👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lennybot | Lenny’s Podcast | How I AI | Lenny’s Reads | AI/PM courses | Public speaking course Annual subscribers get 19 premium products for free for one year: Lovable, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Bolt, Devin, Wispr Flow, Descript, Linear, PostHog, Superhuman, Granola, Warp, Perplexity, Raycast, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, ChatPRD + Stripe Atlas (while supplies last). Subscribe now. Someone smarter than me once said, “AI won’t replace you, but a person using AI better than you might.” I believe this is exactly right. Right now, we all need to be building the skills that help us become that person using AI better. Lucky for us, Amir Klein is already that person and has written a guide for the rest of us. Though it’s targeted at product managers, the advice and workflows can be implemented by anyone in any function. Thank you, Amir, for giving us a glimpse into the future and the concrete steps to get there. For more, follow Amir on LinkedIn. You can also listen to this post in convenient podcast form on Spotify / Apple / YouTube. The first month in my new role at monday.com, I was tasked with building our first AI agent. The goal was to create an AI co-pilot, something users could turn to for insights, explanations, or building complex workflows they wouldn’t know how to create on their own. To build that, I needed a ton of context—all the internal knowledge, decisions, assumptions, and scattered inputs that shape any product direction. And gathering all of that felt completely overwhelming. I was drowning. All that context lives everywhere: Slack channels, Notion pages, Monday boards, decks, Google Docs. Hundreds of tiny fragments I could never quite piece together. I kept running into mental blocks, forgetting what I knew from where, and getting stuck. Instead of trying to keep all of that context in my head like I always had, this time I wanted to try something new. I dumped everything I had into a ChatGPT Project, word-vomited all that was on my mind, and asked if it could help me get started. And boy, did it. Finally, I felt like I could smell a roadmap on the horizon, a direction was forming, and things began to click. Even better, I felt somewhat in control without being stressed about storing everything in my head. I could store it in the AI instead—a second brain. Instead of all that information overloading my own brain and pulling my attention in a hundred different directions, I could finally focus on the product work I love and need to get right to be successful: understanding the problem, shaping the vision, and building something meaningful. My good friend Tal taught us how to think with AI. I’m building on Tal’s post by showing what happens when AI becomes an extension of your mind—when it carries your context, grows alongside you, and ultimately amplifies what you’re capable of as a PM. Context is important—but comes with a heavy mental loadNo matter what we’re doing, we’re constantly trying to hold way too much information in our heads. I always imagine it like carrying a giant basket filled with random things like eggs, water bottles, watermelons, toy cars, a cactus (I hope you’re picturing a Dr. Seuss scene). And I’m on the go, so things are rocking all around the basket, and more things keep being added, and then an egg falls and cracks, one of the water bottles starts to spill over, a toy car keeps banging into one of the watermelons . . . basically anxiety in a metaphor. That’s what it feels like trying to hold all the context required to do product work. But the hardest part isn’t just carrying it; it’s that none of these pieces arrive neatly fitted together. Context comes in fragments: user feedback, metrics, market changes, internal constraints, past decisions, intuition. As PMs, our job is to assemble those pieces into a clear picture—shaping the problem, forming the hypothesis, and defining the solution space. When you can pull that together, you build products that solve real problems so well that customers change habits for them, pay for them, and genuinely feel the impact. But doing that synthesis in your head, and doing it over and over again, can literally feel impossible. That’s where AI comes in. When you feed in all of that context that you’ve been trying to juggle yourself, your ChatGPT Project becomes a second brain that can store the information and synthesize it for you. That means that it can know and retrieve the right piece of data for the right problem—like an instantaneous librarian—and even use what it knows to run analyses and generate recommendations, like an associate PM. It’s important to say: using a second brain doesn’t dull your role but actually sharpens it. Your reasoning, product sense, knowledge, and taste are still doing the real work; AI just amplifies them. You can’t outsource judgment or creativity. This isn’t AI thinking instead of you—it’s you thinking with more clarity becau |