WEEK’S HIGHLIGHTS

• Product: Simple and difficult

• Founding: Founding in the real world

• Design: Improvements and increments

• Science & Tech: Solutions to problems or just add-ons and nice-to-haves?

• AI: Copycats vs copied cats

• Quote for the day: - From Dalai Lama

Simple and difficult

AI is quietly reshaping product work with sharper metrics, tighter loops, and less room for fluff.

PMs who can’t show impact are running out of places to hide.

Once forgotten generalist products are staging a comeback, owing to AI’s claimed knack for personalisation at scale.

Agentic design is now a practical concern, not a thought experiment, and onboarding is being rethought as a growth lever, not a chore.

Tools like Wrike and Amplitude are nudging teams toward structure and speed. Even phrases like “it depends” are starting to sound wise.

Product is getting more and more complex in its own elegant manner.

Founding in the real world

Startups are shedding illusions. Metrics, AI agents, and dodgy ARR are all under scrutiny.

Fractional execs are in, fundraising’s still brutal, and fake progress hacks behaviour better than real features. They call it the endowed progress effect.

IPOs are peeking back, Plaid proved pain driven demand trumps polish, and VCs are fusing AI with old school businesses.

Meta just lobbed $14.3B into Scale AI, scooping up its founder and fuelling the superintelligence arms race.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI Mode is gutting publishers, A/B tests are mostly garbage, and micromanagement is having a moment.

But our core takeaway last week?

Precision beats posturing.

Improvements and increments

As ever, plenty of brand glow-ups last week.

For starters: Apple’s big reveal, Liquid Glass. It sparkled more than it served, with testers calling out legibility issues.

Roku made subtle but smart tweaks, finally prioritising how people actually navigate.

Nintendo turned its eShop from a laggy afterthought into a proper storefront.

Meanwhile, DeviantArt’s founder wants you to spend $22k on a screen for generative art, and Adobe’s price hike is pushing longtime creatives toward leaner, scrappier tools.

The week also brought introspection.

What I mean by that is that designers debated empathy not as a vibe but as workflow, flagged accessibility as political, and dismantled the tired theatre of design awards.

Solutions to problems or just add-ons and nice-to-haves?

Every week, two kinds of advancements are achieved by the genius sector:

One would prodigiously impact humanity for the good. The other just appears to be a result of endless pursuit of “more”. None different last week.

Engineers gave mice infrared sight, grew teeth that talk to brains, and fired up nuclear hopes with meltdown-proof fuel.

Meanwhile, doctors are using soundwaves to treat chronic disease, IBM's planning error-resistant quantum leaps, and robots are now your pizza chefs.

Over in tech, OpenAI’s o3-pro flexed reasoning skills, Meta dropped $14B on Scale AI, and Snap’s prepping smartglasses that see the future (yes, literally!)

Stablecoins came to Shopify, 3D chats came to Google and Nintendo smashed sales records.

Now how many of these inventions or upgrades, do you think, would really be blessings for mankind?

Copycats vs copied cats

AI just hijacked the NBA Finals with a viral ad made in 48 hours, Barbie’s getting brains thanks to Mattel and OpenAI, and ByteDance’s Seedance is now the video model to beat.

AI had its fair share of feasts and famines last week. Here’s an intensely squeezed version of all the various happenings:

While Apple played it safe at WWDC, Meta’s building a superintelligence lab, Claude is syncing with Slack and Docs, and Hollywood’s suing Midjourney over AI-generated Shrek clones.

From China freezing AI during exams to the UK digitising planning documents with Gemini, AI’s colliding with law, labour, and legacy systems.

V-JEPA learns physics from video, browsers now behave like assistants, and OpenAI’s o3-Pro made top-tier reasoning cheap.

Whether it’s lawsuits, language, or lattes, AI is everywhere, in everything. Mankind’s companion for some and a job-hungry parasite for others.

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED TODAY’S NEWSLETTER

Until next time,

With love,
Charbel

From Velvet Onion & Friends,
The House of Better