Toby Rogers

Whoever says, ‘as an engineer I can talk to customers and define product strategy myself, so we don’t need product managers’ just became the product manager

If you can’t write a user story and it’s acceptance criteria on a single large post it note, then it’s too big.

Social media is why the internet sucks now, but not for the reasons you're thinking. It sucks now because they convinced you to give up having your own website in favor of a centralized platform they control. This allowed them to normalize shit like identity verification.

Me talking about prototyping as an alternative to writing product requirements documents in front of an attentive audience of product people (and some pizzas) at ProductTank Newcastle.

had an excellent time talking at producttank newcastle again last night.

this is one of the main things that makes bluesky awesome

watching terminator 2 again. feels a lot more real now than it did thirty-odd years ago.

Screenshot of a tweet from Google’s Head of Product, Madhu Guru talking about how they’re moving from a writing-first culture to a building-first culture with vibe coding tools.

literally just done a talk on this exact topic

iOS could’ve been one of the all-time great gaming platforms, but Apple let the experience die in favour of advertising.

When 90% of games mean wading through advert after advert before you even get to play, what’s the point in persevering to try and find something decent?

For most tech jobs, thinking is the bottleneck—not cranking widgets.

That’s not a bad thing, though.

If we’re not making room to think, we risk creating a lot of stuff that has little or no value.

We should be using AI to give us that room back, not do the thinking for us.

Eight months in, Swedish unicorn Lovable crosses the $100M ARR milestone | TechCrunch Less than a week after becoming Europe’s latest unicorn, Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable has now crossed the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark.

The speed of Lovable’s growth has been incredible.

As a PM whose coding skills amount to HTML, CSS and some VBA from back in the day, I’ve been blown away with how easily I can turn ideas into something tangible.

Showing is better than telling, and Lovable has skyrocketed my ability to do that.

Yeah, Bear is a very nice notes app.

Meme showing a note-taking journey that goes from calm Apple Notes to frantic and freaked out Anki, Readwise, Notion, Roam, Obsidian etc to zen Apple Notes.

The Apple Notes meme is a pretty good representation of my note-taking journey.

I don’t need a Zettelkasten or PARA setup, I just need to “do the thing” instead of procrastinating.

With tools like Evernote, Roam and Obsidian I spent more time messing around with my notes than using them.

Tough question. I’d go with 1967:

- Are You Experienced?
- Disraeli Gears
- Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Forever Changes
- The Velvet Underground & Nico
- Moby Grape
- The Who Sell Out
- The Grateful Dead
- Small Faces
- Buffalo Springfield Again

Just like GarageBand turned everyone into music producers, vibe coding tools are turning everyone into developers.

That doesn’t mean what they’re developing is any good, though.

When the world is flooded with half-baked ideas, it’s creativity, taste and experience that will make you stand out.

Product managers need to be able to sell.

It’s all very well focusing on customer impact and achieving outcomes, but building software is a commercial endeavor.

If you can’t sell what you’re shipping to someone, how can you expect your sales team to be able to?

Once we all start abdicating our thinking to machines we’re screwed.

AI will fundamentally transform how we work, and how we measure our impact, but it can’t be at the expense of our own critical thinking.

AI isn’t killing knowledge work—it’s making it more important.

Instructure and OpenAI Announce Global Partnership to Embed AI Learning Experiences within Canvas /PRNewswire/ -- Instructure, the world's leading edtech ecosystem and maker of Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence...

Interesting to see how hard AI companies are starting to push into education to try and counter the “AI is evil and rotting our brains” narrative.

Expect to see a lot more partnerships like the one OpenAI just announced with Canvas.

I Deleted My Second Brain Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

I followed @joanwestenberg.com’s lead and deleted my second brain this week—my reflect notes account, all my apple notes, all my reminders, my readwise account.

starting again with a blank slate has been hugely liberating and has really got me thinking about what I’m capturing “knowledge” for.

me too! dia goes back to a tabs in the header nav rather than the sidebar which is a bit disappointing. switching between profiles isn’t as nice either

Just because it's big doesn't make it strategic.

The game developers striving to offer authenticity and inclusion in the face of AI At the Develop conference in Brighton this week, talk turns from cancelled deals and job cuts to replicating real human experiences and telling stories about diverse characters

this is about video games specifically, but it's true of all product development in the age of ai.

when you can build anything and everything, it's authenticity, integrity, and human-ness that will set you apart from the swathes of vibe-coded apps flooding whatever market you're in.

yeah, sounds like it. expect it'll hang around for a while (looks like they're still rolling out updates), but the whole company is pivoting to ai-powered browsing with dia on desktop and arc search on mobile.

i *think* it only uses the ai if you choose to use the chat function. not sure, though, so i'm not using it for anything i definitely don't want to share with big tech

YouTube video by Every Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia.

yeah, they've just launched arc's replacement (in closed beta for existing arc users). there's a good interview with the founders about the reasoning on dan shipper's ai & i podcast. the deal is you can use ai to interact with your browser tabs, if you want to.

Meet Dia – the AI Browser Where You Can Chat with Your Tabs Dia is the AI browser from The Browser Company. Chat with your tabs, write in your own voice, learn and plan faster, shop, and more — all with privacy that you control.

i was gutted when the browser company announced they were killing off arc, but now that i've played with dia for a few days i can absolutely see why.

ai is going to completely reimagine how we interact with computers and the internet, and dia is already showing what's possible.

as a product manager, you need to try and embrace uncertainty—not eliminate it

simplicity is a competitive edge

let's have a pre-meeting to talk about the pre-meeting for the actual meeting

not all meetings are bad, but bad meetings are the biggest killers of productivity and progress—avoid them at all costs

there’s a big difference between making a decision and acting on it