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 Illusion of Progress: Why Most Metrics Are Theater, Not Truth
A strategic guide for CPOs and CTOs on distinguishing signal from noise—from email open rates to lines of code to inflation metrics. Why the numbers on your dashboard might be lying to you.
The Compounding Portfolio: Why Engineering Careers Are Built in Days, Not Decades
Small builds compound into extraordinary capability. Why the best engineers aren't built through moonshots, but through hundreds of day-long projects that create knowledge, artifacts, and instinct over time.
The Architecture Imperative: Why AI-Generated Code Demands Better Component Design
As AI accelerates code generation, the real competitive advantage shifts to problem decomposition and component architecture. How CPOs and CTOs can harness AI without drowning in technical debt.
Frontier AI Models Are Becoming Luxury Goods
As open-weight models close the capability gap, API providers face a strategic inflection point. Are companies like Anthropic becoming luxury brands—essential for some use cases, but increasingly unnecessary for many others?
Building on Shifting Ground: Product Strategy in an Era of Exponential AI Capability
How do you build products when what's possible is improving daily? A framework for product leaders navigating rapid AI capability improvements—from layered architectures to capability-threshold roadmaps.
Why Now Is the Defining Moment for AI-Driven Legacy Enterprise Transformation
A strategic and technical exploration of why this moment uniquely positions legacy enterprises to leverage AI — not despite their systems, but because of them. For CPOs and CTOs navigating transformation.
Caching for LLM Systems Is Harder Than It Looks
Semantic caching, prompt-template caching, retrieval-result caching, tool-result caching, and tenant-aware invalidation. A technical deep-dive into the five caching layers every production LLM system needs.
Most AI Policies Are Written to Prevent Failure, Not Enable Value
Why risk-averse governance is killing AI adoption—and how risk-based frameworks can help CTOs and CPOs move fast where it matters while maintaining control where it counts.
The Illusion of Competence: Why Builders Don't Read the Manual
Why passive reading is just expensive procrastination. A builder's guide to escaping tutorial hell and acquiring real skills through the 48-Hour Micro-Project.
The Narrow Agent Advantage: Why Micro-Behavior AI Will Win Production Deployment
Why narrow agents that nail one micro-behavior ship to production while general AGI-style agents stay stuck in demos. A strategic framework for CPOs and CTOs on deploying AI that actually works.
When AI Lifts All Boats: Rethinking How We Evaluate Talent
As AI democratizes output, judgment becomes the new scarce resource. A strategic guide for CPOs and CTOs on identifying exceptional talent when traditional productivity metrics lose their signal.
Growing Junior Talent When AI Does the First Draft
How CPOs and CTOs can develop the next generation of senior leaders when AI has automated away traditional learning paths. A strategic framework for talent development in the age of AI augmentation.
What the Best AI Users Do Differently—and How to Level Up All of Your Employees
The gap between AI adopters and AI masters is widening. Learn the patterns that separate elite AI users from casual experimenters, and how to scale that proficiency across your entire organization.
AI Adoption Isn't a Training Problem—It's a Workflow Problem
Why AI adoption fails despite extensive training, and how embedding AI into existing workflows drives real adoption. A practical guide for CPOs and CTOs.
The End of 'That's Not My Job': Redefining Ownership in the Age of AI
AI is dissolving functional boundaries across organizations. How CPOs and CTOs can redesign accountability and ownership without creating chaos—with actionable frameworks and real-world examples.
The New UX Debt: Prompts, Memory, and Invisible State
Why AI products get messy fast, and how to design around context drift. A deep dive into invisible state management for product and engineering leaders building AI-native products.
Object-Oriented Thinking in an AI World
Why good software architecture principles still matter when building with LLMs. A technical deep-dive into design patterns that work in production AI systems.
The Builder's Loop: Ship, Measure, Learn
Why the best ideas don't come from thinking harder—they come from shipping faster. A deep dive into how every great innovator actually works.
Don't Let It Smell Your Fear: A Builder's Guide to Moving Through Paralysis
Learn how to overcome fear using neuroscience-backed strategies. Understand what happens in your brain during fear and discover actionable tactics to move through paralysis and build anyway.
Your Career Looks Like a Solitary Sport—But It's Actually a Team Game
The 'self-made' myth isn't just inaccurate—it's actively harmful. Every significant career moment happens because someone else opened a door you didn't even know existed.
From Idea to Prototype in 48 Hours: Why Constraints Are Your Secret Weapon
The best products aren't born from unlimited time and resources. They're forged in the fire of brutal constraints. Learn how to ship a working prototype in 48 hours.
Writing is an Act of Discovering What You Think and What You Believe
Writing doesn't capture thinking—it is thinking. Explore how the act of writing reveals hidden insights, tests beliefs, and creates the architecture for clear decision-making.
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