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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This week’s fresh picks 🥗

Everything can be cloned in minutes (competitive moats are dead), 20 million people are paying for AI friendship (loneliness economy is booming), Apple leaks its entire roadmap by accident (secrecy is impossible), and 77% of PMs admit they have no idea what they're doing with AI (finally, some honesty).

• 📰 Not Boring → The clone economy arrives, AI loneliness hits 20M users, Apple's accidental roadmap reveal

• ⌚️ Productivity Tapas → AI video creation, analytics automation, usage metering made simple

• 🍔 Blog Bites → AI-powered personalisation examples, strategic investment reality checks, AI job search tactics

• 🎙️ Pod Shots → Impact First Product Teams: Escaping the low-impact death spiral and the CEO question that changes everything

Let's go 🚀

📰 Not boring

The Intelligence Race

• GPT-5's rollout fell flat for consumers, but it was OpenAI's stealth enterprise play. Startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory have already made GPT-5 the default model due to faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and lower price. Less popular with customers but more profitable overall. Interdasting…

• Life post GPT-5: Sam Altman hints at a future beyond a single universal product, with Instacart's Fiji Simo leading the launch of multiple consumer apps outside of ChatGPT and whilst we’re on what’s next: Sam Altman on GPT-6: ‘People want memory’ (no shit Sherlock)

• Gemini now learns from your past conversations over time

• Google's new open source model can run on your smartphone whilst barely impacting battery. Edge computing eh?

• But whilst we’re in the middle of all this hype, worth noting GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire. With next to ZERO return

The Attention Economy

• Threads now has 400 million monthly active users (same as Twitter/X), obviously great for ads but even more so for data. Meanwhile X's declining Android app installs are hurting subscription revenue. The network effect giveth and taketh away

• Substack writers can now direct US readers to cheaper web-based subscriptions on iOS, joining Spotify, Patreon, and Amazon Kindle. Apple's 30% tax slowly crumbles

Disruption Roulette

• Firecrawl announced an open source AI web app builder that can transform any web URL into a working editable clone. If your competitive advantage can be cloned in minutes, you don't have one. Network effects and brand loyalty seem the logical refuge, but as agents take over customer interactions, how do you even build those? 🤔

• Grammarly gets a design overhaul and multiple AI features hot off its acquisition of productivity startup Coda

• Character AI has over 20 million MAU for its LLM-based virtual friends. Loneliness is a growth market it seems

Everything Else

• 77% of product managers expressed uncertainty regarding responsible development of new AI features. Everyone's building, nobody knows what they're doing

• A mind-reading brain implant that turns imagined words into speech. Unsure what is more ridiculous, A) we can do this B) the lack of shock I have we can do this

• Everything announced at Made by Google, including Pixel 10, Pixel Watch 4, and Pixel Buds 2a

• Every Apple Secret That Leaked Wednesday - Apple accidentally exposed hardware identifiers revealing HomePod mini with S-series chip, Apple TV with A17, Studio Display 2, iPad mini with A19 Pro, Vision Pro with M5, plus a Ring-style security camera and tabletop robot. Seems nothing remains secret any more!

• Duolingo's roller-coaster week shows how AI model upgrades can threaten existing products overnight. Progress is a double-edged sword

• ChatGPT's mobile app has generated $2B to date, earning $2.91 per install. The money printer goes brr

• A16z on the future of e-commerce: Is Google screwed? Maybe. But not how you think. On a similar topic, ChatGPT is sending less traffic to websites – down 52% in a month

• Spotify's latest feature lets you add your own transitions to playlists.

• Google pays $30M to settle lawsuit over children's YouTube data

• AirPods Pro 2 seem set for another surprise upgrade at iPhone 17 event - spoiler alert: it’s live translation

• Wyoming's 'Frontier' Stablecoin Debuts on Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche. And whilst we're on good old crypto, Coinbase is betting on the rise of AI payments fuelled by digital dollars. Pretty sure I talked about the rise of AI automated crypto stablecoin payments about a year and a half ago….

• Acrobat Studio rolled out by Adobe to help you manage multiple PDFs

• Listen to your documents using Gemini in Google Docs

• TikTok's latest feature lets college students find and connect with classmates.

• Finally…here's a great explanation of MCP with some nice visuals too

Better inputs. Sharper outputs. Download the guide to premium AI.

Building or refining generative AI models? This guide shows why scraped data falls short—and what to use instead. Learn how real-world behavior signals, clustering, semantic scoring, and visual diversity improve output. Plus, see how Shutterstock’s licensed data and services reduce risk and boost performance. Train smarter, faster, and more responsibly.

Download the guide

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• Reeroll: Create videos by chatting with AI. AI video editor for creating short, engaging videos in minutes. Choose a template, add your assets and links, and Reeroll will customize it for you. No complex editors, just a simple chat that turns ideas into ready-to-publish videos.

• Airbook AI: “Cursor for Analytics” Airbook AI connects to your CRMs, marketing, support, and product databases - understands your schema, auto-writes SQL, joins across sources, creates charts, builds dashboards, and activates workflows - In one place, on command.

