In partnership with

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.

New here? We're your shortcut to staying sharp. Essential stories, practical tools, real insights.

For the best reading experience, check our web or app version and sign up for future editions here.

What’s on the menu this week? 🧑‍🍳 

ChatGPT conversations no longer indexed (good news), Apple ready to spend big (finally), everyone's copying homework (obviously), and consulting actually helps workers (shocking).

•  📰 Not Boring → The model wars, Apple's awakening, everything wars

• ⌚️ Productivity Tapas → AI slides, chat to data, onboarding magic

• 🍔 Blog Bites → UX wins, brand reality checks, leadership resistance

• 🎙️ Pod Shots → Joel Marsh's VDP framework for real-world shipping

Let's go 🚀

📰 Not boring

The AI Model Wars Heat Up

• The AI revenue gap is closing fast: OpenAI's $12B lead over Anthropic's $4B has shrunk from 20x to just 3x since 2022. While OpenAI dominates consumer with 700M+ weekly ChatGPT users, Anthropic's enterprise-focused approach is proving the tortoise-and-hare strategy might just work

• ChatGPT conversations are no longer getting indexed by Google and other search engines. After 24 hours of timeline outrage when people realised their chats were discoverable, the handwringing can finally stop. Crisis averted, privacy restored. For now at least

• You can now automate repetitive tasks using Perplexity's Comet browser- making bookings, comparing products, the usual suspects. The browser wars have officially gone AI-native, and you can bet Google's already working on their response. Table stakes keep on increasing

Apple's AI Awakening

• CEO Tim Cook says Apple is ready to open its wallet to catch up in AI. They've created a new Answers team eyeing a ChatGPT-like product in this big AI push. Apple executives have also held internal talks about buying Perplexity.

• Apple's latest Liquid Glass design shows it won't back down with iOS 26. The design language evolution continues as Apple doubles down on their aesthetic vision.

The Everything Wars

• Instagram takes on Snapchat with new 'Instagram Map' whilst Google takes on ChatGPT's Study Mode with new 'Guided Learning' tool in Gemini. Everyone's copying everyone else's homework at this point

• Reddit plans to unify its search interface as it looks to become a search engine. The search wars are heating up beyond just AI - every platform wants to be where people find information

Everything Else

• Hot off the back of last week's shortcut AI spreadsheet tool recommendation, here's a demo of how to use it. I know I know, we’re too kind

• Google is experimenting with machine learning-powered age-estimation tech in the US. The behavioural profiling implications could be... interesting.

• Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent. A sobering reminder that tech doesn't exist in a political vacuum.

• WhatsApp adds new features to protect against scams. Finally, some good news in the fight against digital fraud.

• Coinbase says it's launching tokenised stocks and predictions markets for U.S. users in coming months plus debuts embedded crypto wallet for developers with Stablecoin focus. Crypto continues its march into traditional finance territory. Gradually then suddenly

• Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33. The design tool that nearly got acquired by Adobe proves the public markets still love a good SaaS story

• As OpenAI explores a Shopify integration, would this fundamentally change what it means to be an e-commerce brand? The implications of AI-powered checkout could reshape retail entirely.

• ElevenLabs launches an AI music generator, which it claims is cleared for commercial use. The creative AI space continues to navigate the thorny copyright landscape

• Tinder explores a redesign, dating 'modes,' and college-specific features to boost engagement. Even dating apps are getting the AI treatment as user engagement becomes increasingly challenging

• Aaand finally, new empirical research unveils how consulting boosts firm productivity and wages without harming workers. Some good news for an industry that's often taken a beating in public perception

An Entire Month of Videos Before Lunch

Tired of the post-every-day grind?

Syllaby.io automates your entire content workflow. All you need is a topic—our AI does the rest.

✅ Get daily viral content ideas
✅ Auto-generate scripts tailored to your niche
✅ Instantly create faceless videos
✅ Bulk schedule across all your platforms

Syllaby is perfect for coaches, creators, and marketers who want to grow without showing their face or spending hours editing.

