2025-03-10 08:00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about agentic software lately and how it’s going to transform our workplaces. While everyone’s experimenting with AI assistants and cobbling together solutions with tools like LangChain and Crew AI, I believe Google actually has the best shot at making AI agents a seamless part of our daily work lives. Let me explain why.
Think about Google’s product ecosystem for a second. You’ve got Gmail, Meet, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides - all these powerful tools operating on the same layer. But what’s missing is a meta layer above all of these - an orchestration layer that ties everything together. Essentially, an operating system for work.
Picture a knowledge worker (like a product manager) operating primarily from this layer rather than jumping between individual apps. This orchestration view would give you:
Consequently, without this layer, your work remains fragmented across multiple apps, and you’re constantly moving context around manually. With it, you get a cohesive workspace where information flows naturally.
Ultimately, this will be the unified view for the product manager. Not Slack. Not Drive. Not Jira.
How Would This Actually Work?
Let’s walk through a couple of concrete examples:
Example 1: Propagating strategic updates
Your CEO holds an all-hands meeting where she announces a major change: “We’re shifting our revenue growth target from 10% to 20% for the next fiscal year.”
Current workflow: You attend the meeting, take notes, and then manually update numerous documents - your roadmap spreadsheet, business models, planning docs, and presentation decks. You hunt down each relevant file, make changes one by one, and hope you haven’t missed anything.
With an agentic layer: You simply tag the key insight from the Meet transcript: “Growth target increased to 20% from 10%.” Your Google agent then:
You review the suggested updates, approve them (perhaps with some tweaks), and the changes propagate across your workspace. What might have taken hours now takes minutes.
Example 2: Creating Product Specs on the Fly
Now let’s look at how this might work within Google Docs specifically. Imagine you’re a product manager tasked with creating a spec for a new feature that will help hit that ambitious 20% growth target. You open a blank Google Doc to start drafting.
Current workflow: You manually gather context from multiple sources - you open your business projections spreadsheet in another tab, pull up design mockups, reference competitor analysis docs, check the technical limitations from engineering notes, and try to keep all this context in your head while writing a coherent spec from scratch.
With the agentic assistant: Just like how Cursor has Composer chat always available on the right-hand side for coding, Google Docs would have an always-present AI sidebar. There you can ask the agent to co-work with you on the spec. You start by telling it:
“I need to create a spec for our new Premium tier feature. This needs to contribute to our new 20% growth target.” The assistant responds: “I can help with that. What information should we incorporate?”
You reply: “Let’s use the Q3 business projections spreadsheet, the competitive analysis from last month, and those new mockups the design team shared yesterday.” You can even tag the relevant files like you do on Cursor.
The assistant then:
It then drafts a complete product spec including:
You review it section by section, making tweaks and giving feedback like: “The timeline is too aggressive here,” or “Add more detail about the user flow.” The assistant refines its work based on your guidance.
When you’re satisfied, you accept the changes - just like in Cursor Composer - and your polished spec is ready to share with stakeholders, complete with all the right references and metrics aligned to your company’s new growth targets.
Google is uniquely positioned to build this future for several key reasons:
This gets even more powerful when you add MCP to the mix. This approach would allow the Google orchestration layer to extend beyond just Google products.
Your agent could use MCP servers to communicate with tools like:
All from that same unified interface. Imagine saying “Update our roadmap to reflect the 20% growth target and make the changes on Asana” and having it all happen automatically.
And for large enterprises with thousands of files? Only Google’s approach would scale. While having a huge context window is helpful, Google’s real superpower is their ability to index, search, and prioritize information at massive scale. Again, they can fetch the files relevant for a particular task. They don’t need new permissions because your data is already with them. Over time their model to predict which files are needed for the task only becomes better because millions of workplaces already use Google.
Furthermore, even if your organization has files spread across hundreds of teams and departments, Google’s infrastructure is already designed to handle exactly this kind of complexity. The search giant would excel at finding the needle in your organizational haystack and identifying the information that needs updating when new information comes in.
For knowledge workers, this represents a fundamental shift in how we spend our time:
In essence, the agent becomes your second brain - remembering context, suggesting actions, and handling routine tasks while you focus on the work that truly requires human judgment.
I believe we’re moving toward a world where our digital work life isn’t spread across dozens of disconnected apps. Instead, we’ll operate from an orchestration layer that gives us a cohesive view of our work while agents handle much of the manual labor behind the scenes.
Google, with its integrated workspace, massive context windows, and search capabilities, has everything needed to make this vision a reality. The question isn’t if this will happen, but when - and which companies will be quick enough to adapt.
As these agentic systems mature, the productivity gains will be enormous. The companies that embrace this shift earliest will have a significant competitive advantage. And based on what I’m seeing, Google is perfectly positioned to lead the way.
P.S Yes, Microsoft can build this too. Eventually OpenAI might also figure out long context, and Microsoft has a product suite like Google. Since I have always used Google suite, this was more about how I see my workflow evolving.
2025-03-09 08:00:00
There’s never been a better time to be a growth PM for a big company. Every day, I come up with dozens of top-of-the-funnel mini-product ideas. Great for user acquisition, but not quite full-fledged startup material.
A decade ago, I used to get inbound offers to build these for existing companies. Think: a credit score checker as a lead gen tool for a lending app. Back then, the cost of building such products was still high. I was not sure if leadership would be invested in the long term. How many bets would they take? What if they shut down the team after one failed launch? Now with Gen AI, the cost is almost zero.
Actually, it is not just top of the funnel. You can do products for engagement too. Spotify wrapped for other products. Mini-gamified surveys. Endless possibilities.
2025-03-08 08:00:00
India is a low trust society.
