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🦄 AI Skills That Matter—And the Product Fundamentals That Don’t Change

October 29, 2025

Hey 👋

This week we connect strategy to shipped AI: prioritise for durable advantage, make AI useful without losing judgement, and ship citations‑backed workflows that people trust.

How you enjoy - Adam at Unicorn Club 🦄

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🏗️ Build

Make better interfaces.

Using AI for UX Work: Study Guide

NN/g’s study guide curates concrete ways AI can assist UX without outsourcing judgement. From prompts to research, writing, and workshops.

Why it matters: It lifts output quality and speed while keeping decisions human and defensible.
Adopt this week: Rewrite one research‑planning prompt using CARE (context, ask, rules, examples) and test on three live tasks and compare results.

Solve The Right Problem

Five Whys and the broader 5E reframing framework to stop “just add a button” solutioneering and fix the real causes.

Why it matters: Better problem framing reduces waste and creates fixes that stick across code and process.
Try this: Run a 15‑minute 5 Whys on your next “add a button” request. Log the deepest non‑technical cause and one counter‑measure.

🧩 Shape

Shared foundations across teams.

Prioritization Starts With Strategic Prioritization

Cutler links four benefit types, downward pressure, decay vs leverage, and Helmer’s 7 Powers so prioritisation is genuinely strategic.

Why it matters: Anchoring bets to durable advantage improves portfolio focus and resilience, not just this quarter’s wins.
First step: Map current initiatives to Increase/Protect Revenue, Decrease/Protect Costs, score decay and leverage 1–5 to “prioritise the priorities”.

Visionary work. Part 1: Crafting a vision statement

A designer’s play‑by‑play for crafting a bold five‑year vision that genuinely informs a one‑year strategy.

Why it matters: A shared, visible vision aligns decisions and speeds day‑to‑day trade‑offs across teams.
First step: Book a 60‑minute PM×Designer session and list target areas and key words, then draft one aspirational sentence to wall‑post.

🚀 Ship

Release, measure, iterate.

AI Changes Everything (And Nothing At All)

Four AI build skills "prompt, context, orchestration, evals" plus the timeless fundamentals that still decide outcomes.

Why it matters: Evals and orchestration turn good demos into reliable, shippable features with guardrails.
Adopt this week: Build a 20‑case eval set for one AI feature and add one code assertion. Run pre/post your current prompt to baseline quality.

Powering Government with Community Voices: How ZenCity Built an AI That Listens

Shipping civic‑grade AI via layered data, workflow briefs, a deterministic+LLM mix, citations, and guardrails.

Why it matters: Workflow‑anchored AI with citations builds trust and lands the right brief with the right person on time.
Try this: Gate one AI summary behind mandatory citations and fail closed if sources are missing or stale.