Try Free for 7 Days

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• WorkPPT: AI slide creation

• Chronicle: Oh seems there’s a theme here; create impactful presentations in a fraction of the time…

• Frigade: Help users onboard through your product with AI powered assistance increasing retention and customer success

• Julius: Chat with your data and get expert-level insights in seconds

  Remember. Product Tapas subscribers get our complete toolkit - 450+ 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

Peter Ramsey's Weekly UX Bites

Peter Ramsay’s Built for Mars is probably the most featured repeat link in this newsletter and for good reason. It’s been a good few weeks since he’s featured so here’s another collection of his thoughtful UX patterns that demonstrate how small design decisions can significantly impact user experience.

This week's UX Bites showcase accessibility improvements, error handling, habit formation, delightful interactions, and contextual loading states. Access his full collection here.

Brand Strategy: Does Liquid Death's Brand Actually Convert?

Product managers often face pressure to build distinctive brands that cut through market noise, but Liquid Death's case study reveals the critical tension between viral marketing and sustainable conversion metrics.

Bill Kerr, Elly Strang, and Jean Teng dissect whether rock-and-roll water branding translates into real business results, using Tracksuit's brand tracking data to examine the gap between awareness and purchase intent—a challenge every PM faces when balancing brand investment with growth targets. Read the full article here.

💡 "We think about our marketing team more like Saturday Night Live. We're making fun of the shit corporate marketing that everyone hates." This captures Liquid Death's approach—but the data reveals that brand love doesn't always equal brand growth.

Organisational Change: Expecting Resistance from Leaders During Product Transformation

Product managers leading organisational transformation often focus on team adoption whilst underestimating leadership resistance. Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion explore the three most common forms of stakeholder and leader resistance during product operating model pilots, revealing that even transformation advocates struggle to relinquish control when change becomes real.

These insights extend well beyond product operating model implementations - they're relevant for any product manager helping leaders navigate the delicate balance between empowerment and oversight more broadly Read the full article here.

💡 "It's easy to think only our product teams change in the product operating model. But what we see in practice is that it's an entire organisational change."

🎙️ 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

🎯 UX For Business: Lessons from a UX Veteran Who Taught Millions

Joel Marsh didn't set out to become the accidental godfather of UX education. What started as Friday afternoon emails to help product managers avoid looking stupid in client meetings eventually became "UX for Beginners"—a book that launched thousands of careers. But success created an unexpected problem: all those new practitioners kept asking him the same question.

"Can you recommend another book that will tell me what to do at work?"

That persistent question led Joel to write "UX for Business"—his answer to the messy reality of actually shipping products. In a recent podcast interview, Joel shared the thinking behind his latest book and introduced a deceptively simple framework that's helping product teams navigate the gap between theory and practice.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: May 9th, 2025

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 3mins. Time saved: 40 mins!🔥

🏗️ From Email Newsletter to Product Bible

The origin story reveals something crucial about how real learning happens in product development. Joel's first book wasn't born from academic theory—it came from the trenches of agency life, where project managers and product people needed just enough UX knowledge to survive client meetings and ship better products.

"I was sending a newsletter to teach people who actually didn't care that much about design," Joel explains. "They just needed it so they didn't look stupid in a meeting."

This approach—making complex product concepts digestible without dumbing them down—became Joel's signature. When a million people read those blog posts, he'd accidentally created a bridge between design theory and business reality that product teams desperately needed.

🔄 The Real-World Problem

But success brought an unexpected consequence. Joel's book created "this population of people with basic knowledge or information and no experience who then went out and got jobs." These new product team members faced a harsh reality: the messy, irrational world of actual work bore little resemblance to the clean frameworks they'd learned.

The messages kept coming: "Thank you, I got a job because I read this book... but can you recommend another book now that I need to know what to do at work?"

This wasn't just user feedback—it was user research at scale. Joel had solved part A of the problem (getting into product work) but part B remained: how do you actually execute when you don't have enough money, time, or information?

"UX for Business" became his answer to those real-world challenges—the stage two book that bridges the gap between learning frameworks and shipping products in less-than-ideal circumstances.

