Max von Beust

Operations & AI @ Voy | Ex @Choco @RWTH | don’t minimize risk, maximize opportunity | RT≠EndorsemenT

[Max von Beust @mvbeust]

I've finally found the time to publish my master thesis on my website.... So, if you're into data, business models and monetization - or any of the challenges surrounding these topics: have fun reading it!
https://t.co/5GbILmFCPo

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

Saw the following in a startup update today:

"On some days this past month, we spent more on AI tokens than people".

Token Spend divided by Headcount Spend is a (if not THE) leading indicator of an AI-native company.

[Jay Rughani @JayRughani]

https://t.co/yJCOOpbQXP

[gian @giansegato]

kinda ironic how the average work day is getting _harder_, as we progressively automate the easier parts of our daily jobs offloading them to agents. net result is that the average complexity of the tasks we still get to do is actually increasing

insofar as we decide to still work the same number of hours (if not more), the more we offload to agents the harder our days will get

lots of obvious confounders so not exactly direct causality, but since opus 4.5 i feel so much more tired. i get to accomplish crazy more - probably now doing what last year would've considered 3-4 distinct jobs, all at the same time. but at what price?

pretty sure the current general anxiety in tech is not just that. could quite simply be lots of tiredness as we no longer get to code for hours in quiet flow, and have to uniquely narrow our focus to only the hardest pieces

(or maybe i'm just projecting because this race is killing me lmao)

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

PREDICTION: THE CPO ROLE, AS WE KNOW IT, WILL VANISH IN FIVE YEARS

At young AI native companies, the traditional PM role is on the wane, replaced with a product builder archetype that’s a combination of Product, Design and Engineering.

These companies will never hire a CPO. A separate product leader leads to too much cognitive dissonance when the IC roles doing the actual work are blending, extra overhead and imposes an unnecessary coordination tax on the product development organization.

Five years from now, these companies will be the leaders and set the cultural tone for the next generation, so my prediction is that all tech companies will stop hiring for the CPO role in five years. There will be a singular product development leader at each org. Ironically, this new role might still be called the CPO, except they will run the entire product development org.
CPTO is far too unwieldy of a title and only exists today to alleviate confusion.

Career implication: early / mid career product leaders need to stop aspiring to become CPOs. instead, you need to develop a panoply of product development skills across all three disciplines (+ analytics), be able to fluidly navigate the roles, and become a product builder, period.

Farewell, CPO! It was a good 15-20 year run for this role in tech. But like everything else, it’s time to evolve.

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

canada pm mark carney’s speech at davos today, reflecting our new and dangerous g-zero world.

if you only read one speech from the week this is essential. https://t.co/rHoJzniEgh

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

The two things that matter

I’ve interviewed and evaluating 1000+ people over the years. The two attributes that are critical for every role (regardless of function, title, or seniority) are:

1. High Agency: being proactive and taking action, not waiting for someone to tell you what to do
2. Problem-solving Ability: being able to diagnose, root cause and tackle any problem systematically and from first principles

The younger the company and the smaller the team, the more important these two attributes are. If you’re (insert massive company name), you can get away without hiring for these. But if a good chunk of your first 50 employees don’t have these, you will be in a world of pain.

Startups should add interviews that separately test for each of these attributes. At the least, the final interview (with the startup CEO/founder) should focus on these two. When I interview candidates for startups as an investor or board member, I spend most of my time testing for agency and problem solving.

The challenge is that startups need their employees and leaders to have agency and be able to solve problems, while big companies don’t screen for or reward either. This is the root of many hiring misfires when a big company hire joins a startup without being evaluated on these dimensions.

[Isaac Flath @isaac_flath]

The people you'd expect to lead coding agent adoption (coders and AI people) are the laggers.

They've been a super hot topic for many months, but loads of dev/ai people sentiments are flipping only in the last few weeks.

Kinda weird it worked out that way

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

There will be 2 types of companies in the future.

Those that are great at AI, and those that used to be in business

[Ryan Oksenhorn @ryanzip]

The best engineers give pushback, challenge requirements, and ruthlessly prioritize. No AI agentic tools are empowered like this. That’s the biggest gap left.

[Max von Beust @mvbeust]

Closing window shades on flights. Why? Why would you do that on a cloud free flight....

You're in a miracle of technology, have the possibility of enjoying the wonders of nature. And you simply try to block it out.

[Max von Beust @mvbeust]

@nicoalbanese10 Yes, works very well.

