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My favorite weekly finds

🛠️ Tools

• Dust – AI-powered search and automation so you never waste time digging.

• Use Brainnote as an AI thought organizer to summarize your ideas in seconds

• Together AI – AI that runs 4x faster and 11x cheaper—because speed (and savings) matter.

• Mercor – One interview, thousands of job apps sent—welcome to effortless job hunting.

• Upsolve – Custom dashboards that make your product feel like magic.

• Deckd – Instantly turn Figma slides into polished presentations.

• Landing – Launch stunning landing pages in minutes, no tech skills needed.

• Riley – Smart parenting advice and baby tracking, built by PMs who get it.

📰 Intelligent Insights

• Figure – Watch two robots team up to put away groceries using “Helix AI,” a single neural network for all tasks. ​

• Spotify x ElevenLabs – AI-narrated audiobooks are in—Spotify now accepts them

• Sakana AI – Their “AI CUDA Engineer” makes GPU code run 10-100x faster—because speed is everything.​

• A new DeepSeek paper– A new attention mechanism speeds up long-text processing (64K context) by 11.6x by optimizing GPU efficiency.

• EU AI Act – Big Tech just got a copyright loophole—AI training without permission or payment, thanks to a “text and data mining” exemption.​

• Torque Clustering – This AI finds hidden patterns in complex data—no human input needed.​

👀 ICYMI

• Help Your Company Speak ‘Strategy’ (learn more)

• What Does “Fast” Really Mean? Startup Speed Explained (Learn more)

• AI Won’t Take Your Job—But It Will Change It Forever (learn more)

Deep Dive: Stop Building 'Faster Horses'

Why should I care?

I didn’t start in product management.

When I say you must talk to customers, someone always brings up that “faster horses” quote, from Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.” But did Ford really say it?

My digging shows no proof; the quote first popped up in 2001.

Back in 1999, a cruise ship designer used it in Tech Industry Quarterly to warn that asking customers directly might lead them to simple answers.

He argued that if Ford had polled people, most would’ve just said “faster horses.”

Later, the quote resurfaced in a letter to TechCrunch, and in 2006, Ford’s great-grandson even vouched for it.

So, who’s right? I’ll leave that up to you.

The key point?

Whether or not Ford said it, using the quote to dismiss customer input is misleading.

Listening means more than just hearing—it’s about truly understanding and guiding your customers.

As PMs, you need to lead the conversation and harness solid customer insights to drive innovation.

Ready to dive deeper? Keep reading.

Hearing vs. Listening

Here’s the deal - When a customer says “Make it faster” or “Simpler,” it’s easy to just take it at face value.

But if you do, you risk building “faster horses”—giving them what they say, not what they truly need.

We often start planning our reply before they’re done talking.

We jump to agree or disagree, which stops us from really understanding their view. To listen well, leave your assumptions behind and step into their shoes. That’s where real customer insights lie.

Listening isn’t just about words—it’s about understanding their perspective. Even if you disagree, ask questions until you fully get why they feel that way. Their feelings reflect their reality, and accepting that truth is the key to capturing the insights that drive great products.

Listening vs. Understanding

When you’re truly listening, customers often leap to solutions—saying things like “Make it faster” or “I need a new tool.” It’s natural; we all do it. Even I sometimes focus on fixes instead of the real problem.

Don’t blame them—they’re not product pros.

They don’t know they should talk about true problems and needs. That’s on us.

Your job is to shift the chat from easy answers to the root causes. Ask, “Why will a faster feature help?” or “What issues come from a slow feature?”

Dig in for those actionable insights.

Customers may not always spell out their challenges. Use your expertise to steer the talk so you can build solutions that fix the real issue—not just the quick fix next, invite your peers into the conversation. If you're boosting customer adoption while someone else is focused on cutting churn, show how these efforts can work together.

Ask pointed questions like, “What result are we aiming for?” instead of a vague “Why?”