Ron Goldin

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reading the output of cloud code and what it's doing and understanding it actually makes you a more successful builder

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finding the customers number one like like real growth stuff and then two like having a really differentiating product right that feels more premium has an emotional connection with its users like those are things that fall squarely in the design world

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designers that like have the the boldness and the courage to like find ways to like do scrappy cafe testing or like user testing.com or whatever it is and know what that looks like, know when it's useful, and like just do it. Like I think that's that's huge

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you can't just be execution. You can't just be order takers. Not that I think designers ever should be, but like that is no longer valuable because a product manager can doesn't need you anymore to do that

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They're looking at the outputs of AI tools and they're like, "Oh, that's pretty good." But like a lot of them, as we both know, look very similar. And that is because they're literally all being trained on the same world of stuff

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don't wait till like the very end to think about branding and differentiation. Like really try to like I mean in general like I think once you know what the product is and what it's for. I feel like that is a conversation and some definition you should have as early as possible to start to infuse some of that soul and some of that like kind of like brand and point of view into the product

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when something is off in Claude, I could back and forth with it in words for like 10 minutes or I could go to Figma and sketch it out in 5 minutes and it's probably going to be closer to like the pixel perfect version I have in my head

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make sure there's a place that's sort of like the project memory, right? Like kind of your stored context for like what this thing is that it can keep referencing to understand like, oh wait, I'm building a matchmaking service for brands, not whatever some email platform, right

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I've generally found that when you try to build everything at once with any platform it's kind of a disaster in a way

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all the usual exercises still help of like really clearly defining like what is the goal of this product? Who is it for? What are the critical user journeys that this product is supposed to handle

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building software isn't as hard as it used to be, but growing an audience is as hard as it always has been

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I'm definitely seeing more companies that are looking at things that you built outside of work, not as extra credit, but as possibly reasons to get jobs in addition to or even over traditional work experience

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some of the best design leaders are people that have spent some amount of time being entrepreneurs or working in early stage companies again because of that ownership thing

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You're managing the team, but you're also with the team. Like you're building things together. you know, you're kind of not in this ivory tower just doing performance reviews and alignment meetings while the IC's are doing the things the IC's do

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you can do that in like 100th of the speed. And so I think for managers who are curious and crafty, they can do a lot more with their day with the 40 hours that they have

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prototypes win arguments, right? Prototypes get people psyched. like you know moving away from slide decks, moving away from PRDs, moving into like something that people can actually feel and react to