Product is the new bottleneck?

According to Andrew Ng, Product Management is the new bottleneck. Here’s how to avoid becoming the slowest link.

Hey Product Builders,

In his Y Combinator speech last week, Andrew Ng dropped a new dynamic-shift on us: product & design are the new bottleneck. Engineers have gotten so fast that the Product team is now the ones holding things up. 

“The other interesting dynamic I'm seeing is that the product management work: getting user feedback, deciding what features to build - that is increasingly the bottleneck

…

Over the last year a lot more of my teams have started to complain that their bottlenecks on product engineering and design because the engineers have gotten so much faster.”

And get this: his teams are now proposing 1 PM for 0.5 developers, compared to the typical 4-7 developers for 1 PM. And that’s because AI coding tools have increased the speed of development to the point where the bottleneck is now deciding what to build and why.

What Product Builders need to know:

So what does this mean for Product Builders? Andrew Ng suggests we need to get feedback faster, get more comfortable with less accurate data, and make decisions quicker.

I was inspired by Andrew’s scale of speed-of-feedback vs. level of accuracy.

The bullets he provided on where to get feedback are a good overview, but I wanted to elaborate further on how Product Builders can make decisions quickly and complete tighter loops with customers.

And I’ll share a few tips on how I leverage AI along the way.

1. Go Where Your Customers Are, Beyond the Coffee Shop

Sure, sitting in a coffee shop and chatting with strangers to get feedback on your products is a start, but let’s get real:

1. If you’re like me, you hate working in coffee shops. Coffee shops are for relaxing. 🙋Hands up if you’re with me.

2. The chances that your ideal customer is in the coffee shop? Slim to none.

Want to up your game? Go to where your customers really hang out.

When I worked with a client in the airline industry, this meant sitting in their airport lounge and asking customers to provide feedback our product. I’d cold approach customers on their way out of the bathroom and ask them for their time to provide some feedback. I would even stand by the customer service desk and ask customers waiting in line if they would do a quick gut check on a mobile feature we were working on.

If you’re building a B2B product, head to the office building lobby of your ideal customer, or see if you can source some customers to talk to through your corporate friends.

Sure, it’s awkward, and you’ll get rejected… a lot. But hey, that’s the price of real feedback. 

And if you can’t physically find your customer…

2) Source feedback from Reddit posts, forums, and Facebook groups

Reddit, Facebook groups, and industry-specific forums are goldmines for unsolicited feedback. And guess what? You don’t even have to conduct interviews to find pain points. 

It’s all right there, waiting for you in the form of a question, a complaint post, or a “Has anyone ever…?”. Save all these threads in a “product scrapbook,” like Tal Raviv suggests, and revisit it when you’re ready for new ideas.

Want to take it to the next level? Slide into vocal customer’s DMs. Invite them to do a real feedback session.

3) Build bridges with internal teams

If you’re working on a B2B product, your account and customer success teams are your not-so-secret weapon. They know your customers’ pain points better than anyone. If you work in B2C product, reach out to customer support or read through support tickets.

In my current PM role, which is in the B2B space, I’ve been finding a lot of success interviewing sales and account team members. After the interview, I’ll ask if they know any clients that would be interested in providing their feedback. 

Account managers have a strong sense for their clients needs, so we can cover 80% of the unknowns through their insights, and then use client meetings to show concepts and refine the experience further.

4) Stop Overthinking It: 5-6 Customers is All You Need

Here’s the reality: if you’re interviewing 20 users in one round, you’re doing it wrong. Nielsen Norman says you only need 5-6 users to get meaningful insights. Stats nerds will often challenge you by saying interviewing 5-6 people is not statistically significant.

Need I remind you: customer research is not statistics, and it is not an exact science.

Here’s a great rule of thumb: once you start hearing the same thing from multiple people, it’s time to stop. 

Your product’s feedback loop should be quick and iterative. This is not an A/B test, this is a gut check.

Instead of spending months doing user research, ship your product in smaller, incremental updates and meet with a couple of customers every week.

5. Add a Feedback Button or Form in your Product

Why aren’t more products using in-app feedback buttons or forms? It’s a missed opportunity. I’ve used Usabilla in the past, and let me tell you: it’s a game-changer. 

When I launched Beta experience for a major website redesign, we installed a survey pop-up survey to ask users specific questions about their experience. Our team then used AI to pull out insights on the most common themes, but we also read every single line of feedback. This led to a healthy backlog generated within hours, not months.

If you’re not using a feedback button in your product, you’re making it hard for your customers to quickly submit bug feedback and product ideas.

Make it easy for them, and in return it’ll be easier for you to decide what to build next.

6. Your Team Is Full of Feedback Gold

Your whole team is a goldmine of product ideas, but pay particular attention to the feedback from your QE (Quality Engineering) team. They test your product every day, so their insights are gold. They’ll catch things that you or the users may miss. Don’t ignore them.

If you can, try to dog-food your product internally (that means literally eating your own dog food, as in using your own product).

In my role, this means checking in with our internal marketing teams on their experience using the product. 

7. Leverage AI to Deep Research your competitors

Staying ahead of the curve requires constant monitoring of the competition. But let’s face it, competitor research can be time-consuming and often inaccessible if you’re in the B2B space.

Oftentimes you may not be able to access your competitor’s product. In this case, look for publicly available insights: customer reviews, support articles, and YouTube tutorials from customers. User-generated content is full of unfiltered opinions and can inspire new features in your product.

Lastly, you can set up a deep research query to run in ChatGPT or Gemini to research your competitors, so you don’t have to spend hours manually researching.

Interested in seeing what deep research prompt I use for competitor research?

⬇️ Drop a comment below and I’ll send you the link.

8. Set Up Automations for Competitor Research Through Tools Like Relay.app or Zapier

Now, let’s talk about automation. If you’re serious about staying ahead, you need to automate some of this research. With tools like Relay.app, you can set up alerts whenever your product is mentioned across platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, or Twitter. I’m still in the process of experimenting with automations, but watch this space because this will be a game-changer for Product Builders to move at the speed of real-time customer feedback.

Right now, I’m experimenting with modifying this Relay template to notify me whenever my product is mentioned on Reddit and send me an email with the comment.

9. Simplify Your PRD

The process of writing long, detailed product requirements documents, gathering input, and getting approvals can stall your progress.

My team has started experimenting with 1-pagers: short 1-page documents designed to give the Engineering and Design team enough information to start exploration, while the details and approvals are sorted out.

💡Want to try this out with your team? You can download my free 1-pager template here.

Final thoughts:

Product may be the new bottleneck, but with these tactics, you can streamline how quickly you get feedback to make product decisions.

💬 What tactics do you follow to remove bottlenecks on your team?