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Agentic & AI Business Safety for Product Managers – Part 1

September 29, 2025 By Scott

TL;DR

Following are some things I’ve been coming across as I work, (and play), with some of our new tools. These days, whatever your level in Product, chances are you’re building or at least looking at something involving Agentic workflows or AI.

Given the increasing ease of use of new tools, you’re probably working directly with them. Hint: Even if you’re a CPO or VP, if you’re not getting your hands dirty, you’re similar to the CEOs as recently as the 1990s who were proud of the fact that they didn’t use email. Is that really the box where you’d like to constrain yourself? As with so many things, you don’t likely need to be an expert here. You just need to understand what the tools in your box can do and certainly some of the risks we face. Whether as Individual Contributor (IC), or senior manager, there’s risks and basic practices you need to have on your checklist that should be table stakes. Many of us now build with Low Code No Code or are VibeCoding our way to MVPs. Great. These tools are awesome for prototyping. For production though?

Watch out.

Stop here and just ponder that thought if you like. For details… read on. (Note that some of the upcoming examples are for any product person, whereas others are for more technical PMs or their developer partners. Regardless, they should give you a sense of what kinds of things you need to check off your list.)


[Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Tech / Business / General, UI / UX

Saving Lives through Social Emotional Learning

September 10, 2025 By Scott

Lifesaving isn’t always about pulling someone from immediately dramatic danger. Sometimes it’s giving them the tools to rise from despair and build a life where they can thrive. That’s what I want to share with you today. These are some important things I’ve been working on recently as an advisor, and perhaps you can even help us.

Lifesaving and enhancement is why BuildingBlocs and The BrightPath Academy were created. They’re for anyone, but with special focus on several especially challenging situations. The organization is committed to delivering transformative education through emotional intelligence, with an ecosystem built on a foundation of books and workbooks, from financial literacy, and life-readiness through more challenging topics. It’s a holistic approach addressing the academic, social-emotional, and creative needs of learners across all life stages. While there’s a great deal of what many would consider to be obvious life skills, the content is designed for those who might not have typical exposure to such concepts through their home environment. Importantly, there is a focus on families that have experienced trauma, as well as special concerns of veterans, families who have been involved with the justice system, corrections officers, and more. There are specialized guides for veterans re-entering civilian life and for families navigating justice involvement, ensuring the curriculum isn’t just theory but directly relevant to the toughest real-world settings.

As well, there are emotional insight tools including red flag protocols: a trauma-informed, behavior recognition framework designed to help frontline professionals identify emotional escalation before it turns into disruption, shutdown, or violence. This framework is embedded into training guides and facilitator manuals, so staff in schools, ministries, or corrections don’t just hear the concept; they have a written playbook to use day-to-day.

These educational products have already been used by several organizations during development and are now ready for wider deployment.

My Perspective

Why am I involved with this? Why do I care?

My career has been building digital products. Days have the typical scope from strategy planning through design, information architecture, go to market and so on. The usual stuff of digital product craft. However, aside from career, I’ve been a long-time community volunteer in emergency services. Thousands of hours on ambulances or fire trucks. Thousands of rescue calls. It’s been a strange juxtaposition of experience at times. I’ve gone from treating a crash victim at 4 AM in freezing rain to logging into my corporate job a few hours later. Two very different worlds. But shaped how I see things, including both the robustness and fragility of life.

Through this lens I’ve seen how quickly lives can change based on adverse events, or from addiction. I’ve gone quickly from my day job of calm corporate to something else. OK, business life can get intense sometimes as well. But there’s a difference between concerns about deadlines and product launches vs. a tearful family member huddled in a corner saying, “Oh my God, what are we going to do now?” after a terrible family event.

BuildingBlocs is about a lot more than addiction, but I’m going to use that one area just to tell the story. To illustrate the value and the need for better programs than what we have now.

One Slip…

It can be challenging to understand how quickly an adverse change can occur. Again, this isn’t about addiction alone per se, but I’m going to use it as a primary example. (Consider seeing the Used to Survive book series, which reframes addiction as survival rather than identity, giving people tangible tools and strategies to move forward.)

