Product work in the AI era
I have spent more than a decade building products, running operations, and learning what actually works.
Hi, I run PMER. I have spent more than a decade in the internet industry, living through full cycles in gaming, video, ecommerce, and SaaS. I was lucky enough to be deeply involved in the explosive growth of products with hundreds of millions of users, and I served as the founding product lead at a unicorn, owning product strategy from definition all the way to real execution. I like hard fights and pioneering work, and my focus now and going forward is squarely on AI.
The reason for building PMER is simple. Over the years I took part in a lot of internal training and industry exchanges, moving from student to company-level instructor to invited speaker. Along the way I came to deeply appreciate that real knowledge comes from practice: only by doing the work do you truly master a skill and accumulate know-how, and only through practice can you quickly validate an idea or a business model. Today AI is genuinely reshaping how product managers work. The old PM competency model no longer meets what the industry and the role demand, so I am learning as I go and sharing that thinking and practice here.
The writing covers four kinds of things: product-minded breakdowns of what is happening at the AI frontier, hands-on notes on mainstream tools, product methodology from several angles, and career growth for product people. No selling anxiety, no piling up buzzwords, only things I have verified myself, whether they led to results or to lessons from stumbling. I think both are worth something.
Whether you are new to product, looking to switch into product work, or trying to break through to the next level, you will find something useful here.
Everyone says "put user value first"; the hard part is turning that into concrete product decisions. Before taking on an important requirement, I work through three questions: Which kind of user has this problem? How do they solve it today? Where is our solution actually better for them? If you cannot answer all three, don't rush to build.
Whether it's 0-to-1 or 1-to-N, roadmaps and product strategy will inevitably misjudge things, so don't pour in too many resources before the MVP is validated. The whole point of agile iteration is to make "finding out you were wrong" happen sooner and cost less. Get the smallest loop working first, then talk about going big and complete.
When something can be verified with objective data, there's no need to argue it out in meetings. But data only tells you what happened; it rarely explains the real reason behind a metric swing.
You have to go back to the user's real scenarios to spot and reason it out. "The problem and the answer are both on the front line" is a line that only grows more valuable over time.
Product and operations are inseparable. It's an old idea, but it still holds today. Neither one outranks the other; they're just different strategic emphases at different stages of a product.
There are plenty of ways to spike short-term numbers, but most of them spend down user trust. What PMER stands for instead: find the right direction by looking at long-term value, dig in on real user pain points for the long haul, and understand human nature without manipulating it.