Welcome to the future...
“You asked the impossible of a machine and the machine complied.” - Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
TL;DR
Future of Product is a newsletter for product makers who want to stay ahead in the AI game.
I, Max Matson, head of product marketing at PlayerZero, will be providing my personal opinion on AI tools, interviewing product makers, and giving my take each week on the industry and its direction.
Future of Product will not provide a scientific overview of how AI technologies work, but instead a high-level understanding of their value to non-programmers.
My motivation for writing this newsletter is to understand the future of AI and share my journey with others. I also want to record the progression of the technology and give an objective view of the usefulness of popular tools.
Next week’s guest is Jon Noronha, Co-Founder at Gamma - an exciting AI startup with an even more exciting promise: “Write like a doc, Present like a deck”
Welcome to the future...
Welcome to Future of Product - the newsletter for product makers who see the coming wave of AI and want to hop on their surfboards and ride it for all it’s worth. My name is Max, and I’ll be your primary guide through this brave new world of thinking machines. Together, we’ll sift out the real game-changers from the bullshit artists, decouple the marketing from the meaning, and explore the dynamic AI landscape up-close and personal, with a heavy focus on practical tools that you can start utilizing on the very same day.
In each newsletter, I’ll be providing my honest opinion on the most exciting and talked about AI tools, interviewing the people behind the products, giving my take on where the industry stands and the direction it’s moving in, and indulging in a little bit of straight up sci-fi nerd wish fulfillment around the edges to keep my ADHD-addled brain engaged.
But first, a few house-keeping items:
Who am I?
My name is Max Matson and I’m the head of product marketing at an AI company called PlayerZero (ps, work dad, if you’re reading this, I swear this was a totally great, not-at-all regrettable idea! 😉). I also have a background in entrepreneurship, art, editorial writing, and growth. But, nowadays I spend most of my time thinking about the future of AI products, how I can better use them in my job and life, and the implications that increasingly advanced AI will have on society as a whole. In case it wasn’t already clear, I’m also a life-long sci-fi fan (fav writers: Vonnegut, Ellison, Asimov, in that order... fight me).
What won’t this be?
Future of Product is NOT a scientific overview of how these technologies work. As implied previously, I’m not a programmer, and I’ll never pretend to be. I work with enough incredibly bright AI and ML developers to know that the vast majority of people whose lives will be shaped by these tools could not give less of a crap about the insanely complex nuts and bolts behind the technology. Therefore, when we do discuss the technical wizardry that makes them possible, it’ll be high-level and within the context of understanding their evolution, the differences between seemingly identical products, and generally garnering a better understanding of the value they can provide to non-programmers like myself.
Why am I doing this?
I found myself existentially overwhelmed as a writer and SEO by the introduction of Chat GPT - it made me feel slightly inferior, unnecessary, and unimportant. And it made me sad that something I feel such passion for could be done by an unthinking, unfeeling string of 1s and 0s. But months into using the technology in my work, I’ve actually found it to be incredibly liberating. In fact, it’s helped me automate much of the boring, tedious work that previously monopolized a large portion of my time, allowing me the bandwidth to focus on tasks that only a human can manage (for now at least). Quick side note - everything written in this newsletter and all newsletters going forward was actually typed by my own human fingers unless otherwise stated.
I chose to focus this newsletter on product makers because, during my time at PlayerZero, I've had the opportunity to meet and interview countless product managers, product-centric founders, and product builders. One recurring theme among their reactions to recent advancements in AI has been the pressing question, "How will this impact my work?" Like me, I found that they were aware of the opportunity that AI tools presented for their workflows, but didn’t know where to start. Additionally, as with any burgeoning new technology, it’s nearly impossible to know what is and isn’t signal in all the noise of today’s clickbait headlines about AI. I wanted to find out for myself what the future of product is truly going to be, and I figured I’d share my journey with all of you as I’ve failed to find many other people writing about AI from the balanced perspective that I’m pursuing.
I want to be clear about one other thing going into this - I don’t know what’s going to happen. To be honest with you, I’m exhilarated by the progress that AI has made in so little time, but I’m equally terrified of it. Like everyone else at this point, I can see that this technology is going to radically alter the world in ways both good and potentially very bad. But the genie’s out of the bottle... great changes have been set in motion that currently, my brain can’t even really comprehend. My goal with this newsletter is to change that.
Adoption of AI tools is the only way forward for those who wish to do more with less, build better products and ultimately have a shot at changing the world. I think Dr. Li Jiang of the Stanford AIRE program said it quite eloquently in his video “Survival Strategies in the Era of AI Taught by Stanford” (embedded below & seriously worth a watch):
“The human part is really the innovation part from 0 to 1. That’s where AI cannot do a good job. We need to focus on that.”
In order to find the line between person and machine, we need to embrace the promise of automation to cut out all the crap that would otherwise dilute the precious time we could be spending on innovation. As it stands, machines still aren’t capable of creating unicorns... more and more so however, they’ll be crucial to enabling humans to do so.
The final reason I’m writing this newsletter, is to record the progression of this technology, to catalogue it from its nascent stages all the way to wherever it ultimately takes us. Oh, and one other note before I let you get on with the rest of your life - I’m doing this with my employer’s blessing, but, to be clear, any of the products I’ll be reviewing purely reflect my own perspective.
Next week, I’ll be sitting down with Jon Noronha, Co-Founder of the exciting AI-driven slide deck generation startup Gamma, giving my honest take on their product & demoing their new GPT-enabled feature, and discussing Elon Musk’s proposed AI moratorium. Thanks for joining, and I can’t wait to see you next week!