Normally, I like to write about things that are really interesting to me, from AI to crypto to other digital things. But today, in this context, I’ll be perhaps overly candid with you.

I’ve never liked junkies. This may seem obvious. Who does?

After all, drug use is a choice, right? Plus, they lie. They’ll maybe physically attack you. They can be dirty. Even though I try hard to treat every patient as if they might be a friend or family member, there’s some you just have to be more careful of. Today, most EMS crews use some kind of electronic tablet for run reports. But some time ago, we used heavy aluminum clipboards. These were better for personal safety. Because they could be used to defend yourself. Patients struggling with addiction could be unpredictable, even violent. Here’s the thing though, these moments taught me that beneath my frustration was something deeper; fear of how thin the line is between them and me.

Because there’s something beyond just a dismissive dislike that holds more truth.

I think the real reason I don’t like drug users is they scare me because I realize how easy it is to end up that way… How easily that could be me or someone I care for. Which is why I have to treat everyone as best I can. It’s why if I find myself on some call where someone is just being a nightmare, I have to dig deeper for some empathy if I have to. Because here’s the reality… The difference between me and them is practically nothing. It’s a small accident of circumstance. Or as little as one really bad choice.

By the way, this is likely just as true for you as well.

Ever Come Close to It?

How people get to such dark places is not always what you think. It’s not just a progression of gateway drugs.

Every year, millions of Americans, around 8.6 million, report misusing prescription opioids, and over 5 million meet the criteria for prescription use disorder. When it comes to military veterans, the fallout is especially serious: overdose mortality among veterans increased by more than 50% between 2010 and 2019, and those with a nonfatal opioid overdose face mortality rates up to 26 times higher than the general population. This makes the journey from legitimate pain relief to addiction tragically easy. This has become a better-known story after the publicity around Oxycontin overprescription.

Have you ever used hard drugs? I have. Not recreationally. But I play a lot of sports and have been hurt badly enough to end up needing procedures that resulted in somewhat heavy prescriptions.

After sports injuries and surgeries, (including some reconstructive leg surgery just this past year), I’ve been prescribed opioids. I’ve felt how powerful and how dangerously appealing they can be. With sensible doctors and support, I was careful to get off them quickly. Not everyone is so lucky. That reality is why BuildingBlocs created both direct-use books for families and facilitator materials for professionals; resources that explain the science of tolerance, dependence, and relapse in ways people can actually use. The typical stages of progression are tolerance → dependence → addiction. That’s the cycle to interrupt.

From this personal experience perspective, I look at the risks for kids and others today. It’s so much higher now that even just a couple of decades ago. The drugs available, from synthetics to the raw power of them present higher risk. Consider Fentanyl alone. One pill to kill. Or turn someone into something else thanks to brain injury from hypoxia, neurological and cognitive defects, cardiac and organ damage, physical disability, and yes, of course, psychiatric and dependence risks. That’s just one example of potential impact from one drug.

Let’s Check our Biases for a Moment

Success can blind us. Confirmation bias makes us see only what supports our beliefs. Survivor bias makes us forget those who didn’t make it. Together, they trick us into thinking others had the same chances we did.

This makes sense. It’s how we deal with our world. We’re all entitled to confidence, enjoyable lives, joy, and so on. Who wants to think about all the trouble and pain in the world every moment? That wouldn’t be healthy. Bad enough our 24/7 news cycle has the “if it bleeds it leads” perspective and is more about inciting and inflaming, rather than informing. Still, at the same time, on occasion we should realize these issues exist. We can go on about our lives and be grateful for them, but also consider our judgment when things don’t work so well for others.