🎯 The VDP Framework: Value, Diagnosis, Probability

Rather than create another rigid methodology, Joel developed what he calls "guiding principles"—a mental model that helps product teams navigate complexity. The VDP framework isn't about following steps; it's about knowing where to focus your attention when building products.

Value: The North Star Moment

Everything starts with identifying the core value exchange—both for customers and the business. Joel uses e-commerce as the clearest example: customers want products, companies want money, and there's literally one click where this value exchange happens.

"You can often reduce value down to a moment or a click," he explains. "In an e-commerce store, there is literally one click at the end when the value happens—you click buy, thank you for your purchase."

This isn't about creating beautiful interfaces or following best practices. It's about working backwards from that value moment to figure out what people need at each step to get from zero to value. Your first version can be rough, ugly, inconvenient, and slow—but if it delivers the core value, you have something to build on.

Diagnosis: The Doctor's Approach

The second principle transforms how product teams think about user research and feature requests. Instead of just listening to what users say they want, treat their requests as symptoms that need diagnosis.

Joel's father, a doctor, helped him see this connection: "The way you talk about this feels so familiar to the way that I diagnose people when they come in. You're gathering symptoms and symptoms can be a lot of things."

When a user says "I need a better search engine," that's not a feature request—it's a symptom. The real problem might be poor navigation, confusing labels, or content organisation issues. Just like patients who say their stomach hurts when the real issue is embarrassing to discuss, users often can't articulate their actual needs directly.

This reframes product discovery from feature collection to problem investigation. You're looking for clusters of symptoms with common causes, and the common cause is what you're trying to fix.

Probability: The Hidden Multiplier

The third principle acknowledges something experienced product people intuitively understand but rarely articulate: product design is fundamentally about probability.

"The things on a list of 10 options in your menu—whatever option is number one at the top is going to be clicked by nature more often than the one below," Joel notes. "If option number 10 is actually what a lot of people are looking for, a lot of people are going to miss it."

This explains why senior product people obsess over details that seem insignificant to others. They've developed an intuition for probability—understanding that small changes in information architecture, visual hierarchy, or interaction patterns can dramatically affect user behaviour at scale.

Key Takeaways: 

• Start with value, not features - Identify the core exchange moment and work backwards

• Treat user requests as symptoms - Dig deeper to find the underlying causes of user problems

• Design for probability, not possibility - Small changes in layout and hierarchy create big changes in behaviour

🤝 Breaking Down the Product-Business Divide

One of the book's most valuable insights addresses the persistent friction between product teams and business stakeholders. The problem isn't that business people don't understand product—it's that product people don't understand business.

"We tend to imagine that other people should come to our design world," Joel observes, "even though ironically the job of UX people is to understand other people's worlds and for us to go there."

The Solution: Speak Business, Not Features

When product teams enter stakeholder meetings wanting to talk about user experience, they're already losing. Business stakeholders care about business outcomes, so that's where the conversation needs to start.

This doesn't mean compromising on product quality—it means reframing product decisions in terms of business impact. Instead of "This interface is more intuitive," try "This design reduces support tickets by making the most common tasks easier to find."

Joel's advice is practical: "When I start any big new project, the first people I want to talk to are the sales people and the tech support people. My question is: what are the three things you hear all the time? Often I'm three months ahead of where I would have been if I didn't talk to those people."

Key Takeaways: 

• Speak their language, not yours - Frame product decisions in business terms

• Tap internal expertise - Sales and support teams have invaluable user insights

• Lead with outcomes, not process - Focus on what the product achieves, not how it was made

🚀 The "Make Prototypes Without Asking" Philosophy

Perhaps the most provocative advice in the book comes on the very last page: "Make prototypes without asking." This simple statement challenges a fundamental assumption about how product work gets done.

The Permission Trap

When product teams ask permission to do their job, they create several problems:

Power dynamics shift incorrectly. Asking permission for something you're supposed to do creates a weird relationship with managers where you won't act without explicit blessing.

Constraints multiply unnecessarily. When you ask permission for a specific thing, you have to define that thing clearly. This boxes you in before you've even started exploring.

