The AI bubble’s economic fundamentals 🫧, getting promoted 🚀, throwing out your playbook 📚

AI investment is racing ahead of real returns, creating classic bubble conditions. Most enterprise pilots aren't working yet ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR Product Management 2025-11-14 Unified Invoicing for Every Revenue Motion: Metronome Launch Week (Sponsor) What's happening: Metronome just introduced new capabilities that bring automation and unification to how companies monetize across every GTM motion—from self-serve to enterprise to cloud marketplaces. What's new: Teams can now manage PLG invoicing, sales-led contracts, and marketplace transactions (including GCP along with already-supported AWS and Azure) in one system using the same rate cards and pricing logic across all channels. Why it matters: When every motion runs on one monetization infrastructure, revenue scales faster. Unified invoicing helps teams: Launch new channels without rebuilding billing infrastructure Maintain consistent pricing and revenue visibility across PLG, SLG, and marketplace motions Eliminate manual reconciliation and duplicate billing logic Read more on the Metronome blog > 📱 News & Trends What's really going on in software (7 minute read) SaaS metrics have stabilized while AI-native companies grow far faster and reshape productivity across the industry. The strongest growth appears in companies with AI at the core. In Search of the AI Bubble's Economic Fundamentals (10 minute read) AI investment is racing ahead of real returns, creating classic bubble conditions. Most enterprise pilots aren't working yet. True productivity gains may only arrive after today's hype inevitably deflates. 🚀 Opinions & Tutorials Why Being Capable Doesn't Get You Promoted (3 minute read) Promotions in leadership depend on business need, not performance alone. The fastest path upward is finding teams with real openings and growth. The Lenses (5 minute read) A systems map contains many lenses, but someone must choose which ones matter. Ops succeeds when it brings clarity, not complexity. 🧑‍💻 Resources & Tools PMI course: Product x Project Management - The Collaboration Playbook (Sponsor) Are you thriving with project teams — or stuck speaking different languages? This PMI course gives product managers a framework to collaborate better. Concise and outcome-focused, it reflects the increasing overlap between product and project roles. Take the course for $39 or get it free with a PMI membership. Sign up for the course How to ship a mobile app (aka The Submission Gauntlet) (7 minute read) Launching mobile apps is harder because Google and Apple require real testing, real feedback, and real judgment. The challenge is not building the app but navigating people, process, and product choices. AI Marketplaces (74 minute podcast) AI makes marketplaces faster, but trust and local expertise still win. ACV Auctions proves that buyer-first trust, clean data, guarantees, and regional depth are what truly scale vertical platforms. 🎁 Miscellaneous Tinder to use AI to get to know users, tap into their Camera Roll photos (12 minute read) Tinder's new AI matching feature relies on scanning users' photos, but the privacy cost seems higher than the benefit. Despite rolling out fresh AI tools and redesigns, the app continues to lose subscribers in a tougher dating market. The biggest model update this week (8 minute read) Kimi K2 brings open-source to frontier quality through self-correcting reasoning, beating GPT-5.1 on real-world product decisions. GPT-5.1 now focuses on warmth and tighter instruction-following, making interactions feel friendlier and more reliable. ⚡ Quick Links Valz: One Platform for Tasks + Documents (Sponsor) Kill the context switch: track tasks, collaborating on docs, and managing workflows. Think Notion + Jira + Confluence + Asana. Up to 3 months free trial when you book a demo 6 months at Lovable and why I had to throw out most of my playbook (3 minute read) Growth depends on rapid invention, cross-functional work, and letting go of old patterns. Re-Establishing Focus and Execution Across the Org (1 minute read) DRIs, fast decisions, and a customer-obsessed edge keep the team hungry and focused. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/b3142ada/9 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of product management professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Ellen Le & Sinan Zhang Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Product Management isn't for you, please unsubscribe.