[Markus Bublitz @markus_bublitz]

Hallo Herr @bundeskanzler ,

Ich habe Ihnen heute Populismus vorgeworfen.
Sie sprechen von „dem Problem im Stadtbild“, ohne es zu benennen. Stattdessen soll ich meine Töchter befragen, die könnten mir helfen.

Falls Sie auch nur den leisesten Zweifel daran hatten, welchen dogwhistle Sie damit betreiben, empfehle ich Ihnen die Kommentare unter diesem Post zu lesen. Die schlimmsten und rassistischsten habe ich ausgeblendet.

Ich empfehle für die Zukunft: wenn Sie ein konkretes Problem im Stadtbild erkannt haben, benennen Sie es und schlagen einen konkreten Lösungsansatz vor. Ansonsten wird die AfD und ihre hasserfülltesten Anhänger Sie einfach weiter vor sich hertreiben. Und Sie werden deren Forderungen nie erfüllen können.

Kriminalität bekämpft man zB mit Polizei und einer schnellen Justiz, Obdachlosigkeit mit Unterkünften und Sozialangeboten, Armut, Hoffnungslosigkeit und Arbeitslosigkeit mit wirtschaftlichen Impulsen und Integrationsmassnahmen, Drogenkonsum mit Justiz, Frankfurter Modell, Bekämpfung organisierter Kriminalität oder anderen geeigneten Maßnahmen, Vermüllung mit Müllabfuhr und Ordnungsamt.
Und wenn Sie schon dabei sind: Ein paar mehr Fahrradwege, verkehrsberuhigte Straßen, Grünflächen und Parkanlagen würden dem ein oder anderen Stadtbild auch gut tun.
Wie auch immer, befragen Sie dazu Experten, ich bin mir sicher, es gibt einige in erreichbarer Nähe einer Bundesregierung.

Dabei wünsche ich viel Erfolg und gutes Gelingen!

[Cihan Çelik @Celik_Chn]

Anstatt die Gelegenheit für Konkretisierung und Differenzierung zu nutzen, raunt der Kanzler noch vager und pauschalisierender. Die Signalwirkung seiner Worte und das Schüren rassistischer Ressentiments sind ihm entweder nicht bewusst oder vollkommen egal.

[Allison the gay @allisonology]

LLMtuition:
The cost, in hours (time; required), to build up intuition towards working efficiently with LLMs.

It's obvious when you haven't paid btw.

[Alex Albert @alexalbert__]

Over these next few years it's going to become more and more important that you resist letting slop consume you.

Keep creating. Keep learning. Keep thinking.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Product management for AI agents is easily the wildest form of product management in history.

Typical product management is trying to figure out how to design interfaces and software for people to interact with deterministic systems. The user generally knows all the context to do their work successfully, so it’s generally a matter of nailing the underlying business logic and surrounding UX.

But with AI agents, the user you care about most is the agent, and they don’t know anything by default. They’ll happily run in any direction to perform the task, often without success.

So as a PM (or engineer) you basically spend your time trying to reverse engineer “what would a human need as context to perform this task”, and then figure out how to design systems to get the agent that data in the right sequence, with the right tools, and instructions.

Some of these systems are entire invisible to the human user, but part of the craft is equally how the end-user will interact with the agent to supply this context. Then, it’s often unending trial and error working to eke out incremental points of quality at each stage.

This is especially why people with deep domain expertise, or those that can acquire it quickly, will do extremely well building AI agents. The ability to anticipate the context that the agent would need to be successful is a huge determining factor in how effective the agent will be.

This partly explains why coding agents have worked so well out of the gate; because its builders deeply understand the domain that they’re working to automate. But clearly we’re going to quickly see this same outcome across every field - legal, healthcare, finance, etc. - as context engineering and a new crop of product managers emerge.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The premium on just being someone that stays insanely current on what’s going on in AI is so high right now. The space is changing so fast that you will stand out by being more AI-native and caught up than everyone else. Huge opportunity for the next generation workforce.

[Chris Albon @chrisalbon]

One more slack channel and everything will be fixed. Just one more.

[Eugene Yan @eugeneyan]

💯 agree with Shreya. Having reliable enough evals, high experimentation velocity, and keeping up to date with what works will get you very far.

[Max von Beust @mvbeust]

100%. The PM role is changing.

I'd argue, the same is true for people in strategy&ops positions.

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

We are adding a coding section to all of our Product Managers interviews at @Shopify.

We'll start with APM interviews. We expect candidates to build a prototype of the product they suggested in the case interview.

There is no excuse for PMs not building prototypes.