Roberto Salem

@aakashgupta PRDs and prototypes were never sequential. Always been iterative and interdependent. AI made prototypes more powerful. Sure. But for real products, text matters more now: the PRD is a key part of the build context. Bad spec, bad build.

Everyone's debating whether PRDs should die. Wrong question. The spec moved from step 2 to step 6. Old flow: Idea → PRD → Design → Eng → QA → Ship. 8-12 weeks. The PRD was a permission document. "Please approve before we commit resources." New flow: Idea → 5 prototypes → Evaluate → Kill 4 → Spec the survivor → Ship. 1-2 weeks. The PRD is now a decision record. "We built 5 versions. Here's which one and why." At Anthropic: no PRDs. At OpenAI: specs still critical because 800M MAU need behavior contracts with 15-25 labeled examples. At enterprises with 5,000 people: the document is the alignment mechanism across 3 time zones. Company stage determines where the spec sits. The universal shift is that the spec comes after you've touched working software. A prototype shows what. The spec explains why, how you'll measure, and when you'll pull the plug. Those are the things that separate a PM from a vibe coder.

Missing primitive in @intercom : “Summarize last 7 days of feedback about feature X → send to Slack” Tried MCP + agent (no filtering)
Tried native Intercom (no workflow) @intercom what’s the intended way to do this today? Feels like a pretty fundamental feedback loop.🤔

@alexkehr @drgurner @linear

@drgurner It was hybrid with offices though - all my friends who worked there in Boulder all went in all the time There aren’t many good examples - I actually can’t think of a single fast growing/generational company that’s remote or started remote

it’s fascinating how deeply people thought remote work was the future now any company still leaning into it doesn’t get taken seriously and any employee who insists on working remote is considered a red flag

@eglyman @emilymason00 @business @EdLudlow @marioyac75 time to save some money

If you're interested, click here so you're first on our list to support: ramp.com/europe-waitlist Grateful to @emilymason00 and the @business team for their detailed coverage: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…. Looking forward to joining @EdLudlow at 11:20a ET to discuss more live!

If you’re running a business in Europe or the UK, we bring good news from across the Atlantic. @tryramp launches locally this summer. We’re setting up shop and the waitlist is open. The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year. Europe’s most ambitious companies deserve the same.

can’t wait till the agent demands to speak to my agent😅

2020: “Hi, thank you for calling XYZ.
For billing press 1, for support…” User: “Speak to an agent” “Okay, I’ll connect you with an agent.” 2026: 
“Hi, thank you for calling XYZ.” User: “Speak to an agent” Agent: …😭

Update: I found a workaround that works great across apps and devices: @usemonologue . Only a matter of time before it gets built natively and on device, but I’ll take it for now. Thanks @rachidakiki for the reco!

Push-to-talk with AI is incredibly underrated. Thinking out loud + instant transcription can massively increase output during the day. ChatGPT does this well. Claude only lets you use voice to start a new thread, not inside one. Breaks the flow. Someone tag a @claudeai PM.

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

@thenanyu Agreed. PRDs and prototyping go hand in hand. Prototyping accelerates the feedback loop that pressure-tests the thesis of the PRD. No thesis → no product. Just a demo.

PRDs are more alive than ever. When the cost of implementation goes down, describing what to implement and why is where all the leverage goes.

@andrewchen @RampLabs where you at ?

Who’s working on this idea: Openclaw for personal finance - integrates w all your banks/cards/etc - understands tax returns and filings - monitors portfolio and competitors - digests proprietary data sources (credit card panels, app rankings, and etc) - reads company news and X Etc etc

@TheSoloCTO @aakashgupta 💯

I am the PM who went down the abstraction ladder and built a 240 file production app with AI. Full stack+ payments+ auth + 25 screens. 6 weeks, solo. Zero engineering team. Also got 0 users. Because I skipped the part you are calling "the easy part." When building costs 6 weeks instead of 6 months, the cost of building the wrong thing does not go down. It goes up. You just burn through bad ideas faster. The PMs who prototype on Monday and ship on Wednesday still need to know what is worth prototyping on Monday. That judgment is not a strategy deck. It is knowing which of your 10 ideas to kill before you waste a sprint on them. The build cycle collapsing makes product judgment more valuable, not less. The bottleneck just moved.

I’d argue almost the opposite. The most valuable PMs in 2026 are moving down the abstraction ladder. Building prototypes. Shipping working code. Testing with real users before writing a single PRD. Google, Stripe, and Netflix added vibe coding rounds to PM interviews. They’re testing whether you can turn a product idea into a working prototype in 15 minutes. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 71% of leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with strong AI building skills than a senior PM without them. The premium is on execution speed. “Define goals, constraints, and long-term strategy” describes every mediocre VP of Product who’s ever existed. That was always the easy part. The hard part was building, which is why PMs who couldn’t build were dependent on engineering capacity. Now that AI collapses the build cycle, the winning move is to close the gap between “what to build” and “building it.” The PMs gaining the most leverage right now prototype on Monday, test on Tuesday, and ship on Wednesday. They skip the 30-page strategy doc entirely. Reforge calls it “the rise of the builder PM.” 54% of engineering leaders expect to reduce junior engineer hiring because PMs and designers can now build directly. The walls between PM, design, and engineering are collapsing into one person. “Goal Architect” sounds like a promotion. In practice, it’s a layoff memo. The PMs who survive the next two years will be the ones who can show a working prototype, not a strategy deck.

@andrewchen But isn’t that what great PMs already do and what separates them from the average? I like “Goal Architect,” but the real skill is defining the smallest coherent unit of the problem. And getting the constraints right. That’s the hardest part.

Today the job of the PM is the define the product, how it works, and how it’ll get built But we won’t need that soon The future job will be simple to define the goals, the constraints, and long term strategy - and letting the AI figure the rest out Goal Architect, not product manager

@siavashg @stillaai Fair point. Once a title exists, it should stay stable. The real problem is intuitive retrieval later. What if threads start as “New chat” then generate + lock semantic title only on defocus (thread switch / session end) instead of on message #1?🤔 More context, same stability.

@robertosalem_ @stillaai You’re right and it’s a recognizable problem. But a somewhat familiar pattern from file systems. Wonder if getting it wrong the other way around is a much worse problem though 🤔

Does anyone else constantly rename ChatGPT / Claude threads? They auto-title from your first message, usually a weak signal of actual intent. 20 messages later, the model understands the convo better than the UI does. My bet? @siavashg @stillaai ships dynamic retitling first. ⏱️

the best growth hack in 2026 will be to build something so good that AI agents recommend it to users Not word of mouth… word of agent

From now on, hype-centric splashy launches will likely be strongly uncorrelated with success. If by the time you launch you don’t have escape velocity, you will likely get Sybil attacked¹. Agents will spin up 10 competing products with your same interface. Start with an audience of 1 and get confirmation that it works. Then expand to a circle of friends or design partners. By the time you go public, your moat needs to be deeper than it’s ever been. ¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_att…

@alexkehr Yes 💯

“Educational scrolling” is still scrolling. If the algorithm sets your learning agenda, you’re not really in control.

@mattshumer_ As cognition becomes abundant, our need for wisdom is greater than ever. In other words, in a world where thinking is cheap, wisdom becomes priceless.

Every time someone asks me what's going on with AI, I give them the safe answer. Because the real one sounds insane. I'm done holding back. I wrote what I wish I could sit down and tell everyone I care about. Send it to someone who needs to read it. x.com/mattshumer_/st…