Week in Product #476 đ
Claude Code for everything, A guide to Evals, Designing with AI, OpenAI starts ads and Perplexity ditches them, Handling conflict as a PM, The omnipotence dilemma & more
Hi friends đ
Welcome to a new Week in Product!
đ° The week in figures
$717B: Amazon's annual revenue, officially overtaking Walmart ($713B) for the first time to become the world's largest company by sales
$100B+: OpenAI is closing $100B+ funding round at $850B+ valuation. Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia, and Microsoft will take part in the round
$1B: World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's spatial intelligence startup, raised $1B with $200M from Autodesk. Valued at ~$5B, focuses on 3D for AR/VR/robotics
$1B: DeepMind co-founder David Silver raised $1B in a seed round for Ineffable Intelligence, signaling that scaling LLMs is hitting diminishing returns and the next leap comes from agents that learn through reinforcement learning (RL), or trial-and-error self-play
$385M: Vestwell raised $385M in Series E, as the workplace savings platform doubles its valuation to $2B and has $200M in ARR
120M: Alipay reported that its âAI Payâ solution exceeded 120M transactions in a single week, marking a milestone for agentic commerce
$100M: Emergent, the Indian vibe-coding startup, hits $100M ARR in 8 months with 6M users creating AI apps without coding
+16%: Figma stock jumped 16% after Q4 earnings showed Figma Make drives profitable AI monetization without margin erosion
-10%: Block cut up to 10% of its workforce (~1,100 employees) in rolling layoffs while mandating daily AI tool usage for remaining staff
đ° Whatâs going on
Anthropic and Figma launched a new Claude Code to Figma MCP. Users can now send the rendered state from Claude Code straight into Figma as fully editable layers by installing the Figma MCP and typing âSend this to Figma.â Once in Figma, designers can use the canvas to explore visual options, compare them sideâbyâside, and refine details with direct manipulation. Once youâre happy with the design changes, these can then be pushed back into Claude Code for more functional manipulation. Here you can find some practical examples
Google launched Gemini 3.1 Pro with doubled reasoning performance and a 1M token context window. The new model scored 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, more than double Gemini 3 Proâs 31.1%. It beat Claude Opus 4.6 (68.8%) on reasoning benchmarks while keeping API pricing unchanged
Google added music-generation capabilities to the Gemini app using DeepMind's new Lyria 3 model
Google integrated âagentic shoppingâ into its AI-powered search, enabling users to delegate complex purchasing tasks
OpenAI began testing ads inside ChatGPT for U.S. free and Go tier users, with sponsored content appearing after the very first response rather than deeper into conversations
Meanwhile Perplexity ditched advertising to preserve user trust. Execs said ads would have users âdoubting everythingâ and undermine the companyâs accuracy mission
Reddit tests AI-powered shopping search with product carousels. Community recommendations now match with retailer links, as Reddit's AI search users grew from 1M to 15M in 2025
Apple launches integrated video podcasting to challenge YouTube and Spotify's dominance as video formats increasingly overtake audio in podcast consumption
Meta bans OpenClaw over security fears due to unpredictable autonomous behavior (after a failed bid to acquire it)
Meta patents AI to simulate dead users. Meta's new patent allows AI to mimic deceased users' social media activity, raising serious ethical questions about digital legacy and posthumous data use
Meta plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses this year; an internal memo said theyâd launch while critics are âfocused on other concernsâ
Metaâs Malibu 2 smartwatch will launch in 2026 with AI assistant and health tools
WordPress added an AI Assistant that edits layouts, styles, content, translations, and generates images via Google Gemini in the block editor
Amazon's redesigned Fire TV interface rolls out with improved content discovery, more app slots, & enhanced Alexa integration
Airbnb is testing a new AI-powered search feature, according to their latest shareholder update. They are âapplying AI to how people discover and plan trips on Airbnbâ and taking an iterative approach. Early tests focus on letting guests describe in natural language what they want and ask questions about both the listing and the surrounding location, instead of clicking through filters and photos. They expect this to evolve into a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that continues through the entire trip, not just the initial booking
