Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice

Alex Komoroske, a former Google and Stripe strategy leader now building an AI-era web startup, discusses how he thinks about product, strategy, and organizations. The conversation covers gardening versus building, how LLMs change product development, organizational kayfabe, slime-mold-like team dynamics, nerd clubs for strategy, and personal productivity habits.

01Key learnings

• Favor gardening over pure building: look for things that can grow on their own with ecosystem or network-effect dynamics, invest small amounts of energy, and let the best ones compound.
• Treat LLMs as squishy, imperfect 'magical duct tape' and design products that tolerate occasional failures rather than assuming reliable autonomous output.
• Build taste by finding a distinctive perspective that resonates with people, since cheap content generation makes differentiation through originality more important.
• Expect organizations to show 'kayfabe': people publicly claim plans will work while privately doubting them; seek disconfirming evidence in ways that don't cost you your standing.
• Plant many cheap, low-stakes seeds of ideas and water the ones that show signs of growth, rather than trying to predict which will succeed.
• Protect a portion of team time for unproven, emergent bets while delivering clearly valued, legible work that prevents the team being questioned.
• Start small communities such as strategy salons with a few enthusiastic people, enforce a 'yes, and' norm, and add diverse perspectives to generate cross-functional insights.
• Make productivity sticky with clear 'always' rules and short, low-activation-energy tasks, and capture ideas quickly before they disappear.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.