What It Means to Tell a Story
Making things is cheap now; judgment is not — so the artifact you owe your team is a story, not a spec.
Class recording
The lecture recording posts here after the class is taught.
Class summary
The class opens with the room writing it: "What did we learn from the pitch competition?" goes up on every student’s laptop and the answers land on the screen live, one card each. Then a show of hands for who read the article, and the one-line version for everyone who did not — making software got cheap, deciding what to make did not, and the thing that carries the deciding is a story. From there, the interview question Reid Hoffman asked Josh Elman in 2007: every other role in a company produces an artifact — engineering produces code, business development signed contracts, design the visual look, the CEO the org chart and the funding — so what does a product manager produce? The slide ends on a question mark and the room answers out loud.
Then what AI actually changed, drawn as two loops side by side and beaten out one station at a time: the old one — idea, spec, costing, scoping, everything else, build — revealed and then crossed out station by station, and the new one beside it arriving in a crescendo, build it, play with it, design it, ship and learn, each bigger than the last. The cost of making collapsed; the cost of judgment did not move at all. What did not change is the vision, and a vision is three answers rather than a mission statement: purpose, core actions, and cycle, worked through LinkedIn, whose core action fired once or twice a year — which is exactly why the company invested in accurate profiles instead of prodding people to post daily. The class then runs the framework on the thing the winning team is actually building — purpose: save money, energy and time putting in orders; core action: he fills out a purchase order, which the slide opens up to show the two shapes that could take, an agent he talks to or a form he works in; cycle: every time a new client comes in — and lands on the one sentence that has to come out of all of it. It closes by setting up the environment together on the instructor’s screen: Antigravity as the foundation, Claude on top of it, Supabase and Netlify above that.