đ Good reads
AI-native skills are your biggest career lever right now. AI is massively accelerating and will likely reshape or replace many current roles, but it also gives individual contributors unprecedented leverage to build, ship, and learn without waiting for permission. Elena Verna explains how OM who go âAI-nativeâ using tools like Claude, Cursor, and Lovable as the default for writing, thinking, designing, and even shipping code, can quickly outpace peers stuck in meetings and process. The next 12â24 months are a short window where curiosity, experimentation, and side projects with AI will matter more than titles or brand-name logos
Handling conflict as a PM. David Pereira argues handling conflicts well matters more than frameworks or AI tools for becoming a true product leader. David argues that PMs who âplay to progress, not to winâ by choosing words rationally, not emotionally, and redirecting tension toward shared goals, are the ones who unlock impact. Your ability to swallow ego, find common ground, and point the team toward the future instead of rehashing the past is what separates stuck PMs from those who grow into leadership
The omnipotence dilemma. When everything is technically possible, what should you work on? AI makes starting effortless but finishing harder. Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests to sandbox your curiosity with experiments that have clear scope and duration
The software shakeout: what is durable and what is not in the age of AI, by Dan Hockenmaier. Software companies arenât their code but the business wrapped around it. What will happen (as in each past wave) is existing forms remain and new, more valuable forms get built on top, but the threat isnât companies vibe-coding their own software
A guide to which AI to use in the agentic era. Ethan Mollick argues that âusing AIâ now means working with agents that can actually take actions. He breaks the landscape into :
models (GPT-5.2/5.3, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3),
apps (chatbots and specialized tools like Claude Code, NotebookLM),
and harnesses (how well those tools orchestrate multi-step work)
đ§ Good listen/watch
Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved, by Boris Cherny via Lennyâs Podcast. Boris Cherny now ships dozens of PRs daily without touching code, reporting a 200% productivity boost. âToday coding is practically solved for me, and I think itâll be the case for everyone.â He claims the software engineering title may start to âgo awayâ this year
đ§âđť Worth learning
Claude Code for everything. Hannah Stulberg explains how Claude.md files are lightweight onboarding docs that auto-load every session so Claude already knows who you are, how you work, and what each project is about. By mirroring your real work in a folder structure (company â area â project) and putting only the essential âalways-neededâ context at each level, you get sharper help without blowing the context window. Iâm a big fan of Hannahâs guides. Go follow her publication!
A new paper found that simply repeating your prompt to a non-reasoning LLM boosts accuracy up to 76% on some tasks, with zero extra cost or latency
How to design with AI as a PM. Aakash Gupta and Xinran Ma lay out how PMs can go from PRD to working prototypes using AI tools like Google Stitch, AI Studio, Lovable, v0, Magic Patterns, and Cursor. They break AI design into clear categories (prompting, ideation, prototyping, workflows, and âstaying consciousâ) and walk through concrete workflows (e.g., remixing existing UIs, going from a custom GPT spec to a Lovable prototype)
AI evals explained simply. Ankit and Aakash break down why evals are the core new AI skill for PMs, treating LLMs as probabilistic systems that need rubrics, metrics, and continuous monitoring. They walk through how to design scenario-based eval rubrics, pick the right mix of retrieval/generation/task metrics, and use LLMs as judges safely
đ§ Products to try
Anthropic launched Claude in PowerPoint. Free beta for Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise. PM use case: generate and edit presentations from templates or descriptions with native charts/diagrams while maintaining formatting
Qwen 3.5 is Alibaba's free, open-weights model that matches GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. You can run it locally on a Mac, and it handles text, images, and video across 201 languages with up to 1M tokens of context
Thatâs a wrap for this week.
Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what youâd like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you!
Have a great weekend.
