This post is a collaboration with Matthew Mamet. Matthew and I worked together for many years at TripAdvisor. More recently, we’ve both been knee-deep helping clients build in a more AI-native way. This essay grew out of what we’ve seen—and one experience Matthew had while helping a large nonprofit rethink its membership and fundraising platform.
As teams climb the AI learning curve, they’re accelerating, but new failure modes are also emerging. AI lets anyone on a product team build almost anything. That doesn’t make the team obsolete. It makes the team more important.
Matthew learned this the hard way — in a room with fifteen people.
He was helping a large nonprofit replace its membership and fundraising platform. In two days, with help from AI, he had produced a North Star document and a rough wireframe. Eighteen months earlier, the same work would have taken a designer and at least a week.
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