[Week of April 14] — When learning speed beats feature velocity
WHAT I’M THINKING ABOUT
We’re watching seat-based pricing collapse in real-time. Reports show it’s dropped from 21% to 15% of vendors in twelve months, with a prediction that 40% of enterprise spend will shift to outcome-based pricing by 2030. At Freedom Forever, I saw procurement squeeze every renewal. But here’s what I’m mulling over: if AI lets customers do more with fewer seats, the product moat isn’t features anymore—it’s how fast you notice what’s changing and ship a different answer. 94% of PMs are using AI daily now. The ones winning aren’t the ones with the best roadmap—they’re the ones who can tear it up and rewrite it fastest when the market moves.
WHAT CAUGHT MY EYE
MCP went to the Linux Foundation. Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation this month, with Block, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and AWS co-signing. Over 10,000 public MCP servers are live, and enterprises are hitting real problems: SSO, audit trails, config portability. The protocol matured from experiment to infrastructure in less than six months. That’s the kind of velocity that matters. (https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-mcp-roadmap/)
Agentic AI is here, sort of. Only 25% of AI PM tools have real agentic capabilities, but the shift from copilot to autonomous execution is already underway. We’re moving from “AI helps me write a spec” to “AI ships the spec and tells me what happened.” Not sci-fi—just 2026. (https://aipmtools.org/articles/future-of-ai-product-management)
ONE THING
If you’re a PM and you’re not asking “how would we rebuild this product if we had 6 weeks instead of 6 months,” you’re optimizing the wrong variable. Speed isn’t recklessness. It’s tight feedback loops, smaller bets, and a team that can pivot without a three-week planning cycle. At PowerMyFitness, we learned this the hard way: the feature that took us two months to ship got lapped by a competitor who shipped three iterations in the same window and landed on the better answer. Your next edge isn’t what you’re building—it’s how fast you can learn whether it matters.
— Nick
