2 posts tagged with “product management”

10 min read
Closeup of a man with glasses, with code being reflected in the glasses

From Craft to Curation: Design Leadership in the Age of AI

In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”

A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”

Still from a YouTube video that shows a quote from Leo Paz

While vibe coding—the new term coined by Andrej Karpathy about coding by directing AI—is about leveraging AI for programming, it’s a window into what will happen to the software development lifecycle as a whole and how all the disciplines, including product management and design will be affected.

12 min read
A cut-up Sonos speaker against a backdrop of cassette tapes

When the Music Stopped: Inside the Sonos App Disaster

The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.

What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.

A collage of torn newspaper-style headlines from Bloomberg, Wired, and The Verge, all criticizing the new Sonos app. Bloomberg’s headline states, “The Volume of Sonos Complaints Is Deafening,” mentioning customer frustration and stock decline. Wired’s headline reads, “Many People Do Not Like the New Sonos App.” The Verge’s article, titled “The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy,” highlights missing features despite increased speed and customization.

As a designer and longtime Sonos customer who was also affected by the terrible new app, a little piece of me died inside each time I read the word “redesign.” It was hard not to take it personally, knowing that my profession could have anything to do with how things turned out. Was it really Design’s fault?