Ship Happens, Week 1: How to write requirements, tiny habits for your brain, and staying up to date on the AI race

Just in time for the flood of new ideas from your boss! 😅 A roundup of helpful reads and ideas heading into the new year.

Your boss: Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to tell you about every crazy idea he dreamed up over the holidays that needs to be shipped yesterday 🎉 Photo by Maaz Ijaz on Unsplash

The new year is here! I’m sure some of you are back in offices or on Zooms and starting to get after it.

I am definitely not lol. In pajamas writing this in my study, I’m back to work on Monday. But the job of product management in a lot of ways is 24/7. I like to stay sharp over the holidays by staying up to date on what’s happening in tech and in markets overall, both here on Substack and elsewhere.

So I’m going to use this newsletter to share at least three things I’ve come across this week to help you build better product. Subscribe so you don’t miss these when they come out:

Some of what I’ll put in here is directly relevant to product management. Some of it will help you get into that user mindset. I’m going to sprinkle in also some of the critical reads and videos that have made an impact on me in my product management career.

That’s a nice segway into the first thing, here we go!

1. Joel on Software’s blog series on product requirements

This series of blog posts is admittedly old school. The Chief Product Officer I worked for when I first started out as a baby PM recommended this series, that’s how old it is. 👴🏼

But I have to say it continues to be relevant, and it’s one of those resources I recommend over and over and over again. Why? Joel makes a lot of key points that I find gets lost quite often in discussions about product requirements, like:

1. Product requirements are being written to clarify requirements and align on those requirements with your design and engineer team. If the requirements don’t do those jobs, they’ve failed. There’s no point in having them.

2. Thus, you should write requirements that are designed to be read and understood by actual human beings. You don’t get points for having the longest requirements that no one reads. Since it’s for actual people, try to be concise and direct but also make them fun and easy to read.

3. Requirements are complete when no one has any more questions or feedback. This is a really simple but powerful idea. If the above is accomplished fully, everyone’s on the same page, edge cases are clarified and we are ready to move forward quickly to completion.

I hope you’ll find it particularly useful heading into the new year writing all of those requirements that you put off in December. 🤣 I did it too don’t worry! On to our next topic:

2. 7 Tiny Habits That Will Change Your Brain and Help You Not Go Product Manager Crazy in Q1 2025

Okay I admittedly changed up the title, but

Better Brain by Dr. Julie

brings it here with some great little shifts for 2025:

7 tiny habits that will change your brain in 2025

The one I’m personally working on the most is taking little breaks throughout the day. My Oura ring loves to tell me that I get 0 restorative time. Shove it Oura ring! But it was totally right. My sleep has been improving as I’ve been forcing myself to take more breaks and more down time, especially at night.

The Q1 onslaught is here, it’s gonna be stressful. Take your breaks and take care of yourself.

3. Make double-sure you’re staying up to date with the AI race

I personally follow Azeem Ahar for content like this on AI:

🔥 Beyond human: OpenAI’s o3 wake up call

Once you’ve mastered the basics, product management starts to become about getting intuition and foresight about how to build better products for human beings. That requires understanding where the puck is going and skating towards.

Sometimes the puck is a mirage, but AI is definitely not a mirage. We’re early, so sometimes AI can feel like “glorified autocomplete,” to borrow a phrase from an engineering manager I worked with. But AI is here, it’s coming, and it’s going to have a big role to play in building products going forward.

So it’s best to understand the latest on these technologies. It reminds me of mobile when I started out in startups in 2010 👴🏼 I never worked at Apple, but knowing what was happening and what users wanted/grew accustomed to helped me build much better products.

In this case, what we’re staring down the barrel of is something like GPT-o3, where with enough compute power the model is able to more and more complex tasks:

Basic facts: The new model is good at reasoning in mathematical and programming domains. It scores really well on a particular benchmark called ARC-AGI, which is above the average human. Spend more money on it, up to $3,500 per task, and it approaches the performance of a STEM graduate.

Crazy. What should you take away from this as a product manager?

1. These models are only going to get better and better. It was thought that we’d hit a wall after LLMs trained on all of the data on the internet. But now OpenAI and others are turning to newer techniques like “thinking” and they are paying off big time.

2. Thus, users are going to expect more and more from products and experiences. The use of AI in your products is going to be a given in a few years. So if you’re not thinking about how to use AI in your product experience now, good chance you’ll be behind.

3. The tolerance for screw-ups is going to get lower and lower. “If AI can do STEM-graduate level math problems, why can’t it tell me correctly when my new Nike shoes are going to deliver?!” I can already feel this feedback coming. Start planning to invest in lower and lower product error rates.

That’s it for this week! 🚀

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I’ll be back around this time next week with more useful product manager things!