Product Fridays

A researcher runs some interviews. They produce a report. They tell everyone what they learned. Then the product team goes back to building. The researcher Emily Goligoski doesn’t work that way. This week on Product Fridays, Emily says research is a team sport: “When I think about research design, I think the real cheat code is actually collaboration,” she says. We couldn’t agree more, and we’re t...

Did the camera kill art? Of course not, says our guest David Somerville , it pushed art to new places. Cubism. Impressionism. “What didn’t happen is art ceased to exist,” he says. “It became about, okay, but now can I paint a feeling?” David is one of the most creative people we know. He is a designer, creative consultant, game maker, and published Dungeons & Dragons author. (He’s also our first-e...

Big news! Sous Chef, our AI-powered app for creative cooking, is officially in open beta 🎉 Now, we’re not saying we’re the next coming of Bobby Flay and Alton Brown, but we both know our way around the kitchen. And we’ve always been frustrated by the dearth of purpose-built products that match how we like to cook. So, we’re designing our own. Sous Chef makes cooking amazing meals easier, more spo...

Last week, we threw down the gauntlet: We’re joining the SaaSpocalypse and picking one of our software subscriptions to replace with a vibecoded substitute. The people spoke: It’s QuickBooks. We suspect QB has very few fans. Much like other big platforms (e.g. Jira, and increasingly Zoom), it’s tried to become everything to everyone over years — and ended up completely incomprehensible to anyone....

Earlier this week, the NASDAQ’s most powerful software stocks took a massive nosedive because an AI provider published a plugin. It sounds kind of silly, like the ( probably apocryphal ) thing where elephants are deathly afraid of mice. But the numbers don’t lie. Some of the biggest software platforms around — Intuit, Adobe, LegalZoom — did indeed lose hundreds of billions in market capitalization...

Folks, we did the dang thing. After six years of friendship, three years of consulting together, and 10 beautiful months of Friday podcasting — The Andrews are officially joining forces to create The Andrew Company. ( Here’s our official launch video — shot in Phelps's daughter’s playroom.) We have two goals: * Create delightful (and opinionated) products together. We love tools that solve specifi...

Happy almost New Year! This is a year-in-review episode, but we’ll save you the usual LinkedIn end-of-year pablum. Some things about 2025 were hard. Andrew Phelps shares how he dealt with unexpected business pressure; McGill talks about his “duck months” — calm on the surface, paddling like hell underneath. Some of you might have felt the same way? But 2025 also gave us some incredible gifts. Clar...

Phelps has been building something for the past month. It’s inspired him — maybe more than any side project in recent memory. And it just suffered a setback that has him wondering if he should keep going on at all. McGill has been building something for the past year. It started out promising. Then it got hard. Somewhere along the way, he set it down. Now he’s looking for the inspiration to see it...

Our last PF conversation left us hungry for more. Sure, it’s great to hear how two chaotic coders — er, talented thought leaders — are using AI to build products. But what about genuinely top-tier engineers? Are their lives any different? So we asked two elite developers — both named Andrew, of course — to weigh in. Please welcome: * Andrew Briz, editorial director of newsroom engineering at POLIT...

A note from The Andrews: Hey! It would help us a lot if you would review Product Fridays on Apple Podcasts (even if you don’t like us). It’s basically like giving us money. If you do, we’ll immortalize you in a limerick on the next show. AI is changing software development — duh! But while no-code platforms like Replit and Lovable have gotten a lot of attention, most of the magic is happening when...

A programming note: We’re now releasing Product Fridays on Mondays. We know, we know, Friday is right there in the name. But Friday is the vibe, you see. And Monday turns out to be a better day to release podcasts. OpenAI’s latest product, ChatGPT Pulse , automatically compiles a personal news digest from your email, calendar, and across the web. It’s convenient, addictive — and a little terrifyin...

Andrew McGill shares a new demo he’s been working on — an AI-powered interior design assistant called Zhuzh — and wonders aloud: if this is just ChatGPT with a prettier interface, what’s the point? But maybe that is the point. We go deep on: * Why good UI still matters in the age of LLMs * How purpose-built tools outshine general-purpose chat for many use cases * Where wrapper apps land on the spe...

