Michael A. O’Neill
Thoughts from two decades building data products, platform products, and AI systems. Mostly about trust, context, and the ways product managers get things wrong before they get them right.
Latest on Product
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I deliberately created a release management problem
For our soft launch last week, my engineering lead (Donnie) and I deliberately chose a sub-optimal way to share context. Well, what we think is sub-optimal. We used the feature that would get us to “market” fastest, not the one we think is the best long-term solution. We’re building the plane while it’s taking off–we…
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Soft launch
I soft launched my context product this week. A fellow with Artic Consulting, Amit Giri, has been asking me interesting questions on LinkedIn about my exploration of context engineering. Good questions. Interesting questions. Difficult questions. Very difficult questions. A few days ago, he shared a report from Redis about context engineering. Quick version: First, everyone…
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How Do I Get a Second User?
I’m working on an organizational memory product. It’s a fancy way of saying documentation for agents, at scale, across the company, distributed so users don’t have to struggle to find the context. I’ve built lots of rich context, and I could put you to sleep with anecdotes about how it’s helped the agents I’ve built…
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What two chatbots figured out about me from opposite ends of my life
Apparently asking chatbots to name things they know about you that you never told them is A Thing on social media. I don’t really do social media — a chatbot had to tell me this was a thing — but I caught it in Sunday’s Seattle Times. So I gave it a whirl, with a…
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Do I write two specs now?
I’ve had basically the same mental template for writing PRDs since the mid-2010s, when my then boss tried to standardize specifications across his team. Then Claude showed up. A few months ago, I got into a pattern with my engineering lead that, in hindsight, was ridiculous. I’d use Claude to help research and draft a…