PRODUCT STRATEGY FOR BUILDERS
Re:imagine Product Thinking (in the AI era)
A weekly journal on building great products and becoming a better leader—through clear thinking, strong systems, and honest lessons.
I’m Shekhar Yadav — founder at 23 Ventures. We’re building some exciting things with AI, and honestly, it’s made me fall in love with building again. This is where I share what I’m learning in real time: product thinking, iteration, and the messy middle of shipping.
What you’ll find here
Product & Growth
PMF signals, roadmaps that learn, pricing, and GTM that compounds. How to know when you've found pull vs. push. What to build next when the roadmap feels like a wishlist. And why most growth advice is just dressed-up guesswork.
Build Lab
Tiny tools and system patterns — code, screenshots, shipped or scrapped. Weekend experiments with real numbers: latency, cost, what broke, what stuck. Sometimes it's a prototype that becomes production. Sometimes it's a lesson you ship without the code.
AI Applied
Practical AI that survives prod: evals, costs, UX, and defensibility. Where models actually add leverage vs. where they're expensive theater. How to instrument, measure, and iterate without burning budget on hype. And why most "AI products" still feel like features waiting for a wrapper to fall off.
Leadership & Team Ops
Hiring for velocity, technical product craft, and execution under pressure. How to build teams that ship instead of plan. What changes when you're the one making the call with incomplete data. And why the best operators treat org design like system architecture.
Featured
View allThe Missing Feedback Loop: Why AI Can't Tell You If You're Wasting Time
AI tools always produce output, making it impossible to know if you're being productive or just burning time. Here's why the feedback loop problem matters and what you can do about it.
Beyond the Price War: Identifying and Delivering Customer Value
How product leaders can compete on value instead of price. A strategic framework for CPOs and CTOs to identify what customers actually care about and architect products that deliver it.
The Experimentation Paradox: Why AI Productivity Has Nothing to Do With Learning Styles
Stop blaming cognitive fit for slow AI adoption. A deep dive into why competence theater is killing your engineering velocity and how startups use productive failure to win.
The Data Delusion: Why Big Data Can't Decode What It Means to Be Human
Big data excels at predicting behavior but fails at understanding subjective experience. Why product leaders need to rethink their relationship with data when building for humans.
Spotting vs. Lifting: The Human-AI Co-pilot Dynamic
Why treating AI as an outsourcer destroys technical intuition, and how engineering leaders can use the 'Spotter Dynamic' to build stronger teams.
When Automation Edits the Job: How AI Changes the Value of Expertise
AI doesn’t just cut headcount; it changes which tasks are scarce. Drawing on Autor–Thompson and operational history, this piece shows how automation reshapes wages, hiring, and training—and adds a 90‑day manager’s checklist.
The Cognitive Overload Crisis: Why AI-Assisted Development Is Creating a New Class of Burnout
AI coding tools promise superhuman productivity, but they're silently multiplying cognitive load. Why CTOs and CPOs need to measure developer cognition as carefully as velocity—before the burnout crisis hits.
The Optimization Trap: Why Technology Keeps Making Things Ugly
From 1960s sports cars to AI-generated art, the relentless pursuit of measurable efficiency is stripping beauty from the things we make. An exploration of what we lose when optimization becomes the only goal.
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