Best Of Product Roundup - July 18, 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.

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Top Long-Form Content

1. How Top PMs Increase Their Leverage With AI

   1. What we liked: A tangible list of real PM tasks you should be doing differently in our AI native world.

   2. Choice quote: "The best PMs at the best companies are prototyping with real code, querying data conversationally with MCP, confidently running coding AI agents."

2. 30 Principles for AI-Powered Project Management

   1. What we liked: Every principle draws a clean line between what AI assembles and what only you can own. Practical, hard-won, and free of hype.

   2. Choice quote: "AI does the assembly. You keep the judgment… It cannot tell you which risk your CFO will use to kill the project."

3. The New AI Working System: Your AI Setup Is About to Matter More Than Your Prompts

   1. What we liked: The opening walkthrough — an agent that gathers all the refund evidence, then stops and asks for approval — is a great illustration of human-in-the-loop design for agents.

   2. Choice quote: "It is not one clever prompt. It is not a giant agent allowed to do everything. It is a small working system… and a clear point where the human takes control."

Top Tweets

1. You Just Hired a Million Bad Employees

   1. What we liked: An article hiding as a Tweet, but well worth it for its description of parallels across the old working world to the new AI world and the fail modes.

   2. Choice quote: "Just like 80% of employees do nothing, 80% of tokens today do nothing."

2. Agents Are the New SaaS. Here's the Whole Playbook.

   1. What we liked: Actionable end to end, and the one-line reframe of what you're actually selling is worth the whole thread. Founders should save this.

   2. Choice quote: "SaaS sells software. Agent SaaS sells work… The product is the job."

3. THE COMPLIANT BREACH: Your AI Agents Can Leak Data Without Breaking a Rule

   1. What we liked: Current (built on fresh Microsoft research), genuinely alarming, and actionable: audit your tool descriptions this week. The security counterpart to all the agent-deployment enthusiasm.

   2. Choice quote: "The exfiltration path that breaks no rule is the one most governance programs were never built to catch."

Top LinkedIn Posts & Short Videos

1. From Hype to ROI: Where AI Is Generating Real Revenue (and Where It's Just Smoke)

   1. Summary: The reckoning phase — companies moving from "we adopted AI" to proving it shows up in margin, with the MIT stat that 95% of enterprise GenAI projects haven't delivered.

   2. What we liked: Sober, numbers-first, and aimed squarely at leaders who need to separate real returns from theater. The line below belongs on every AI steering committee's wall.

   3. Choice quote: "Modernity does not appear on the income statement."

2. The Token Drain: How Subtle Mistakes and Guardrail Friction Impact LLM Economics

   1. What we liked: A practical lens on unit economics that most AI-cost conversations miss. Useful for anyone budgeting agent workloads or wondering where their usage limits keep going.

   2. Choice quote: "By the time the model finally arrives at the intended answer, the user has burned three to four times the tokens originally required."

3. Third Principles Thinking: When Systems Begin to Think for Themselves

   1. What we liked: A thoughtful frame for the agentic era, grounded in how organizations already drift one interaction at a time. Good conceptual footing for anyone designing self-adjusting AI systems.

   2. Choice quote: "Over time, the system quietly starts redesigning itself."

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

1. A common question I hear from local governments is, "Should we be training our own LLM?"

2. I've built tech for Fortune 500s, federal agencies, and local city halls. The pitch is identical. The outcome isn't.

3. America has some very unusual cities. Have you heard of California Forever?