Shipping Products When You Don't Know What they Can Do — Ben Stein, Teammates
Jul 28, 2025 · 19:34
Ben Stein, founder of Teammates, argues that product management for AI agents requires abandoning traditional specs and embracing uncertainty. He describes how his team discovered emergent behavior when a customer asked to tag an agent in a Google Doc comment—an unplanned feature that worked. Stein advocates thinking in affordances rather than features, using evals as the new spec, and vibe coding to feel interactions before committing. He notes that bugs become ambiguous when behavior is probabilistic, and customer meetings shift from selling vision to co-inventing the future. The episode offers a field guide for product teams navigating boundless surface areas built on unpredictable LLMs.