Best Of Product Roundup - January 31, 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 4 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.

In case you missed them, here are the recent posts from Emergent:

1. English Is the Silent Default in AI Models (Video)

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Top Long-Form Content

1. Management as AI Superpower

   1. What we liked: Reframes “management” from a soft skill to the core competency of the AI era. The “Equation of Agentic Work” framework for deciding when to delegate to AI is immediately actionable for PMs and builders alike.

   2. Choice quote: “The skills that are so often dismissed as ‘soft’ turned out to be the hard ones.”

2. How to Write a Good Spec for AI Agents

   1. What we liked: Solves the real pain point every PM and developer faces: how to communicate intent to AI without overwhelming it. The “six core areas” checklist and three-tier boundary framework (Always/Ask first/Never) are immediately deployable.

   2. Choice quote: “The key is to write smart specs: documents that guide the agent clearly, stay within practical context sizes, and evolve with the project.”

3. The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding

   1. What we liked: A brutally honest examination of the emerging “comprehension debt” crisis as developers ship code they don’t fully understand. Critical for product and startup leaders to be aware of.

   2. Choice quote: “If your ability to ‘read’ doesn’t scale at the same rate as the agent’s ability to ‘output,’ you aren’t engineering anymore. You’re rubber stamping.”

Top Tweets

1. The most underrated line in @karpathy’s post...

   1. What we liked: Captures an important nuance most miss—the difference between making something work quickly versus building something scalable and monetizable. Highly relevant for PMs navigating the build-vs-buy decision in the AI era.

   2. Choice quote: “There’s vibe coding (make it work now) and there’s vibe engineering (build the right thing in a way you can scale and monetize).”

2. Most product strategy is optimistic guessing wearing a suit.

   1. What we liked: Offers a practical mental model that flips conventional strategy thinking on its head. The framework—current state, projected mess, ideal future, then ideal current state—is immediately actionable.

   2. Choice quote: “If you can’t articulate the failure path, you don’t understand your position. You’re hoping.”

3. Every PM who wants to survive the AI era should watch this video

   1. What we liked: Dense with actionable wisdom from someone who built core products at Google, Facebook, Square, and DoorDash. The insight that PMs should define outcomes as customer state changes rather than features shipped is a mindset shift worth internalizing.

   2. Choice quote: “Your value is editorial capability—looking at 100 features and identifying the 2 things that will actually drive customer outcomes.”

Top LinkedIn Posts & Short Videos

1. Hot take: AI isn’t going to replace Product Managers. It’s going to expose who was never a PM to begin with.

   1. What we liked: A bold, contrarian take with a concrete two-stack framework that distinguishes between enduring PM skills and emerging AI competencies. The specific technical skills listed in Stack 2 provide a practical learning roadmap for PMs wanting to stay relevant.

   2. Choice quote: “It’s replacing artifact PMs - the ones whose entire job is ‘formatting’ thinking, not doing thinking THEMSELVES.”

2. Stop asking AI to do your job. Ask it to make you better at it.

   1. What we liked: An actionable framework that flips conventional AI usage on its head. The specific prompt examples are immediately usable, and the insight that AI should stress-test thinking rather than bypass it is genuinely novel.

   2. Choice quote: “If you use AI to bypass the thinking process, you’re automating away your own value. But if you use AI to stress-test your thinking, you become 10x more effective.”

3. Most people want AI to sound like them. But no one does this first (and it takes 47 mins).

   1. What we liked: A deeply practical system for solving the generic AI output problem. The emphasis on documenting rejections rather than just preferences is a clever insight, and the portability across AI tools makes this a foundational productivity technique.

   2. Choice quote: “80% of your file should be what you’d never say.”

4. Everyone tells you what you should do. Yet, no one knows your context.

   1. What we liked: A refreshing counter to the framework-obsessed PM culture. The practical action items are immediately executable, and the honest self-reflection about blaming company rigidity resonates with many PMs.

   2. Choice quote: “Product folks like playing a game, finding excuse not to do the job. I played that for too long, blamed the company rigidness. Once I stopped playing that stupid game, growth became natural.”

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In case you missed them — Adam’s recent LinkedIn Content

1. Wikipedia hasn’t had a real competitor in 30 years.

2. Tesla’s trillion-dollar 2025 shareholder-approved pay package matters for one simple reason: it only rewards results that materially change the landscape of the American economy.

3. 10 shocking facts everyone should know about our government today:

4. I finally found a great use case for OpenAI’s Operator agent in my personal life.

5. Around 30% of US job openings have disappeared since ChatGPT launched in 2022.

6. Your parking ticket was issued by AI, and now your parking laws might be written by it, too.