John Cutler argues that AI tools remove not only wasteful friction but also 'positive friction': the productive struggle, debate, and slow sense-making that builds shared understanding and sound judgment in product teams. When teams generate artifacts, code, and specs instantly, they can skip the thinking those artifacts were meant to force. The piece matters because product leaders who optimize only for speed risk weakening the discovery, alignment, and craft that produce good decisions. The essay is framed around a stereotypical product workflow to illustrate where that friction used to live and what is being lost.
01Key takeaways
- Speed gains from AI can hide the loss of thinking that used to happen during slow product work.
- Distinguish negative friction (waste to eliminate) from positive friction (learning to protect).
- Watch for artifacts that look complete but were never debated or understood by the team.
- Deliberately keep sense-making steps such as discovery conversations and design critiques even when AI could shortcut them.
- Measure whether AI is improving decision quality, not just output volume.
02Key sections
- The stereotypical product workflow
- The essay opens by sketching a familiar product process to ground the discussion in recognizable team habits. This sets up the baseline that AI is about to change.
- Negative versus positive friction
- Cutler distinguishes friction that wastes effort from friction that forces reflection, debate, and learning. The useful kind is what makes teams understand the problem before acting.
- What AI removes
- AI makes drafting, prototyping, and summarizing nearly free, which can quietly remove the moments where teams would otherwise wrestle with ideas. The loss is easy to miss because output looks like progress.
- What to do about it
- The author suggests deliberately preserving productive struggle, such as requiring human reasoning before AI generation and keeping alignment rituals that build shared judgment.
03From the post
“Imagine a stereotypical product workflow.”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.