Assumptions about cost and complexity take over. Many organisations assume user research requires gift cards, lab time, and formal processes. Sometimes you just need to talk to people.

The Alternative: Just Do It

Joel's approach is refreshingly direct: understand the value, diagnose the problems, then make something that works. Don't ask for permission to prototype—just build something rough that demonstrates the solution.

"Once you have done the diagnosis part and you kind of see the problem, you know what it's made of, you know what probably would solve it—just make something," he advises. "It's really easy to sit in a meeting and talk about a prototype that works that everybody can understand."

The principle extends beyond prototyping to all exploratory work. When someone asks "What are you going to learn from this prototype?" the honest answer is often "If I knew that, I wouldn't need to build a prototype."

🎭 The Human Side: Cheaters Gonna Cheat

One of the book's most memorable concepts comes from Joel's early career: "Marsh's Law"—any feature will eventually be abused to its maximum abusability.

The story starts with a seemingly mundane argument about character limits in inventory software. Developers wanted unlimited characters for product names because "theoretically this could be anything." Joel pushed for reasonable limits because "eventually somebody's going to do something dumb and copy paste the whole website into that... and it's going to destroy the layout of the page."

Product Design Creates Incentives

This technical debate reveals a deeper truth: your product decisions create incentives to behave well or badly. When you have millions of users, small incentives create massive behavioural shifts.

The principle scales from character limits to social platforms. Twitter's product decisions about replies, retweets, and character limits shaped how millions of people communicate. Some of those decisions made harassment easier; others made constructive conversation more likely.

Joel's advice is proactive: "You have to sit back and think like what's the worst thing I can do with this... you can solve that at the UX stage and just turn it off. We can create incentives to help people behave well."

Key Takeaways: 

• Anticipate abuse scenarios - Think through how features could be misused before launching

• Product design shapes behaviour at scale - Small incentives create massive behavioural changes

• Prevention beats reaction - It's easier to design good incentives than to fix bad behaviour later

🔄 The Real World Reality Check

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Joel's approach is his unflinching focus on real-world constraints. Unlike academic frameworks that assume ideal conditions, his advice acknowledges that most product work happens under less-than-perfect circumstances.

"UX for Business" dedicates significant space to what Joel calls "getting things done under less than ideal circumstances." You will work on projects where you don't have enough time, money, or information. People won't do what you want them to do. This isn't a failure of process—it's the normal state of affairs.

The book prepares product teams for this reality without being cynical about it. Instead of pretending these constraints don't exist, Joel shows how to work within them effectively.

"Best practices are usually most common practices," he notes. "The best practice is an expert taking what matters out of that and applying it for this situation."

🎯 Next Steps: From Framework to Practice

Joel Marsh's VDP framework offers a practical path forward for product teams struggling to bridge the gap between theory and reality. But frameworks are only as good as their application.

Start With Your Current Project

Apply the VDP lens to whatever you're building right now:

• Value: Can you identify the specific moment when value is exchanged? What do users get, and what does the business get?

• Diagnosis: What symptoms are you seeing in user behaviour or business metrics? What might be the underlying causes?

• Probability: Where in your current product are you making assumptions about user attention or behaviour?

Build Your Business Vocabulary

Begin speaking the language of business outcomes:

• Instead of "better user experience," talk about "reduced support costs"

• Instead of "more intuitive interface," discuss "faster task completion"

• Instead of "improved accessibility," frame it as "expanded market reach"

Stop Asking Permission

Identify one area where you've been asking permission to do your job, then just do it:

• Build that quick prototype to test your hypothesis

• Talk to those support team members about common user issues

• Include quality considerations in your standard process

The goal isn't to become a business person who happens to know product and design - it's to become a product person who understands how user experience serves business goals. In Joel's words, "UX becomes product" when you operate at the intersection of user needs and business objectives.

That intersection is where the most impactful product work happens. It's messy, complex, and often frustrating. But it's also where product teams can create the most value - for users, for businesses, and for their own careers.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

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 🍽️.