But I have seen some progress over time.
Earlier, after each Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment, merchants would check your phone to verify. Nowadays, I rarely see auto-rickshaw drivers or merchants wait to verify. They move on to the next customer. Yes, UPI payment confirmation sounds are common. But in auto-rickshaws and similar settings, they don’t have that. It is just that they assume you would not cheat them.
But for every positive step, we have issues like the food adulteration scandals that go viral and make people doubt whether they can trust by default.
Websites have trust markers. They display logos of partners. They show logos of their venture capitalists (VCs).
But I was thinking about what are proxies for offline merchants.
Most local eateries have open kitchens. You know your food is prepared fresh. You can see it made in sanitary conditions. You watch it being prepared in front of you. The fact that the restaurant has spoons in hot water makes me trust them more. If they care about the spoons, they probably care about the ingredients too.
2025-03-07 08:00:00
The high-status individuals dictate the communication platform. And what it means for your growth as a consumer app.
I talk about status signaling quite a bit because it is one of the things that comes up more and more when I talk with consumer app founders about distribution.
Distribution is not easy. Especially if you are relying on organic and don’t have a lot of VC dollars to burn. If you are a consumer app starting out, you have to think very clearly about why the user wants to install your product. What motivates someone to try a new thing?
Let’s talk about a new consumer messaging app.
You want to engage someone on Twitter. You reach out to them on DMs. After the initial chit chat, you want to move to another medium and have a longer conversation. Who decides the medium?
Let’s say you don’t even get a reply on your cold DM, and were wondering if there was a way to reach their inbox.
People might seem equal, but they are not. There is always an asymmetry of power between you, the cold DM sender and the person who is responding to you. Imagine the receiver is busy and is high status.
That person might say, “hey I want to talk to you but I am not sure if you are worth my time and I get a lot of DMs already. I don’t want to share my personal phone number and email ID. So there is this third product which you can use to reach out.”
This is the high status receiver deciding the medium of subsequent communication. The low status person will always have to move to the platform of choice of the high status person.
This is why for pitch meetings for a hot founder (hot as in the product being hot), the VC will move to even Microsoft Teams if needed to win the deal.
While a VC might even ignore a DocSend link, and ask to send the pitch as a deck, if they can’t bucket the founder.
Coming back to the messaging app, the new messaging app will take off only if the high status person chooses to be exclusive on that messaging app and there is no other way to reach out to that person.
If you want to talk to Tanmay Bhat on Instagram, you will have to super DM him. Unless you can find someone who can do an intro. What Tanmay Bhat is signaling is that he gets thousands of DMs every day and he wants a separate inbox where he can filter.
[For the rest of the post we will assume Tanmay Bhat has the same super DM link on Twitter instead of Instagram because it makes it easier for me. I don’t have an Instagram account, and I understand only Twitter]
Tanmay Bhat putting super DM as his link in bio is free advertising for the product. Users who want to reach Tanmay must use it, which forces adoption. This creates an organic distribution loop where people learn about super DM not through paid Twitter ads but through necessity, after landing on Tanmay Bhat’s bio.
So one thing I talk to consumer founders (messaging or social) is how they can be the link in bio for Tanmay Bhat (some high status person) who gets a lot of visits on their profile. If your product can insert itself as the preferred mode of communication for high-status individuals, it can gain distribution.
The more people are exposed to a product through high status individuals, the more it propagates naturally.
If you are building a new messaging app:
The earlier in the funnel your product appears (example: as a link in bio), the more discovery happens.
Can you go even earlier?
The game here is about hacking visibility through user-driven placements—bios, profile pictures, and social behaviors.
If your users are on Twitter, then for anyone landing on home you would want them to see the banner of your app. But of course, Twitter is not going to do it for you. They are going to upsell the user to Twitter premium instead. You can’t have that screen estate. So what can you do?
We have discussed the link in bio.
Can you ask them to pin your product’s tweet in their profile? Their banner image?
If you have leverage, and this person is your investor, maybe you can ask them to do that. But that is after someone lands on the profile.
What are the things people see on timeline?
A post. Name of the person. Their profile photo.
Yes, you can incentivize your high status users to post about your product every time they come on Twitter, but they won’t do that.
Biggest win is if you can turn your product into a movement. Bitcoin pulled this off because laser eyes on profile photos became a meme + a status signal. But it is very hard to replicate unless your product has deep ideological backing. And people’s incentives are aligned with the movement growing.
Till then the link in bio will do.
2025-03-06 08:00:00
I spend a lot of time thinking about status and signaling.
The most interesting thing I have learned about status is that sometimes people pay for status without any benefit.
A person who gets up at 5 AM to run signals youth and vitality. You can’t buy that with money. You have to put in the work. But it also releases endorphins. You feel great afterwards.
A person wearing expensive sneakers signals wealth (hey, I can afford these 20k Nike sneakers) and taste (I know these shoes are cool).
But more important: they also get to enjoy the shoes.
[Gen Z people please ignore the rest of this post because you are too young for it].
What I have never understood is the business of buying caller tunes. That was in the VAS era. Remember that? People used to pay monthly for caller tunes they couldn’t even hear. It was something the caller would hear. There is no benefit to the buyer who is the receiver. No utility.
The only purpose was to say, ‘I can pay for your enjoyment. And I have good taste in music.’
What is the equivalent of that today?
2025-03-05 08:00:00
The person creating the list decides who receives status, implicitly placing themselves at the top of the status hierarchy.
This shows there is still opportunity for someone to create a top 100 people in AI in India list. It builds the brand for the status giver and provides free SEO for them. People will add this newly earned recognition to their LinkedIn bio.