Best Of Product Roundup - January 17, 2026
The best expert-curated product content from the best product thinkers from around the Internet delivered twice a month.
Every two weeks, we dive into the vast ocean of product content online, both free and paid. We sift through it all to bring you the crème de la crème. Our round-up includes carefully curated links and concise excerpts from top content.
This week’s highlights feature:
Top 3 Long-Form Articles/Podcasts
Top 3 Tweets
Top 3 LinkedIn Posts or Short Videos
Our expert product team has selected these resources to help you save thousands of dollars on unnecessary subscriptions, avoid wasting time reading instead of taking action, and save years following the wrong advice. Our mission is to introduce you to brilliant product thinkers, whether they’re renowned experts or emerging voices.
Top Long-Form Content
AI evals are changing the PM craft
What we liked: Tackles the most critical evolution in AI-first PM craft with concrete frameworks for integrating evals throughout product development, from customer research to PRD writing to testing, complete with real examples from Amplitude, Harvey, and AirOps.
Choice quote: “Instead of measuring ‘# users who completed the 5-step email creation flow,’ PMs need to ask, ‘Did the email meet our quality bar? How many edits were needed before the user sent the email we drafted?’”
Claude Code and What Comes Next
What we liked: An analytical approach to unpack why this moment in AI tools represents a genuine capability leap. The hands-on experiment (Claude working independently for 74 minutes to build a functional startup) makes the abstract concrete.
Choice quote: “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between.”
A strategic 2x2 framework analyzing AI applications by adoption difficulty and problem complexity. Explains why coding agents improved so fast (easy adoption → data flywheel), and predicts the “hard-hard” quadrant will see the next wave of winners.
What we liked: Finally, someone articulates why different AI categories are succeeding at different rates. The insight that enterprise integration difficulty creates its own moat is counterintuitive but compelling for founders and PMs positioning their products.
Choice quote: “Easy to adopt also means easy to displace. Hard to adopt products have their own data moat: Once you’re embedded in an enterprise, you learn about how that company works in a way that makes your product incredibly hard to replace.”
What we liked: Shreyas cuts through the noise with pithy observations that lodge in your brain. The piece on being “perpetual pawns of problems that shouldn’t have arisen” is a perfect diagnosis of chronic organizational fire-fighting.
Choice quote: “The reason you are saying we don’t have time to think right now and we must do something right away is that you said the same thing last time and before that and the time before that, and so we are now perpetual pawns of problems that shouldn’t have arisen in the first place.”
Top Tweets
I just saved hours per week with ONE hour and ONE button press inside Claude.
What we liked: A highly actionable tutorial from one of AI’s most prominent voices that shows exactly how to leverage Claude’s underutilized Skills feature for productivity gains. This is the kind of practical workflow optimization AI-first PMs should be implementing immediately.
Choice quote: “Now, for the rest of eternity, I just have to type into a conversation ‘write me a newsletter subject line’ it will apply all of my rules and preferences and style and structure and output them in the exact way and order that I want.”
What we liked: A practical, open-source tool announcement that addresses real cost concerns with Claude Cowork while demonstrating concrete automation workflows. The ability to chain local and cloud actions is particularly valuable for PMs managing complex project portfolios.
Choice quote: “In the demo we use it to scan through my laptop and find all my unfinished projects and put them in a notion database with completion status.”
I know exactly what would fix our product org.
What we liked: Cuts through typical PM platitudes to address the structural dysfunction most PMs face daily. The tactical advice to document rework patterns and reframe pitches around cost rather than process is immediately applicable. The honest acknowledgment that some systems simply can’t be fixed without executive intervention will resonate with frustrated PMs.
Choice quote: “Problems move people. Solutions don’t. Your manager doesn’t care about product operating models. They care about the $2M you’re burning on coordination overhead.”
Top LinkedIn Posts & Short Videos
What we liked: Reframes Discovery from ceremony to continuous uncertainty reduction, making it more palatable to stakeholders and more effective for teams. The practical Freemium launch example demonstrates how to identify and test critical assumptions without ritual.
Choice quote: “Discovery isn’t about running a prescribed set of activities—interviews, prototypes, opportunity solution trees—because you’re supposed to. It’s about identifying your riskiest assumptions and testing them as cheaply as possible before you commit engineering capacity and organizational credibility.”
Do you know how to correctly set user personas for your product?
What we liked: Uses a memorable, humorous example to drive home a critical point about behavior-based segmentation. Clarifies the distinction between demographics (useful for product building) and personas (representing usage patterns).
Choice quote: “User personas are about identifying patterns of behavior, not about any specific user, fictional or otherwise.”
What we liked: Challenges the common conflation of GTM and launches with a memorable analogy and actionable framework. The visual comparison chart makes the distinction immediately usable for product teams and founders.
Choice quote: “A launch can’t fix a weak GTM strategy... A launch is an accelerant. It amplifies whatever you give it. If your product is an absolute ball of crap, that’s what the launch will amplify.”