How Product Discovery changes with AI – by David Hoang
February 2, 2026
In Jenny Wen’s talk at Hatch Conference in 2025, “Don’t Trust the Process,” she raises an important point: the processes we’ve established are rapidly becoming lagging indicators. Process is important, but it should work for you, not the other way around.
People worshipped the process artifacts, not the final result. We’re in a moment where the moment you document a process, it becomes irrelevant. I don’t believe it’ll be like this forever, but until software is completely rewritten with AI as a core capability, it’s going to be like this for a while.
So, where does Product Discovery change? Let’s revisit those four risks.
Last week, we referenced Jenny Nguyen’s talk at Hatch Conference where she revisited the product design process that has been widely adopted over the last decade or so. She asked the question: Does this still make as much sense in an age of AI? The answer, for the most part, is probably not.
It’s something we’re seeing elsewhere, particularly with software engineering, where that long-term software engineering or software development life cycle that we’ve evolved over the last 15 or 20 years perhaps doesn’t make as much sense in a world of Ralph Wiggums and Gas Towns and, of course, other approaches to AI-generated software.
Here, David Huang asks a similar question about product discovery. We had a talk at our recent Next conference, the video will be available soon, which also considers this particular issue. In short, we’ve developed processes and approaches that made sense in terms of the scale and capability of humans and human teams across design, product, and engineering. That when AI large language models are a part—indeed, often a significant part—of our process now may not make as much sense. I don’t think folks like David or Jenny have so much as answers right now but more are thinking about existing processes and the sorts of things that might change.
Whatever your field, I think it’s well worth considering these challenges, which also represent opportunities.