Is our dismissal of some others struggling with these issues because we hate them? Unlikely. Do we fear what some of them might do in society? Of course. But is there something else as well? Is there fear that the line between us and them is so thin? Because it is. Studies on addiction stigma show people often distance themselves from those with substance use disorders not just out of fear of crime or behavior, but because it threatens their own sense of control and safety. Social psychologists describe this as “othering,” pushing stigmatized groups away, to reassure ourselves that we are different. Research on mental health stigma (e.g., Link & Phelan’s work) finds people often fear the “contagion of similarity,” that what happened to someone else could happen to them under different circumstances. That’s part of why BuildingBlocs created not just facilitator training but also a suite of books for parents, teens, veterans, and justice-impacted families, meeting readers where they are with relatable stories and actionable exercises. Addiction is framed as a “moral failing” in some narratives, but neuroscience shows it’s a brain disease of reward circuitry. That makes the line between casual use and addiction disturbingly thin, which fuels unease. Erving Goffman’s work on stigma points out that reactions often reflect not hatred, but anxiety about our own vulnerability.

I am not suggesting to anyone to wallow in despair at the state of the world. For all of our challenges, if you take a long view of human history, we are arguably doing better off than any humans throughout history. Most of us live full lives and die of so-called “natural causes.” Often, other animals and even plants end their lives not through old age, but by being outright eaten by something or another! Do you know why there’s so much cancer around? Part of it is that we’re living longer than we used to so it shows up. The point is, we’re collectively doing well as a species over time. For all the travails of the world, things are great and we can – I believe – be fairly optimistic. But sometimes some of us have extra challenges. And maybe need some special tools to manage them. And optimism is exactly what these programs are built to provide. Step-by-step, book and program supported systems that move people from despair to practical hope.

The Pitch

BuildingBlocs and The BrightPath Academy have been several years in development and the programs are ready to help those in need. These programs are paired with their published books. Titles like Budget Like a Boss for financial literacy, Family Reset for intergenerational healing, and the Used to Survive series for addiction recovery. Each one is designed to connect directly with the courses and facilitator guides, so people can engage individually or in group settings.

If you are a school, a facility dealing with at-risk populations, a ministry, or similar, please spend some time checking out the available programs. Or perhaps you may personally know a family or individual that’s struggling. There are programs for direct help for those in need, as well as training materials for facilitators.

Whether through the published book series or online courses, BuildingBlocs makes the tools accessible. If you know an organization or even just one family that could benefit, point them here.

Thank you,
Scott Germaise
(Advisory Board Member)

Filed Under: Tech / Business / General

Teach Your Children (AI) Well

August 28, 2025 By Scott

This is for parents of school age children, which is generally elementary through middle-school age, but some consider it the full K – 12 period. Some of us may be AI builders. Others users, and some wish it would go away. Regardless, we have to help our kids navigate another technology. It’s another amazing tool, carries some risks, and maybe another distraction. I’ve written about AI GPT Safety & Issues for Kids earlier. This is more about some specific things to consider doing as a parent. This isn’t coming from a professional educator. Just a parent who works with these tools. I couldn’t find a good guideline to use with my own family. Most things I found were about safety or overly generic. So I’ve tried to make one.

What’s next is first some background regarding this area and then the Specific Guidelines. BUT YOU CAN SKIP THE BACKGROUND IF YOU LIKE and head right down to the section: Specific Guidelines for Teaching Kids

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Tech / Business / General, UI / UX

PM Perspective: Is AI a Great Business?

August 12, 2025 By Scott

Introduction

Short Answer? Maybe not so much. (At least when talking about the core tech vs. specialized solutions.) This won’t be as much about AI as about category and startup creation in general. AI just happens to provide us with a great developing case to review. (At least in terms of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) products.)

Product people need to zoom in and out. There’s so much noise around new AI features, we may forget to take a wider view. While we’re often responsible for detailed product roadmaps, some of us also do strategy and business planning. In that role, we need to think about offerings in terms of long term strategy. Rapid growth in AI LLMs / GPTs provides a case worth study in terms of new category creation. We should keep in mind that AI / ML has been around for decades. What’s interesting now is the LLM / GPT space is a great example of a Blue Ocean strategy that is perhaps only fulfilling its promise in a general way. That is, the rising tide is lifting many boats, but early pioneers might not be able to take margin advantaged positions, which should be a benefit in a new category. (If you buy the book, be sure to get the latest edition.) Even though OpenAI bust this category open, they didn’t get to a winner-take-all or even winner-take-most position.

