Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 29/09/2026I have held the chief product officer title and I think the role is already dead. The job was running a pyramid that translated between the business and a big engineering team. Agents shrink the team, so the pyramid goes too. What stays is an adult in the room for the big moments. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 28/09/2026I grew the Boston Lean Startup Circle from 30 members to 3,000 in 2010. This August the fractional meetup I organize cancelled its in-person session because three people confirmed. And I just admitted to the group that I rarely go to events. The organizer has to show up first. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 25/09/2026I finally counted where TripAdvisor's product org went. 170 people, 148 companies, 21 chief product officers. For junior PMs, the best predictor was being there when two big bets went opposite ways. Tenure didn't matter. buff.ly/XyP5r9nmatthewmamet.comTripAdvisor Wasn't a Mafia. It Was a Coaching Tree.170 TripAdvisor product alumni, 148 companies, and a shape that looks nothing like the PayPal Mafia. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Elena Verna wrote that it is a great time to be freemium. At EditMe, our free month told us almost nothing on its own. The signal that mattered was whether an account had a second person editing by day thirty. Single-editor accounts churned however generous the trial was. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 22/09/2026My honest split on the people talking about AI: 80 percent have read about it, 15 percent have opened a chat window and uploaded a document, 5 percent are building. I spent years in the first group. It changed at EnergySage, when I pushed a team to build automated solar quoting. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Alibaba ran 200M+ AI-native orders through Qwen in a single Spring Festival. Walmart's checkout inside ChatGPT converted 3x worse than Walmart's own site. Same technology. The difference is whether the agent is already standing inside the trust the buyer built somewhere else. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Stripe's internal AI agent is used weekly by 10,000+ employees. Their finding: the hard part was governance, not model choice. I run the same architecture at a scale of one, and I had to build the governance layer from nothing. Neither of us tested it inside a company that's a mess. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 15/09/2026John Cutler: the consensus you see in a company is mostly people adapting to what the powerful already believe. I've started at nine or ten companies, and the window where you can still tell the difference is about two weeks wide. Then everyone files you and the signal goes. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 14/09/2026I asked a guy who bootstrapped an agency to $15M and sold it whether I'd already missed the AI window. He said no. Then he talked me off my own plan: you can build a product agency with no developers, and you get smoked the moment the work turns technically serious. 110
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 11/09/2026I once walked into the CEO's office to recommend we shut down the product I'd spent two years building. It won an award. It was also the wrong thing to keep funding. The hardest product calls aren't about the product. They're about separating its quality from your pride in having built it. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 10/09/2026A founder I worked with had one constraint that reorganized her whole growth plan: it had to run inside a nine-to-three workday, kids in school. We cut everything that scaled with her hours and kept only what compounded without her. The time limit made the strategy better. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 09/09/2026John Cutler named the recontextualization tax: every handoff between a person, a tool, or a model costs work to rebuild lost context. I run my practice on AI agents and pay it daily. The fix wasn't a smarter model. It was making the chat disposable and the file the memory. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 08/09/2026A liquidity problem and a demand problem look identical on the dashboard: too few transactions. Add traffic and watch. If conversions stay flat, it was never demand. How I diagnose it: matthewmamet.com/blog/how-i-u... 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 07/09/2026A founder was interviewing me for a fractional role and I talked myself out of it. He asked where the category goes once AI eats the workflow. I said I don't fully know. I'm good at scaling chaos, not seeing around corners. Better to name that than discover it in month three. 001
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 04/09/2026In 2010 I hand-wrote SQL against my own production database at 2am to find out if my bootstrapped wiki was real. The number that predicted survival was 19 customers who would recommend it against 2 who would not. Rarely the one already on the dashboard. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Etsy cut 12% and went out of its way to say it wasn't about AI. I believe them, and that's the tell. When layoffs "aren't about AI," the story underneath is usually slowing demand in the core. A marketplace is only as big as the smaller side wants it to be. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 31/08/2026CPO tenure averages 2.6 years, shorter than CEO or CTO. It isn't that the people are bad. The job is three roles stacked under one title, and it gets swapped for a different one every time the company doubles. You're hired for today and judged eighteen months later. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 28/08/2026My whole operation runs on one Claude Max plan: 10 agents, 34 skills, 17 scheduled jobs. I touch the paid API only on demand and treat every other AI tool as a monthly experiment I expect to cancel. matthewmamet.com/blog/ai-tool... 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 27/08/2026I've published 40+ posts this year. Not one made a client call me up to work together, and I stopped expecting it to. The writing isn't lead gen. It's a filter. The people who'd think I'm doing it all wrong pre-reject themselves before anyone gets on a call. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 25/08/2026Apple cut its EU App Store take from 30% to as low as 5%, and developers think they won. But in a marketplace the take rate was never what held anyone in place. Apple kept discovery, the install button, the default. It kept the distribution. That was always the real asset. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 24/08/2026I once designed a quarterly operating review where teams got seven minutes to present and thirteen to be argued with. The walkthrough is the part everyone rehearses, so nothing in it changes what they do next quarter. matthewmamet.com/blog/product... 110
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 21/08/2026A traveler saw $189 on our page and $214 at checkout. Same room, same night. I ran hotel metasearch at TripAdvisor, and four teams could always explain that gap. None of them owned it. matthewmamet.com/blog/marketp... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 20/08/2026The founder of the best agency I know of could not write a line of code. Everyone read it as the hole in the leadership team. It meant he could never get pulled into a delivery crisis, so he spent those years building the company instead of the work. That was the whole advantage. 120
