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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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…
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Be a context magnet
I’ve spent the past six months experimenting with the creation of organizational memory. That’s sort of a pompous term for good end-user documentation produced at scale. But it helps me separate the age-old, mundane task of writing documentation from the new challenge of keeping overconfident LLMs from accelerating the human game of telephone. Context makes…
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Sure, Claude. Sure.
I’ve been involved in shutting down a lot of software in my career. It’s like documentation: not the most exciting thing, just part of the job. This one turned out to be different. My hypothesis was that there were a small number of users on really old devices, and that this was why they appeared…
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One Playback Session, Multiple Truths
Why data quality is a product problem, not an engineering problem. Over two decades, I’ve found myself solving the same problem over and over again. People think they’re asking for better data, but what they really want is data they can trust. They’re not the same. I’ve spent most of my career building data products.…