What your product is becoming
The new problems worth solving
The signal is the reason to reach out. Max Mitcham proved it at Trigify: he says he got 48 meetings from a list of 120 leads using his own tool + Claude Code. In Max’s framing, timing and relevancy beat personalization every time.
He’s right. And there’s something else underneath that idea.
If you’re in the business of surfacing data or signals, that part is getting easy.
One sec: I should define what I mean by “signal” in this context.
These are signals:
Product analytics data (sigh, this is what we do)
Task lists and kanban boards
CRMs and pipeline flows
OKRs and KPIs
Etc.
Intent data, hiring moves, funding rounds, competitor announcements. Vendors package this and point AI at it. The signal layer is becoming table stakes. It’s not worthless and it still has some life in it, but it is getting cheaper by the quarter.
Legible signals vs. valuable signals that explain nothing
External signals are legible. A company hired a VP of Sales. A competitor got acquired. AI reads these, scores them, triggers a sequence. That part is becoming a commodity, not a moat.
First-party data -- product usage, for example -- is different. It’s higher fidelity, but the data doesn’t tell you what it means.
Someone logs in every day. Are they winning or stuck? A feature sits unused. Did they not need it or did they just not find it? Behavior is visible. Intent is not.
“I can see what is happening, but not always why”
I asked the onboarding lead at one of our vendors whether she could see how I actually use their platform. She was honest about it. She can see what I built, but only when she logs in as an admin.
What she can’t see is how I move through the product moment to moment. Where I got stuck. Why I stopped doing something I used to do.
Her words: “I can see what is happening in the account, but not always why.”
A signal-rich tool, built to surface behavior, and the person responsible for my success still can’t answer why.
The what is visible.
The why is the unsolved part.
The why is where the money is moving.
The open frontier
A RevOps lead I know has built real confidence in product signals. He’s not surprised by churn anymore. He can see it building weeks out. He and his team have made real progress and it’s awesome to see such clarity.
What he hasn’t cracked, though, is what to actually do about it. The action that reliably lifts net revenue retention. The signal is solved. The action is the open frontier.
That gap, between seeing it and knowing what to do, is where the real work sits now.
I picture it like I would a real frontier: imagine standing on the edge of the great forests of what is now the USA, staring out at an endless sea of grass and prairie. The value isn’t in the mapped forest behind you, it’s out in the unmapped prairie. That’s where you go to build new stuff and grab land.
What your product is actually becoming
Wes Bush at ProductLed and Ben Williams of PLGeek are both circling this. They’re asking their newsletter readers to think deeply about the problems they’re building to solve.
A lot of the problems we’ve all built for are now solved by Claude and Codex.
What a product even is anymore feels up for grabs. AI can do a lot of what software did for years. If your value proposition was “we surface the data,” that part is getting cheaper fast.
The defensible layer is interpretation and action. What this signal means for this specific customer, in their situation. What to do next. Not in general, but for a specific “them”.
This is a threat to a lot of existing tools, for sure. But it’s also an opportunity. It’s where the moats are forming.
If AI is making a core part of any product nothing more than table stakes, what do we build next?
A lot of what we’ve all built for the last while is tooling to say to a human reader: This is what you need to know so you can decide what to do next.
As Claude Tag moves into Slack and gives us all an army of Claude agents embedded in every channel, the work of surfacing these signals is abstracted away.
And it leaves us to build for the problems and opportunities that come next.
When the signal is damn near free, where do our products provide value?
Peter
PS: This is actually an optimistic note. There’s more to build. It’s just not where we have been building.