• Autumn: Price, meter, and control AI usage in just three API calls. Built on Stripe, it handles subscriptions, metering, and access from one place—no webhooks, no backend glue. Perfect for early-stage teams shipping LLMs and image models

  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

UX Design: Five Brilliant Micro-Interactions That Show AI-Powered Personalisation in Action

Peter Ramsay is back with another five standout examples of how leading platforms use AI, dynamic content and more to create more personalised user experiences. Each example demonstrates thoughtful design that anticipates user needs and adapts interfaces in real-time. Jump to a great onboarding example here.

💡 "Design is thinking. It's anticipating intent. It's understanding nuance. It's experimenting."

Strategy: Meta's AI Manifesto and the $100 Billion Reality Check

Not an article per se this one, just a good take from Benedict Evans re Mark Zuckerberg's strategic pivot from metaverse to AI where he covers how Meta's founder-led advantage enables radical shifts that professional CEOs couldn't execute. Evans argues that Zuckerberg's pattern of strategic copying reflects a deeper rigour in surfing user behaviour changes, comparing Meta's approach to Bill Gates' Microsoft rather than Google or Apple.

💡 "Social media is pop culture, and it's protean, always changing, and Mark Zuckerberg is extremely good at surfing user behaviour - at keeping up with how much and how fast everything is changing all of the time."

Career Strategy: How to Land 7 Final Round Interviews Using AI-Powered Job Search

Not sure whether this is going to step change your job hunt, but given how competitive the market is, I figured it's worth sharing as it looks interesting…

Brian Kemler explores how to leverage artificial intelligence to achieve "candidate market fit" and bypass traditional application processes. His strategic approach focuses on using AI to craft targeted narratives, research companies deeply, and connect directly with hiring managers rather than relying on mass applications. Read the full article here.

💡 "Instead of brute-force applying to companies and hoping something sticks, I focused on my candidate market fit and using AI to bring it to life."

FYI it’s paywalled - so you’ll need to sub to get he full article

🎙️ 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 Low-Impact Death Spiral: How Product Teams Can Avoid Layoffs by Becoming Impact-First

Matt LeMay is ace and I love his book Impact First Product Teams so was stoked to see him on Lenny's podcast this week. If you haven't got his book, definitely go get it. It's a breath of fresh pragmatic air and every product team should read it. The podcast is also worth a listen in full and a solid summary of what's going on in the book. And this below is a summary of that podcast…

Product managers and teams are getting laid off at unprecedented rates. According to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, the core problem is clear: "We still have too many people doing work around the work" instead of driving real business impact.

Matt LeMay, longtime product leader and author of "Product Management in Practice," has identified the root cause: the Low-Impact Death Spiral. This insidious pattern starts with small, seemingly safe features that gradually increase complexity without delivering meaningful business results—until the next round of layoffs hits.

In the pod, Matt shared his three-step framework for becoming "impact-first" and introduced the CEO question that changes everything about how product teams think about their work.

🎥 Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: 14 August 2024

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 4 mins. Time saved: 95 mins! 🔥

🤔 The CEO Question That Changes Everything

Before diving into frameworks, Matt poses a critical question every product manager should ask themselves: "If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team?"

"Frankly, most of the people I ask that question to don't know the answer right away," he observes. This hesitation reveals a fundamental disconnect between what product teams think they're delivering and what the business actually needs.

The harsh reality? Companies won't keep writing paycheques for two years just because your OKRs hit 0.6 or 0.7. You need to demonstrate clear, measurable business impact—or risk becoming expendable.

Key Takeaways:

• Ask yourself the CEO question honestly - would you fund your own team?

• OKR scores don't guarantee job security - business impact does

• Most product managers can't immediately answer this question - that's the problem

🌀 Understanding the Low-Impact Death Spiral

The Low-Impact Death Spiral follows a predictable pattern that Matt has observed across countless product teams:

Stage 1: Small, Safe Features
Teams focus on low-risk improvements—minor UI tweaks, small feature additions, cosmetic changes that feel productive but don't move business metrics.

Stage 2: Accumulating Complexity
Like rhinestones weighing down a car, these small features accumulate technical debt and operational overhead without proportional value creation.

Stage 3: Resource Drain
The team becomes increasingly busy maintaining and supporting low-impact features whilst struggling to deliver meaningful business results.

Stage 4: Layoffs
When budget cuts come, leadership can't justify keeping teams that haven't demonstrated clear business value, regardless of how busy they've been.

Matt shares a telling example: "I worked with a product manager who broke out of this cycle by focusing on one clear, impactful goal instead of juggling multiple small improvements. The difference in business results was dramatic."

Key Takeaways:

• Small, safe features accumulate into big problems over time

• Being busy doesn't equal being valuable to the business

• Focus beats fragmentation - one impactful goal trumps multiple small improvements

📈 Step 1: Set Team Goals No More Than One Step Away From Company Goals

Continued here and on the link below 👇️ 

Hey everyone. As mentioned last week I'm starting to move the Pod Shots to standalone web articles because they're getting a bit long for the newsletter. So to continue reading follow the link below!

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Alastair 🍽️.