“A lot of what we've discovered is that it's really easy to build, and it's pretty easy to build with pretty good quality. What's hard is still building the right thing. And that's where you spend a lot more of your time, in discussion, rather than sitting down at a keyboard writing out a PRD.”
Product Growth · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
The host asked what an AI-native startup looks like from the inside. Greiner describes his four-person team recording design discussions and feeding them to an AI skill that writes the product spec and tasks.
Transcript
…up, the AI response one time helps them convert. What can you learn from the approach that the AI took to get to that point is an equally big opportunity as like, hey, the AI made a huge mistake here. Like what can we learn from how you can tie that back to how it specifically made that mistake?
…have a unique place, right? You're not at Uber with 200 other PMs. You're a small startup. You guys get to operate and define your processes to the level that the current tooling allows. So what are the interesting things we can learn about what an AI native startup looks like in the inside? For
sure. I think a lot of what we've discovered is that, you know, it's really easy to build. It's really easy to build quickly. It's also like pretty easy to build with pretty good quality. I think those are things if you have the proper engineering workflows, leveraging the latest AI tooling, you can get really good at. What's hard is still building the right thing. And so that's where you spend a lot more of your time. And we found it to be very, really valuable to spend a lot of that time in discussion, right? So there's four of us on the team. Let's all sit down and talk through this problem space. Let's have someone obviously bring to the table an artifact that lays out the problem, lays out the opportunity. And then let's work through what are the biggest challenges we need to solve? How are we going to solve them? What's the experience we want to create? Whiteboard that as well. And then you end up with an artifact, which is a detailed transcript that you've recorded from this discussion and a diagram either on a live whiteboard or a Fig Jam or something similar. And you…
So am I hearing this right? Instead of spending your time writing PRDs or writing front-end PRs as an engineer, engineers and PMs are spending more of their time in meetings sketching out this is what it should look like, making sure that the transcript has that information and they have pictures.…
right. I think, and that's why it is, it has been very important for us. And I think in the future, it's very important to have everyone at that table be capable to at least a certain degree from a product and a business standpoint. We want people who understand what we're trying to accomplish as a…
So if you're at a larger company like Uber or Bolt and you can't like adopt all of that, what can you adopt? Like what are there specific tools within how you're engineering your harness, specific processes with how you're working with your product team to just operate a little bit more like this…
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