Why?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Marketing, Product Management, Tech / Business / General

When LLM Models Get all Forked Up

August 1, 2025 By Scott

Things are going to get forking ridiculous. I think there’s already enough results in that I can make a prediction. And that’s this…

These new tools we have are going to get a lot better and also somewhat worse at the same time. Like a lot of you, I’m having great fun using some of these new tools. Sometimes as a consumer. Sometimes for digital product craft. And sometimes for personal experiments. Insofar as those of us working in Product should be paying attention to trends and adjusting our efforts, we should be watching this emerging area of a patchwork modelverse of LLM dark matter. (Apologies for mixing metaphors so early, but I’m just really an LLM myself with drastically limited training data.)

Why should we care from a Digital Product Management perspective? As we look at some of the To Do items below, it’s not necessarily a product person’s job to handle the specific task, but we should understand the risks and make sure at the very least that table stakes items are part of the work plan. Because we need to ensure what we build is not only performant to its fit-for-purpose build, but also be confident that go-to-market claims are trustworthy. And I think it’s possible a lot of our products may end up sitting on shelves next to dain bramaged garbage. Trust is still going to matter. Actually, more so than ever. But we’re going to have to prove quality and branding will still matter.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Tech / Business / General

GPTs and LLMs from a User Use Case Perspective

July 25, 2025 By Scott

Companies are missing the mark with AI projects. The headlines are not great.

  • Gartner Predicts 30% of Generative AI Projects Will Be Abandoned After Proof of Concept By End of 2025
  • Research by the RAND Corporation estimates more than 80% of AI projects fail, which is twice the rate of failure of non-AI projects.
  • Deloitte shows some benefits accruing such as uncovering ideas and insights with ROI generally positive, and yet, barriers due to mistakes with real-world consequences.
  • BCG’s 2025 survey indicates only “25% of executives are seeing significant value from AI”, with projects vulnerable due to unclear use cases and poor data readiness.

What’s going on? And more to the point; can product people help improve these outcomes?

Perhaps there are efforts to solve tech problems, but not always customer problems. From a Product person’s perspective, it’s time to re-visit basics and use cases. In the add AI scramble, there’s confusion about our shiny new toys. You see it in the drive to do anything with them. You see ridiculous job requirements posted from tech to product asking 5 – 10 years experience deploying AI. (For traditional ML, that may be fair. But they usually mean GPTs/LLMs, which have only been around a handful of years.)

Let’s reconsider our new capabilities from customer use case perspectives with focus on LLMs/GPTs. While also growing, we’ll skip traditional ML as it’s a separate and better understood category. (Things like regression models, decision trees, or clustering algorithms used in fields like finance, logistics, or medical diagnostics, which have established frameworks and decades of practical application.)

Why should we try a look from use case perspectives? Because for those of us that work in Product, instead of panicking figuring out how to check off the “We’re doing AI” into a checkbox in an Annual Report or a marketing piece, it might be useful to have clarity of purpose. We’ll focus on Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) and the Large Language Models (LLMs) over traditional ML or multi-modal GPTs.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Marketing, Product Management, Tech / Business / General

The Continuing Sandwich Attack Irony in Crypto

July 17, 2025 By Scott

In DeFi, you’re not always eating the sandwich, sometimes you are the sandwich.

Crypto trade front running is hardly news. So why bring it up again? There have been rises in this practice in 2025 so it’s worth taking another look. More importantly, there’s somewhat recent changes giving us options to cut down the risk. Part of the latest rise might be due to the latest crypto bull cycle, or new blockchain ecosystems. It’s also plausible that some are using newer AI tools to level up their bot game. In any case, I’ll cover the core issue for those not already familiar, then lay out some of the relatively new tools we can use. Some have been around awhile, but only recently started showing up in user-friendly wallets and services.

