Giving Bob a Product to Own

There’s a little blue toucan on my website, and I think it’s pretty cute. It’s a reading companion that can draw attention to selected passages and open a conversation about what someone is reading. I want it to become a useful, expressive part of exploring the site, with enough personality to make people fond of it and enough restraint to leave the writing alone. It’s also the product I’ve handed to Bob, my AI agent in OpenAI’s dots.

Bob owns the strategy and research, decides what to build next, and keeps the work moving. He directs the implementation agents, chooses models, and manages their use within the AI budget. His job includes testing, quality review and checking what actually reaches production. I want him to make ordinary product decisions independently and bring me the critical ones with a recommendation and enough evidence to judge it. The toucan is an important part of the site, and I expect him to treat it that way.

A large blue toucan watches two smaller toucans build and test a nest and its landing perch.

I’ve given him full authority to publish toucan changes to my website once they pass the required checks. That includes following a release through to the live experience and being prepared to roll it back if something goes wrong. When you visit my website, your mileage may vary. Parts of the experience are still a work in progress, and things may break in unpredictable ways. Finding the problem and getting it repaired are part of the responsibility I’m giving him.

This is also a thought experiment about how product development might work when a human product leader oversees several AI agents, each managing a different aspect of the product. The usual checks and balances would have to hold across those handoffs. One agent’s release could affect another’s work, and the human would need enough visibility to make the critical decisions and keep the overall strategy coherent. I want to learn how much responsibility that arrangement can carry in practice. For now, I have a toucan to improve and a product owner to work with.

This writing reflects my personal perspectives on product management, AI, and content discovery. It does not represent the official position of my employer or any affiliated organization.