AI states the obvious
What I learned from mixing AI into my product dev workflows.
I spent a month putting AI into everything, but this is not about that in general, it’s just about Fred.
What started as a one-week experiment quickly spilled into four weeks of integrating AI into various workflows. Most experiments faded away naturally, but a few became indispensable. Among these survivors was "Fred the Feature Spinner," a custom GPT I built to help develop product features.
Fred does one thing: it takes a feature idea and systematically "spins" it across six dimensions, generating twelve variations. Simple enough. But after using Fred weekly for over two months, I've made a counterintuitive discovery.
If you only have 5 minutes: here are the key points
AI excels at thoroughness: Tools like Fred the Feature Spinner (my tool, explained below) aren't revolutionary because of their creativity, but because of their consistency and coverage.
Thoroughness is costly: Traditional brainstorming involves significant time, coordination, and cognitive effort—AI can reduce that overhead drastically.
AI offers scalable structure: Like a junior analyst or management consultant, AI ensures no angle is overlooked.
Best Available Human Standard: AI doesn't need to beat the best humans—just the best you can access on a Wednesday afternoon.
Consistency over time: AI helps supplement the parts of cognition—like exhaustive iteration—that humans often rush or neglect.
The magic of Fred isn't its creativity or revolutionary thinking. It's that Fred is methodically, relentlessly comprehensive. Fred makes sure I don't miss the obvious.
This connected with something I've observed about management consultants. Companies don't hire McKinsey because consultants are smarter than internal teams. They hire them because consultants provide structure and articulate what the organization already knows, but in a systematic, comprehensive way.
What Fred provides isn't AI brilliance—it's AI thoroughness.
Being thorough is expensive, AI can help
The cost of thoroughness in business has always been high. When I need to ensure I've covered all the angles on a new feature, the traditional approach is gathering several team members in a room for a brainstorming session. Bringing in sales, product, and engineering perspectives ensures comprehensive coverage of user needs, technical constraints, and business opportunities.
But this approach comes with substantial costs:
Calendar coordination: Finding a two-hour slot where five busy people are available might take weeks.
Preparation overhead: Everyone needs context beforehand, requiring documentation and pre-reads.
Opportunity cost: Those hours in a conference room are hours not spent on implementation or customer interaction.
Cognitive limitations: Even with diverse perspectives, human teams have blind spots and shared biases.
This is where Fred—and AI more broadly—offers something remarkable. Like the junior analyst who stays up all night preparing every possible data view before the executive meeting, AI can methodically work through all variations, combinations, and edge cases without fatigue or complaint.
As the saying goes, "when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Most product teams are holding the hammer of their own expertise. Fred doesn't replace that expertise—it just ensures we examine the problem from angles we might otherwise neglect.
The real value isn't that Fred thinks of something revolutionary I wouldn't. It's that Fred thinks of everything I might eventually think of, but does it in seconds rather than days.
In enterprise consulting, this kind of thoroughness comes with a six-figure price tag. With AI, it's available on demand, instantly, at a fraction of the cost. This doesn't just save money—it fundamentally changes when and how often we can afford to be comprehensive in our thinking.
The Best Available Human Standard
Ethan Mollick recently proposed a framework I find particularly useful: the "Best Available Human Standard." The question isn't whether AI outperforms the ideal human, but whether it outperforms the humans you actually have access to in your specific situation.
For thoroughness in product development, my comparison isn't between Fred and the world's most methodical product strategist. It's between Fred and the team I can actually gather in a room on Wednesday afternoon. And on that specific metric of comprehensive coverage, Fred often wins.
Fred doesn't get tired after the fifth iteration. Fred doesn't have a favorite approach it unconsciously favors. Fred doesn't skip steps because there's another meeting in ten minutes.
In my case, I'm using AI not to replace creative thinking, but to supplement the mundane aspects of cognition that I personally struggle to maintain consistently. When developing products, I often find myself racing through ideation to get to implementation. Fred forces me to be more disciplined in my thought process.
Consistency is remarkably difficult for humans to achieve. As von Clausewitz noted in his military treatise: "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."