This problem of front running trades shouldn’t exist at all in a supposedly permissionless and trustless environment. Let’s remember part of why crypto was invented. There’s a lot about traditional finance (TradFi) that’s opaque to retail traders. No one seems to pay much attention until something breaks. We can infer the regulators don’t, can’t, or won’t do much to stop this. At least they haven’t so far, beyond a handful of show trials and fines that are small enough compared to gains that they’re just a cost of doing business. Some might argue front running in crypto is not even a flaw in the “trustless” design (which relies on code and consensus) but is just a tradeoff of openness, which happens to enable attacks without breaking rules. That may be true from a purist standpoint. But I’d argue it’s not a viable position for the long-term health of the ecosystem.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Tech / Business / General

Agents for Content Discovery and Ideation

July 15, 2025 By Scott

TL;DR

If you’re a product manager crafting content production workflows for yourself, a client, or your team, start by explicitly defining your values and strategy. (After all, values like authenticity can be core to your strategic edge.) What follows are practical ideas and a walkthrough of how this plays out in a real-world example: a niche medical site powered by AI agents for discovery and ideation.

AI tools don’t need to be garbage generators. They can be useful partners when used thoughtfully with humans in the loop. Here’s just a couple of ways AIs can help in market discovery and content creation, backed by real-world examples from my niche medical community site, ACLSupport.com. Key takeaways: Leverage AI to uncover customer insights quickly and streamline production, while maintaining your unique voice. In a market where AI content tools are projected to reach $2.38 billion by 2032, and the Generative AI In Content Creation Market $134.23 billion, businesses that integrate these tools ethically will gain a competitive edge.

The AI Content Debate: Addressing Key Concerns

As AI reshapes content marketing, backlash centers on two main issues: quality and authenticity.

Quality: The “AI Generates Garbage” Debate

Critics argue AI output often feels generic, optimized for clicks rather than value. This may be true for low-effort prompts churning out clickbait, but it’s not inherent to the technology. Content creators, writers, marketers, understandably worry about disintermediation. Yet, as with any tool, results depend on the user. Poor input yields poor output, much like spellcheckers can’t fix flawed ideas.

Authenticity: The Authenticity Dilemma

The deeper unease stems from the “uncanny valley.” If you haven’t heard of this, it’s kind of a creepy feeling when something mimics humanity imperfectly. We dislike being deceived, especially where source transparency matters. Blockchain might have a partial solution by verifying origins as I’ve written about, but for now, we don’t have this industry infrastructure. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B Content Marketing report, while 81% of B2B marketers use generative AI, 45% lack usage guidelines, underscoring gaps in prioritizing authenticity. As is often the case, our practices lag the cutting edge tech.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Marketing, Product Management, Tech / Business / General, UI / UX

Fear of Agent Rot: Lobotomies in Smart Systems

June 20, 2025 By Scott

tl;dr

Are you a builder? Probably if you’re here. Either way, we’re all getting carried along in several recent trends. As we race to automate everything with shiny new AI tools, we’re also stacking up fragile workflows and hidden dependencies, setting ourselves up for a quiet kind of chaos I’m calling Agent Rot. It’s like Link Rot, but for smart systems. The short answer is to just pay attention to this. For more, here’s why it’s happening, what could go wrong, and what we can do to keep our bots from forgetting what they were built to do.


Agent Rot will put Link Rot to shame. It’s not quite here yet, but I’m giving it a name. Because for now our burgeoning bright, shiny, new AI/GPT automation tools still have that “Fresh New Workflow Scent!” But what challenges will we face when they start to get creaky?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Tech / Business / General, UI / UX

Adding a GPT with RAG to a WordPress Site

June 19, 2025 By Scott

A couple of weeks ago I deployed a small WordPress website in support of a particular medical community. My goal was to test using WordPress vs. A Gen AI website builder and see how well a moderately technical product manager type, (but not a developer), could use some tools to make digital things. I kind of joked at the end that “I’ll probably toss in a GPT Chat feature because, well, I mean… it’s 2025.” I wasn’t actually going to bother, but, really now… it is 2025 after all. The site should have a GPT. So let’s have at it! (Here’s the end result by the way: ACL-GPT.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Tech / Business / General, UI / UX

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Recent Posts

  • Agentic & AI Business Safety for Product Managers – Part 1
  • Saving Lives through Social Emotional Learning
  • Teach Your Children (AI) Well
  • PM Perspective: Is AI a Great Business?
  • When LLM Models Get all Forked Up

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