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Ravi Mehta and I worked at TripAdvisor, and lately we've both been deep in AI-native product work. An operator said a clear North Star and wireframes couldn't be done. With AI I did both in two days. The speed showed them up more than it helped. blog.ravi-mehta.com/p/the-case-a... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 17/08/2026CarGurus' AI tools for dealers are machine learning with a new label. The former VP of Product there named three non-AI forces behind the B2B pivot. Outside analysis runs toward the scariest explanation. matthewmamet.com/blog/ai-agen... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 13/08/2026AI made my company cheaper to run a full year before it made it bigger. Agents do the analysis, the drafts, the A/B tests, the work of four or five people. It hit my cost line long before my revenue line. Watch where AI lands on the income statement. Margin comes years before growth. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Airbnb beat earnings, revenue up 17 percent. But nights booked grew only 10. It is charging more per trip, not carrying more travelers, plus a one-time World Cup bump. Watch the nights, not the revenue. One says the platform is worth more, the other says more people want it. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 10/08/2026At TripAdvisor I ran product for hotels and had no say in who got promoted on the team building it. I owned the roadmap and the number. He owned their ratings and their pay. matthewmamet.com/blog/matrix-... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 06/08/2026The Scrum Guide never uses the words product manager. Not once. Name the one person who can kill a feature engineering already started. If that takes a meeting, the accountability is already split. matthewmamet.com/blog/product... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 04/08/2026People keep calling their agents a moat. Mine have a shelf life of about six to nine weeks. I watched the same land grab around content management, then around mobile, and none of it held. Pay for the team that can rebuild the stack fast. Whatever they build now gets thrown out anyway. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 03/08/2026Amazon starts requiring sellers to tag AI-generated people in product photos on August 15. The tag sits in image metadata, where no shopper ever sees it. Amazon will know which listings contain synthetic people. The person spending forty dollars will not. Provenance is the product. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 30/07/2026I ran a 50 million dollar media budget across five dating brands. The company still went insolvent. Marketing spend moves the number this quarter, but acquisition only compounds when the product actually holds people. Ours did not, and no budget fixes retention. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Monday.com cut 20 percent of staff and told everyone it was about AI. The quieter move: they killed per-seat pricing. Seats plus AI credits now. Once your product does the work a seat used to, charging per seat eats itself. Usage-based is the only model that survives agents. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 27/07/2026The whiteboard had two words on it. Total. Qualified. Total leads you move by buying traffic. Qualified leads you earn on both sides of the marketplace. Each implies a different org chart. We picked qualified. Roughly $200M to $400M. matthewmamet.com/blog/north-s... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 23/07/2026A founder once slid my six-pager across the table and said, that is pure fantasy. Five founders in, here is what holds: you earn their trust through results, not rapport. Hand them something they cannot argue with. matthewmamet.com/blog/working... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 21/07/2026"I get in trouble if the Friday status report is late." Nothing happens if I never talk to a customer. That line has come up in my first month at nearly every company I have walked into. It usually gets said as a joke. It is the diagnosis. Change what gets measured on Friday. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 20/07/2026Expedia just signed Allegiant to a 12-month exclusive and now distributes every US commercial airline. Allegiant's whole model was refusing this. I ran hotel metasearch at TripAdvisor and watched the same movie. Resisting intermediation is a timing call. The last one in signs an exclusive. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 16/07/2026Product folks reach for the interface first. Better flow, clearer copy, smarter defaults. But a behavior someone is paid to keep doing rarely changes because the screen got cleaner. Move who absorbs the cost and it shifts on its own. Change the incentive first, then build around it. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 13/07/2026Square just put restaurants inside ChatGPT and Claude with no marketplace commission. Everyone is watching who wins AI discovery. The real move is the transaction. If the agent brings the demand and the order lands in the merchant's stack, the 25% aggregator tax loses its justification. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 10/07/2026I have never won a fractional client from outbound. Not one. My entire pipeline is a Friday reminder to message the six oldest names in my CRM. Most say keep me in mind. That eight in ten is the mechanism - people buy the week the pain lands, and you cannot schedule that week. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Fractional executives are not a cost play. Expertise beats cost nearly 2 to 1 when companies explain why they go fractional. What you rent is judgment from a dozen companies. matthewmamet.com/blog/what-is... 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 07/07/2026Most teams think user research takes a quarter. That is the tell they are doing it wrong. Talk to eight users in a week, watch where three trip on the same thing, and act. Seven days, not ninety. If you cannot name the decision a study will change before it starts, you are stalling. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 03/07/2026I tell clients I have a team of twelve behind me. They are agents, not people. The CPO job stopped being about managing humans and became about orchestrating agents. Traditional PM roles are down thirty percent, seventy in SaaS. Build the orchestration layer first. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 25/06/2026The most dangerous product org is the one that exists only on the org chart. People handed product titles in a reorg who never asked for them, were never trained for it, and do not want the job. Worse than no product team at all, because leadership thinks the function is covered. It isn't. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 23/06/2026Most fractional operators have high conversion and no pipeline. Every client came through a different channel - referral, podcast, old colleague, cold message that landed right. The mistake is waiting to find the one channel that works. There isn't one. The portfolio of accidents is the model. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 19/06/2026The bottleneck in product used to be build capacity. Now someone can stand up a working tool in an afternoon. The constraint moved to conviction: knowing what to build and in what order before you've built the wrong thing. Cheap building raises the price of knowing what to build. 010
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 18/06/2026Most companies hire a full-time exec to lead their new AI bet. Usually the wrong first move. By the time they're hired and ramped, two quarters are gone and the bet is untested. A new bet needs conviction for a window, not headcount. Hire the headcount after you have proof, not before. 000
Matthew Mamet @mamet.bsky.social · 17/06/2026At TripAdvisor a checkout field in the wrong order could cost 10% of conversions, and no one would guess it from the design. Most product problems are already solved a hundred times: the card field, the signup flow, the cart. Save your originality for what's actually unsolved. 010