Feed the AI Beast

A common pitfall for junior product managers is “feeding the beast”: over-focusing on keeping their engineers busy. As AI coding tools empower more people to essentially product manage coding agents, many people are falling into this same pitfall of focusing on tokens used over value delivered.

Marty Cagan’s writing in the original is worth quoting in full:

For those that haven’t heard the term before, “feed the beast” refers to one of the most common problems with product teams, and one of the top reasons for failed projects. It’s very easy to spot. If you find a product manager that is scrambling to finish up his PRD because the developers are freeing up from their current project on Monday and the very thought of the developers not having a fresh spec ready to go sends the product manager (and especially senior management) into a panic, that’s what we call “feed the beast.”

In 2026, “feeding the AI beast” looks like the founder who brags about how they are consistently hitting the usage limits of their Claude Max 20x plan or the engineer who feels passé because they aren’t managing 10 agents simultaneously from their laptop plus 3 more on their phone. It’s the companies who monitor token usage as an employee performance metric or the bootstrapper who is slowly drowning trying to review and unblock their AI assistants out of fear that they may not fully utilize their OpenAI subscription’s token allotment. These behaviors are toxic and optimize for the wrong thing.

Before AI agents, it didn’t matter how many features your product had if you built the wrong thing. The same thing is true today. If you don’t yet have something clearly valuable to build, focus your energy on product discovery, even if it means spending a day or a week talking with customers without worrying about whether Claude is idle. It’s okay. Really, it is.

And yes, AI tools are really helpful in creating prototypes for product discovery, and certainly once you have line-of-sight to a valuable product go ahead and let ‘em rip. But keep top of mind that your goal is maximizing value not feeding the AI beast.