Weekly Product Hits: AI Product Onboarding, You Can't Eat Relative Growth, Redefining Time Off
Product Hits: February 16, 2026Every week, I share three great product resources from a variety of perspectives. Let's dive in! Onboarding people to AI product experiences by Krystal Higgins Krystal Higgins, Staff UX Designer at Google, argues that when a product behaves unpredictably, explanations aren’t enough to build trust; and, AI-driven experiences are inherently unpredictable. Instead of front-loading information, she shows how guided interaction and reversible decisions help users learn by doing. You Can't Eat Relative Growth by Nnamdi Iregbulem Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Ventures, critiques Silicon Valley’s obsession with relative growth metrics like percentage increases, arguing that they obscure the true challenge of generating real progress. He encourages PMs to focus on tangible targets instead (e.g. absolute dollars of revenue added). Redefining Time Off by Kate Leto Kate Leto, Head of Product at Moo, argues that time off is a leadership signal. The way leaders take vacation, justify it, and return from it quietly shapes team norms around burnout, fear, and performance. She reframes time off not as something to earn after overwork, but as an intentional act that sustains creativity, clarity, and long-term effectiveness for groups and teams. Behind the ScenesHey there, it’s Clement! Lately, I’ve been trying to question the format, not just the idea. On a recent project, I needed to explain a pretty complex setup for a new feature. My default move? Write a detailed product spec. I read quickly. I write quickly. So text has always felt like the most efficient path. Sure enough, the draft started taking its usual shape. Dense paragraphs. Bullet points explaining why certain setups were invalid. Every edge case lovingly documented. Classic PM energy! But halfway through drafting it, I caught myself and thought: am I writing this because it’s the clearest way… or because it’s the way I’ve always done it? So I decided to get playful. Instead of polishing the prose, I used a generative AI tool to make a visual sketch of the key concepts. Not a polished product mock. Not something I’d hand to my incredible UX design counterparts and say “ship this.” Just a rough diagram that showed the moving pieces and how decisions flowed through the system. Honestly, I expected mild confusion. Everyone’s been used to “Clement writes a bunch of text, let’s bounce comments back and forth until we figure it out together.” Instead, Legal leaned in. The conversation shifted from parsing sentences to pressure-testing scenarios. And, Customer Success didn’t have to decode 15 pages of text. They could just see the moving pieces. The diagram wasn’t perfect. But it changed the way we held our conversations. That’s when it clicked for me: the tool didn’t matter. The willingness to abandon the default format did. As PMs, we inherit a lot of defaults. Some examples:
But sometimes the real leverage comes from changing the container! Before you keep pressing forward with your content, ask whether the format itself is the bottleneck:
Being playful in product doesn’t mean being unserious. It just means being willing to experiment with how you think, not just what you think. Sometimes that tiny shift is enough to make something click for everyone else! With love, Let's do more together!
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Product Teacher
In-depth essays and thought-provoking reads for product managers.
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