--- title: "The Six Traps of AI Adoption (and How to Get Out of Them)" speaker: Faith Forster role: Founder and Chief Maker, Discoveree company: Discoveree conference: Just Product 2026, Munich, 16 October 2026 track: AI Mindset Shift slot: 11:00 duration_minutes: 24 video: https://media.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/video/04-faith-forster.mp4 slides: https://media.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/slides/04/Just Product 2026 - Faith Forster - The Four Traps of AI Adoption (and How to Get Out of Them).pdf page: https://www.product-masterclass.com/just-product-2026/recap/talks/04-faith-forster.html language: en source: automatic transcript of the livestream, edited summary --- # The Six Traps of AI Adoption (and How to Get Out of Them) **Faith Forster**, Founder and Chief Maker, Discoveree. AI Mindset Shift, 11:00, Just Product 2026. > AI made building fast, so teams skip the thinking; name the six traps and use the Makers Manifesto principles to rethink instead. ## Summary Faith Forster opens with a familiar Monday morning. Engineers or their agents have built three features over the weekend, nobody knows who asked for them, sales want to demo, and the CEO has seen a competitor's release video. Her diagnosis: AI has made engineering much faster, which puts pressure on product to keep up, so people shortcut or skip discovery and nobody asks whether the feature should exist. It feels like progress and often is not. In spring she spoke to 96 product leaders about their AI use and found wildly different levels of understanding. The old rule book was gone, so she gathered 45 cross-disciplinary operators and wrote the Makers Manifesto: four values, 16 principles, an Agile Manifesto for the AI age. The talk was announced with four traps and grew to six, each a kind of thinking teams skip when they rush, each paired with a principle. Tokenmaxxing is measuring activity instead of value, with Uber as the cautionary tale: a leaderboard ranked teams by AI usage, the year's budget was gone in four months, and when asked what customers got, COO Andrew Macdonald said that link is not there yet. Principle 7, measure what drives value. The Abandoned Junior is handing agents work with no context, then concluding AI does not work, as she saw on the board of an HR tech scale-up. The way we like it had never been written down. Principle 6, make context explicit. Onboard your agent the way you would onboard a graduate. It's Live is calling a feature done when it ships. Faith's line is that distribution, adoption, monetization and retention are not what comes after the making, they are the making now. Omio put a subscription live within three months and then spent six months refining packaging and revenue impact until average order value and tickets per customer rose. Principle 9, make for adoption. The Fire Hydrant is shipping faster than customers can absorb. Fin, formerly Intercom, tripled throughput and shipped nine tier one releases in two months until customers complained that the product no longer made sense; they now run one major release per quarter. Principle 8, match pace to readiness. Humans are the bottleneck, and often those humans are your customers. AI Ate My Homework is letting the model decide and hoping for the best. Deloitte Australia repaid half a million dollars after an unsourced AI statistic landed in client work, and Air Canada tried to blame its own chatbot in a tribunal, which called that a remarkable submission. Principle 16, humans sign the work: you can delegate decisions but not accountability. Lipstick on Legacy is adding a sparkle icon to last year's roadmap instead of asking what problem is worth solving. The winners rebuild: Fin sold to Salesforce for about 3.6 billion dollars, Pendo rethought analytics as an agent with Novus, and Faith rebuilt Discoveree in six weeks. Her closing ask: download the manifesto, give it to your agents, run a retro on one value, and name your trap. ## Key takeaways 1. Replace AI usage leaderboards and percent of code written by AI with a metric that ties AI spend to customer outcomes or revenue. 2. Write down what good looks like for your codebase and documents, then onboard agents with that context before judging their output. 3. Share the rationale behind each feature and the outcome you expect with your agents, not just the ticket. 4. Move the definition of done from shipped to adopted, and plan the months of refinement after launch into the roadmap. 5. Set release pace by what customers can absorb, for example one major release per quarter with small refinements between. 6. Put a named human on every consequential AI decision so the post-mortem never says the root cause was the model. 7. Re-ask what problem is worth solving before adding AI to every roadmap line, because build speed now allows a fundamentally different solution. 