Sam Chang

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@dc_anies Putting that as your year end goal

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@krispuckett @sesame Unrelated, but The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place is such a good album.

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

What kind of IC work can you do if you are a manager?

Attended two dinners with dozens of senior Bay Area tech managers last week.

Every single one of them said they were expected to be hands-on building with AI these days. But what to work on?

4 categories emerged:

1. Internal efficiency -- anything to make your team more productive, from communication tools to digital brain to team skills.
2. Quality-of-life improvement -- got something that bugs the heck out of you about the product but you can't convince anyone else to work on it? Just fix it yourself.
3. Celebration story -- artifact (usually video, image narrative, etc) that hypes up the work done by your team.
4. Vision piece -- describes a really freakin' cool future that your team can move towards.

What NOT to do: take on any critical-path product work. (Because then you either do a poor job delivering on that, or managing.)

[Chris Halaska @chalaska]

"Engineers do code, designers do design. Period."

A startup engineer said this to me this week.

The people who say things like this aren't wrong about the world today. They're just not willing to find out what it could be tomorrow.

The willingness to try is the whole job now. The result of the experiment matters less than the fact that the team ran it.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The obvious path for designers in the AI age is to move closer to code.

But the more valuable path may be upstream: closer to the customer, the business, and the problem.

If everyone can prompt agents to code, the scarce skill becomes knowing why, what, and how to build.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

When you’re a manager and you feel overwhelmed, the right answer is almost always to delegate.

If you don’t have anyone you feel confident delegating to, you’ve failed to hire well.

This is recoverable, but you must start hiring immediately.

[Cole @colderoshay]

AI tooling has changed what designers can ship. The
bottleneck isn't capability anymore — it's developers willing to review your PRs.

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@staysaasy @clairevo

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

The dumbest and easiest management trick in the book is to just be super positive and encouraging all the time. It really does help, it requires 0 brain cells, and so few people do it that it really stands out. I cannot express just how well this one dumb trick works.

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@alexdanilowicz @karrisaarinen bullish on @alexdanilowicz and the MP team

[signüll @signulll]

in the ai era, if your “roadmap” is > 30 days, you’re simply ngmi.

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@staysaasy lmaoooooo

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@thenanyu What's your take on product roadmaps these days? Specifically the durability and length (e.g. 6 month roadmap)

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/0328m6FbEI

[Bobby from Dupe.com @ghoshal]

The hard lesson designers eventually learn is, pretty UI isn’t the moat, capital D Design is the moat, distribution is the moat, revenue is the moat, your network is the moat. Fight to protect and grow your moats, everything else is free. Some monkey copied your work.. booohooo, get over it. Y’all are literally using AI to design for you, theft made that possible, stop pretending you’re some whizbang “design genius.”

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@m_g_nichols @staysaasy Totally. Separately, I find it amusing that "AI slop" is used in a pejorative sense for documentation, but not for code. Different audiences, of course, but still interesting.

[Sam Chang @samchangsucks]

@ridd_design @brian_lovin @brian_lovin is a true og. have benefited so much from his knowledge and @designdetailsfm

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

Many product managers don't bind their ambitions with humility.

They don't work on small things at all. So, small things get worse and they don't learn how to fix problems.

They, therefore, fail at fixing big problems and big things also get worse.

This is why it is such a bad idea to tell PMs to avoid fixing broken windows.

If you are a junior PM. Just fix bugs. Start there. Fix things that are obviously broken. Do not allow yourself to even think about "strategy". Just wake up every day and fix small things, every day.

This gives you at bats learnings how to do things and it will ready you for the moment when you need to fix bigger things.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Executive compression is happening faster than anyone expected.

Workday's CTO took "Member of Technical Staff" at Anthropic. Atlassian's CTO took "Business Lead" at Stripe. Mike Krieger went from CPO to MTS on the Claude Code team. Instagram cofounder voluntarily dropping "Chief" from his title to write code.

Four senior executives in six months all made the same bet: get closer to the work.

AI tools are collapsing the ratio of managers to makers. One senior IC with Claude Code and deep domain knowledge is starting to outproduce a 15-person team with three layers of oversight. The management layer that made sense when shipping software required 200-person orgs is compressing fast.

When that happens, the value of "Chief" anything drops and the value of "person who actually builds" spikes. A CTO managing 500 engineers is less differentiated than an engineer who can ship with frontier models.

The smartest executives in tech are dismantling the ladder and moving to the floor where the work happens. The org chart of 2030 is going to look nothing like today, and these moves are the first draft.