Product-Market Fit, Dogfooding, RTO Mandates, and Dolphins
Your Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
An overarching theme in AI continues to be good judgement versus full automation—who decides what is good and how do we know. AI isn’t the answer to everything, even when it can be a useful tool. Especially when we find new and better ways of employing it, like coordinating agents. But companies that feel like they can outsource good judgement, or fully return to the office, will find their best employees are the first to leave.
Let’s dive into the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology:
📊 Product-Market Fit
👯 Coordinating Agents
🐶 Dogfooding
🤖 Outsourcing Thinking
☑️ AI Tool Selection
🏢 RTO Mandates
🗣️ Dophins
Podcast
Finding Product-Market Fit with Ken Gavranovic
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News and Useful Reads
Four AI agents coordinating in real time outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 on enterprise coding tasks
A coordinated multi-agent setup nearly doubled task accuracy vs. single agents working alone on long-horizon enterprise codebase tasks. It’s good evidence for why coordination structure matters as much as raw model power.
As enterprise codebases grow, AI agents tasked with analyzing them are buckling under the weight of long-horizon tasks that require multiple interactions and tool calls. Dividing the work among a team of agents seems like the obvious fix, but it introduces a fatal flaw: most multi-agent systems are not designed for agents to coordinate among themselves mid-task and in real time.
Dogfooding vs. QA vs. User Research
I’m a big advocate for dogfooding your products. Those of us building products should have a thorough understanding of them. But we know too much—how the data structure works, how it should work, where things are. We can’t rely on our own experience as a replacement for non-employee users.
Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.
I’ve interviewed 700 leaders. The ones outsourcing their thinking to AI lose their best people first
You can outsource almost all your thinking to AI. With Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, answers are instantaneous. But you can’t outsource your own understanding. Credible leaders build trust among employees, investors, and the general public through translating data into meaning. By conveying that meaning, they build motivation, inspiring others toward a shared vision. This is a human skill that AI lacks.
How to Decide When an AI Tool Is Worth Keeping
The pressure to use AI in everything is very real. It comes from everyone on social media talking about how they’ve used AI to automate their lives. It also comes from leaders in your company pushing for “speed” and “automation,” assuming it will lead to cost savings. But not every task needs AI.
Pressure to use AI is real, but pressure is not evidence. If someone asks why you're not using a particular tool, you should be able to point to the task you tested, the tradeoffs you found, and the decision you reached: "This tool didn't improve this work enough to justify its cost, risk, or friction." It also replaces a vague demand like "use more AI" with a better question: which parts of this workflow have we tested, and where did the evidence show improvement?
Return-to-office mandates are killing workplace trust
Most companies instituting RTO mandates are going to suffer in the long term. Not only will it hurt their culture, but it’s going to force many of their best employees out as they find better jobs with the flexibility they want.
The central mistake in many in-office mandates is the assumption that proximity automatically produces commitment. It does not. A worker who spends two hours commuting to sit on video calls with colleagues in other cities is not experiencing culture. That worker is experiencing theater. When executives describe the office as a cure-all, many employees experience lost time, higher costs and lower autonomy. The policy’s defining feature becomes its credibility gap.
Other Interesting Finds
5 Adorable Animals That Are Secretly Vicious
People, especially my family, don’t believe me when I tell them dolphins are actually sadistic and far more dangerous than we give them credit for.
In the wild and in captivity, dolphins have been known to attack humans, sometimes fatally, by ramming, biting, and even holding their victims under water until they drown.
Why Your Voice Sounds Different to You Than to Others
Hearing recordings of myself years ago made me deeply uncomfortable, since I hated the way I sounded. But this is pretty normal. We all sound deeper and richer to ourselves than to others.
The ear achieves transduction through two means: bone conduction (movement of ossicles) and air conduction (movement of air outside the ear). When a person speaks, the ear uses both those methods to make sense of the sound. But because your mouth is close to your ear, the ossicles vibrate more, distorting your voice to a lower pitch inside your head and giving you a “false sense of bass,” according to the BBC.