8. Download the Makers Manifesto, pick one value for your next retro, and ask the team which thinking you are skipping. ## Chapters (timestamps in the talk video) - 0:01 Intro and the Monday morning story - 3:11 96 product leaders, the Makers Manifesto - 6:03 Trap 1: Tokenmaxxing, the Uber story - 8:38 Trap 2: The Abandoned Junior - 11:01 Trap 3: It's Live, Omio - 13:39 Trap 4: The Fire Hydrant, Fin - 15:53 Trap 5: AI Ate My Homework - 18:11 Trap 6: Lipstick on Legacy - 21:14 Recap and the smallest next step ## Highlight moments - 2:23 to 3:11: **Faster builds, skipped thinking**. The core diagnosis of the talk: engineering speed pushes product to skip discovery, and it only feels like progress. - 7:39 to 8:38: **Uber burned a year's AI budget in four months**. The token maxing story with the COO quote that made executives start asking what the spend buys customers. - 9:54 to 11:01: **You would never abandon a graduate**. The onboarding analogy that reframes agent setup as teaching, and the PM's job as sharing rationale and outcomes. - 14:54 to 15:53: **Fin shipped faster than customers could absorb**. A concrete 3x productivity story that turns into a lesson about customers as the real bottleneck. - 16:19 to 16:56: **Humans sign the work**. Principle 16 in one breath, backed by the Deloitte case and the post-mortem that blamed the model. - 21:06 to 21:55: **Six traps, one instruction: rethink**. The recap of all six trap names and the closing argument that the build will only get faster. ## Quotes - "If there's one thing you take away from today, it's this. Don't rush to keep up. Rethink instead." (5:51) - "You've hired a brilliant graduate, you give them no onboarding, no examples, no feedback, and then by Friday you decide they're not good enough. That's exactly what we're doing to our agents." (10:05) - "Distribution, adoption, monetization, retention, they don't come after the making. That is what making is now." (11:17) - "Yes, humans are the bottleneck, but often not the humans within your own business. It's your customers." (15:35) - "You can delegate decisions, but you cannot delegate accountability." (16:31) - "If the definition of done is shifted from shipping to adoption, that is a whole different way of working." (25:06) ## Q&A (not in the video, summarised from the stream) **Q: Any tips for the fire hydrant problem when even internal teams cannot keep up with the shipping pace?** Shift the definition of done from shipping to adoption and organise roadmap, planning and teams around it; she calls this the biggest mindset shift in the manifesto. Less discovery is fine if you build to learn and verify with customers that the problem and the impact are right. It has to come from the executive level, because a PM told to push features out cannot fix it alone. **Q: When the backlog is empty and developers ask what to do next, do you have a slow-down list for them too?** Start with no-regrets moves, the work you know needs doing with low risk of being wrong. Then stop treating product as PMs and designers doing all the thinking up front and handing off; involve developers in building to learn, since you can create ten prototypes now where one used to be expensive, and test them with internal users and close customers. ## Mentioned - Makers Manifesto (makersmanifesto.org): four values, 16 principles, written by 45 cross-disciplinary operators; downloadable in a version for humans and a version for agents - Discoveree.com: Faith's company, a shared context layer or product brain for teams, rebuilt from scratch in six weeks - Uber: internal AI usage leaderboard, 2026 AI coding budget spent by April; COO Andrew Macdonald: that link is not there yet - Fin (formerly Intercom): 3x throughput, nine tier one releases in two months, now one major release per quarter; CTO Darragh Curran quote on humans as the bottleneck; Salesforce deal of about 3.6 billion dollars in June 2026 - Omio: first subscription product in its category live in three months, six months of refinement after - Dext: Faith's former company, nine months to redo pricing and packaging - Air Canada (Moffatt v. Air Canada): tribunal ordered C$650 refund after the airline blamed its chatbot - Deloitte Australia: repaid half a million dollars over an unsourced AI generated statistic - Pendo Novus: analytics rethought as an agent, covered by Dave Killeen later in the day - Agile Manifesto: the rule book the Makers Manifesto replaces for the AI age - Simonetta: introduced Faith to Sebastian and Thomas and co-authored the manifesto - Martin: earlier speaker who mentioned the Salesforce and Fin deal - An HR tech scale-up where Faith sits on the board: the 'so we just do it ourselves' story ## About the speaker Faith Forster is a product leader in B2B SaaS and fintech, including Wise, Dext and Legl, with two exits. She is the founder of Discoveree, a shared context layer for product teams, co-hosts a weekly podcast on building AI native products, and organises the Makers Manifesto. - Discoveree: https://discoveree.com - Makers Manifesto: https://makersmanifesto.org