We've returned from our summer break, and Phelps is ALREADY trying to get back on Island Time by outsourcing the entire podcast to AI voice clones. Seriously, text-to-speech is one of those sneaky technologies that has gotten amazingly better in the last year. Gone are the days of stilted, Siri-esque robot voices mispronouncing your name. AI voice bots can now speak fluidly, emote realistically — ...

This week on Product Fridays , we’re trying something new: a deep dive. We focus on a single product and debate whether it’s worth keeping on our phones. First up: Rise , the sleep and energy-tracking app that promises to turn anyone into a morning person—whether you like it or not. We break down what makes Rise different from other sleep apps (spoiler: it’s not just the graphs), how it gamifies y...

It’s Friday, and Andrew McGill is a deflated car dealership arm-waving balloon of a human being. So this week, we take it easy… and build a bracket to determine the very best utility app on our phones. OK, so it wasn’t easy at all. Eight apps enter. The losers are deleted from the world. Forever!!! In this bracket: * YouTube – universal video hub * TikTok – short-form video juggernaut * Instagram...

What does it actually look like to invent something new in a week? This week we take you behind the scenes of a recent client sprint — a real one, with a real team, real stakes, and the usual emotional arc: * Monday: new faces and high hopes * Tuesday: existential dread * Wednesday : ideas take shape (somehow) * Thursday: revealing our work to real users And yes, at one point, the phrase “sex part...

Google owns the open web. If your website isn’t Googleable or doesn’t work in Chrome, it doesn’t exist. Search has fueled discovery, traffic, and revenue growth for just about every online company of the last 25 years. So what happens when Google rewrites the rules? In this week’s episode, we unpack “Google Zero,” the moment Google stops sending traffic to websites. The term, coined by Nilay Patel...

Andrew Phelps leads off with a question, one he’s never spoken out loud before — “Am I creative?” Oof, isn’t that a straight jab to the ol’ imposter syndrome funny bone? If you’re like us, you’ve grappled with this very question many times before (especially when you’re in the midst of a creative drought). So this Friday, we’re talking about ideas — how we get them, how we keep them coming, and ho...

This week we talk about the shifting role of product management—and whether the profession we grew up in is headed for extinction, evolution, or something in between. We start with the data: Lenny Rachitsky ’s recent State of the Product Job Market shows PM hiring has rebounded from its post-Covid trough, but it’s nowhere near the highs of just three years ago. Big tech is thinning middle manageme...

This week, The Andrews met up in Baltimore for the Hacks/Hackers Journalism x AI Summit , which was a blast. (Even before the Mario Kart tournament got underway.) For one, we got to see some good friends and hear them say smart stuff, like Patrick Swanson and his session on synthetic audience panels. But it was also the first time we’ve seen a huge group of talented journalists grapple with the im...

We all love praise. It feels good! But if a friend gives it to you over and over again, it becomes disingenuous, then irritating. If that friend is a chatbot, it can even become dangerous. That’s what happened with ChatGPT in the last week. The model got too eager to please—so much so that even Sam Altman admitted it had become “too sycophant-y and annoying.” OpenAI rolled back recent changes to t...

This week we pit products against each other in a rapid-fire game of “This or That.” The rules are simple: two products enter, one product leaves. We set a strict timer and make our cases with maximum conviction—and minimum prep. The matchups: * Apple Maps vs. Google Maps Both have niceties and flaws. But only one buzzes McGill’s watch. * ChatGPT vs. Claude We both pay for both. So who wins? It co...

What if anyone could build full-stack software just by describing an app in a few sentences? That’s vibe coding, and it’s pretty exciting to fraudulent software engineers like us. In this episode: * Our vibe coding tools and workflows * The long arc of abstraction in programming * Why this moment feels a lot like the iPhone and photography * Also: Is prompt engineering a real job? We also answer a...

We eagerly awaited news of the Switch 2—and were a little bit disappointed by the reveal. Is it hard for mature product categories to surprise us anymore? (See also: smartphones.) On the agenda: * Nintendo’s strategic focus (and the similarities to Apple) * Will the Joy-Con mouse be good or weird? * Has Nintendo figured out the Internet yet? Plus, all this Nintendo talk gets us nostalgic for the M...

Earlier this week, OpenAI unlocked a slew of new image generation features — and we sincerely (and excitedly, and fearfully) believe it’s a game-changer. On the agenda: * How object constancy makes image generation more useful by an order of magnitude; * A demo of how to create a beloved character and use it in a million different circumstances; * What we think this ~means~ for creators and people...