approach to AI-powered product management isn’t ground breaking isn’t makes a lot of sense. By systematically automating coordination tasks and amplifying human judgment, he's created more time for the work that actually matters: understanding customers, solving problems, and building great products.

The transformation isn't about replacing human intelligence—it's about removing the friction that prevents us from using it effectively. As Brown puts it, the future of product management will "feel like flow, feel like jamming with smart people on really important problems" rather than endless alignment meetings and status reports.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📅Timestamps:

• (00:00) How Morgan uses AI as a companion for everything he does

• (01:26) Morgan's 3 best AI workflows to save time at work

• (06:07) Inside Dash: Dropbox's AI agent to find anything at work

• (14:35) The evaluation process behind Dash's search results

• (18:49) How to ship fast while motion doesn't equal progress

• (22:09) How to balance internal alignment with customer obsession

• (27:27) What Morgan learned from Drew (Dropbox), Tobi (Shopify), and Zuck

• (35:39) The 3 types of PMs Morgan looks for in the AI era

• (38:02) What product management will look like in one year

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 🍽️.