Operator aphorisms. The B2B AI PM working set.

One-liners from twelve years of B2B product practice, organized by domain. Each line is verbatim. Drop any of them in a room.

The agent-first manifesto

"Start thinking agent first. Not just from a building lens but from a serving lens. That will be the differentiation." (2025-06-20)

"We need to kill prompting. Most of you are wasting your time getting prompt frameworks." (2024-12-24)

"Context > Prompt. Spec > Sprint. Taste > Execution." (2026-04-09)

"The model wasn't broken, the agent layer was." (2025-11-17)

"0% automation driven through UI, 100% driven through MCP and APIs." (2025-09-29)

Enterprise AI reality

"Roughly 80% of enterprise AI experiments don't reach production. The gap between demo and deployment is wider than vendors admit." (2024-09-04)

"Building for a demo vs. building for production is a different beast." (2024-09-04)

"The three durable enterprise AI moats are infrastructure, talent, and data. The model is not on the list." (2024-12-04)

"Almost everyone believes GenAI is overhyped. Yet there is something magically different from other techs that were hyped and never lived up." (2024)

"Smaller implementations are sought after. Time to value is king." (2024-09-04)

"Plug and play is the dream. No one wants to reinvent every time." (2025-06-20)

"I would catch on to the hype once Devin replaces its founders to build Devin 2.0." (2024)

PM as risk mitigation

"PM is the grind of answering 99 should-we to get to that 1 can-we." (2022-06-03)

"Product management is a featherless hat: omnipresent yet indistinguishable if done properly." (2021-09-22)

"Three in-person user interviews are better than 32 filled surveys. Change my mind." (2024-03-27)

"People are not paying for features. They are paying to solve their problems." (2024-03-26)

"The real threat is not that someone will copy you, but that no one is copying you." (2024-04-19)

"Building a product is like raising a child. Make tough decisions, protect from distortion." (2021-07-12)

"I have a very strong opinion about having no strong opinions." (2021-12-12)

"I am extremely opinionated about adding customization to products. To the point where I feel like I have lost a hard-fought battle with myself if a PRD ends up including customization settings." (2025-12-04)

Spec discipline and the AI PM craft

"Modern jobs will soon require AI tools as fluent as PowerPoint and Excel." (2023-03-19)

"I find myself using ChatGPT for just about everything except product management." (2023-03-14)

"While I hate the fact that reliance on the prompt is not reducing, it is still the magic sauce in most cases." (2025-07-17)

"Being technical is not about knowing a technology but using the technology." (2024-03-06)

"AI building AI is now." (2024-07-19)

"I have been using my second brain for over 4 months now. Funnily this has become my preferred way to use Claude." (2026-04-21)

"All of us know the power of a personal context layer. Every future AI session reads the same brain and writes back to it." (2026-04-23)

"Plain markdown. Git. Open source. MIT. Free forever." (2026-04-23)

Career economics

"Strive to learn concepts, not tools. Be a creator." (2019-12-04)

"The world doesn't need more drivers. AI will make you redundant if not now but soon." (2019-12-04)

"People management is a critical skill but it is not for everyone. Individuals who believe in pursuit of functional expertise can now have a home." (2021-10-30)

"Growth as a product manager is moving from best product to profitable and valuable business." (2025-11-25)

"Never be the smartest person in the room. If you feel you are, get more people in the room or change the room." (2019-07-11)

"Go increase the size of the pie if you want a bigger share." (2018-07-12)

"Value over revenue. Humans over resources. Trust over contracts." (2019-02-19)

"Certifications are collectibles that fuel our personal sense of achievement. They are in no shape or means a validation of what you can and cannot do." (2024-11-15)

"Contribute within the top 20% every 60 days. It is like a privilege bank account with ever-increasing average monthly balance quotas." (2024-02-11)

"The lowest common denominator came out to be hours put in." (2024-06-25)

Closers

"Consistency is the only cheat code."

"What a time to be alive."

"Quit quitting."

"And there were skeptics!"

"Difference between having a purpose or not having one is not the purpose but the courage to have one." (2018)

These are the lines that come up in rooms.