Striking iron while it's hot or an impending disaster?

Hey Folks!  As the end of the year is coming - in very big steps - it's time to pause and reflect...A lot of tools are launching "a year in review" - which is btw. a brilliant hack to engage your users by showing them how much they've accomplished in a year...with your product: reinforcing the value they are receiving from your solution - and thus helping stave off churn: 

How was your "year in review?"

At Userpilot, from my perspective - it was "the year of analytics" - we launched a bunch of major improvements to our product analytics suite, including custom analytics dashboards and session replay, among others. 

But when it comes to the product world, it feels like there isn't much to reflect about it. 

Maybe it's my bias - but it feels this year was the year of AI agents - and nothing was as exciting as the prospect of not having to perform the tedious tasks you usually do with software anymore...to the point where tools like Worldware (AI agents for building...AI agents? 🤯) attracted tens of millions in VC funding. 

But it was all great until...it wasn't.

As Leah Tharin wrote in her recent post, most of the new AI tools focus on new user acquisition and solve for one specific use case (and often just not well enough).

This usually isn't enough to retain users long term: "Good product and growth management is about retention and understanding churn while a lot of the AI hype right now is around attracting people fast, let me explain: A ton of the simpler AI solutions are extremely strong on the "attract" part of the Hubspot flywheel (see video) while these companies oftentimes don't have a solution on how to retain customers on a longer time frame. (If you lose 7% of your customers per month with a small-scale b2b, single-user solution, you'll run into the end of your market quite quickly) While that's a nice thing for a small company, it's impossible to keep going on a bigger scale. Which is also where you should be as product person." 

Quality issues were rife in the new AI tools this year. So much so a lot of users started losing trust in "AI tools": 

But could the solution be in...AI managers? Tatyana Mamut, interviewed by Shyvee Shi in her recent post, is already making it a reality: 

I have a big announcement to make too! 

Well, it's not an AI agent yet...although that is coming to Userpilot too 😎 (psst - if you've been lurking here and considering trying Userpilot out- book a demo now to save before the prices go up!).

From 2025, we are moving this newsletter to Substack - and will be changing how it's created, how often we send it, and even what it's called too.

Goodbye Product Rantz - welcome the PITT!

As youmay have read from my LinkedIn post - we're launching Product Innovation Think Tank- the first truly collaborative, product thought leadership magazine - created by outstanding product practitioners, for product practitioners.

So we'll be moving to curating YOUR thoughts, rather than sharing ours - because truth be told, I'm not a product manager (and neither is our content team) and don't have the lived experience that you do 🤷♀️

Every month we will be syndicating 4-6 pieces of original, inspiring content from seasoned product & growth experts - curating a collection of intertwined ideas, that provide more value together than the sum of its parts - spanning the topics of AI, Product Innovation, Career in Product, Growth Case Studies, Data-Driven Product Management and User Engagement.

And of course we are rewarding each creator $$$$ for syndicating their content.

If that sounds like a fair initiative that you (or someone you know!) would like to be part of -fill in the form here & join the PITT 😈

Hope you have a very mARRy Christmas - and see you all next year! 

Emilia from Userpilot