Let’s dive into the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology:
📊 Product-Market Fit
☑️ AI Adoption
🟤 Ball of Mud
➖ Em Dashes
🤖 Verification
🦺 AI Safety
🇫🇷 Flags
Podcast
Finding Product-Market Fit with Ken Gavranovic
Discover how seasoned technology executive Ken Gavranovic shares insights on building innovative products, leading digital transformation, and harnessing AI to drive business growth. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a product leader, learn practical strategies to navigate and excel in the tech landscape.
News and Useful Reads
How Leaders Talk About AI Predicts Adoption
Every company and every leader is telling a story about AI, whether we like it or not. But the story we tell greatly influences how others view AI and how well it gets adopted (or not).
The companies where leaders’ stories provide clarity, hope, and growth are seeing outsized performance on these measures. Not enough workers, however, are benefiting from these messages.
The New Big Ball of Mud: Why Agentic AI Systems Turn Fragile
With the rise of all the AI tools and capabilities, it’s very easy to rely on their outputs without appropriate consideration for the broader system we’re creating. But that just creates a big ball of mud.
In the AI era, a big ball of mud works surprisingly well — until accumulated complexity makes the system difficult to direct, diagnose, or reconstruct.
Claude Opus 5.5 uses em-dashes 99% less often and sounds more human — but still exhibits 2,548 AI writing tells
The em dash (a personal favorite of mine until it got usurped by AI) may be on its way out of AI writing. But that doesn’t mean AI sounds human yet.
But anyone hoping the model has shed its recognizable habits will find plenty left: the researchers identify 2,548 words, phrases and sentence patterns that appear at least twice as often in its generated articles as in comparable human articles.
AI Is Making Verification the Bottleneck for Companies
AI is a powerful execution tool. It is making it easy to build and create rapidly. But that means the work of verification is even more important.
When execution is cheap, verification becomes more valuable, and firms turn into verification factories: institutions capable of properly steering AI-generated output and standing behind the results.
Whatever AI Safety Is, It’s Not This
Companies and industries are notoriously bad at policing and regulating themselves. AI will be no different. We’re going to need strong oversight from governments, not from the companies building the AI.
The correct answer to all this uncertainty surely isn’t “I guess we’ll find out.” But that’s exactly what self-regulation encourages.
Other Interesting Finds
Why Are So Many Flags Red, White, and Blue?
So, due to simple practicalities, red, white, and blue became embedded in European heraldry over the centuries — not necessarily through conscious choice alone, but also due to cost and availability. By the time nations began designing flags, those colors were already well-established and strongly affiliated with emblems and crests.