In this short conversation, Jason M. Lemkin and a co‑speaker discuss a framework for using AI agents to model a team’s work as if it were a set of software interfaces. By prompting the agents to reason about how to scale a function 2×, 5×, or 10× without adding headcount, they can generate concrete plans for growth. The speakers warn that democratizing feature creation—allowing every product manager to spin up a feature in an hour via AI—can generate massive “slop”: thousands of half‑baked, low‑quality features that strain organizational processes. To counteract this, they stress the enduring importance of product taste and disciplined review rituals, such as a weekly deep‑dive where the product team evaluates and updates guidelines. The dialogue highlights both the promise of AI‑driven scaling and the operational safeguards needed to maintain quality.
Chapters
I think that it's not a great way to work, honestly. And it's, it doesn't work with agents because agents aren't that fuzzy. They want, they want hard and fast rules. So what we've done is we've actually took the same pattern and said, hey, go think through this team, this function, this job, map out the actual work as in almost like software interfaces. And then tell me about how would you scale that team for 2x, 5x, 10x growth, right? Or scale or volume, what they're doing without any— Without adding any, say, more people, but more agents, right? And just ask it to reason through that. That has actually worked really well.
I don't know that level of depth of the whole organization committing is that common today. I think it will be, right? It can also lead to slop because if every PM can now build features, even if they're not committing to production code, if they can build features and they can build a basic feature in an hour or 2, not one prompt, instead of maybe getting a feature out a quarter, you could build 100 features a week if you wanted. And it rises, even inadvertently, it rises the level of slop. How do organization process 100 features built by a non-developer? If you have 50 people on your PM team, that could be 2,000 features a month that are half-baked and work and are intellectually interesting.
So taste still really matters a lot. And I'll give you one thing we just— okay. Every, every Thursday, part Thursday, like I'll do this after, after we wrap up here. And then on Friday, I spend all day with our product team just reviewing work. And so one of the common patterns that we found is for folks that are new, they're like, okay, gosh, what kinds of feedback are you going to have? And so one of the things we used to write this down, but then sometimes you'll read it or, oh man, we didn't update this. The kind of the guidelines change or whatever.
