Workflow is king 👑 Every time a new AI model drops, like today, I see the same reaction: panic. People feel like they’re falling behind, like another part of their job just became automated. And I get it—because most of us were never taught how to describe the actual structure of our work. We know what we produce, but not how it moves. Not how a decision gets made, how a spec comes together, or how clarity spreads through a team. This piece is about that invisible layer—your workflow. Not your tasks. Not your tools. The seven core motions underneath almost every job: making sense of input, deciding what to do, creating something that communicates, sharing it with others, moving it forward, making it repeatable, and learning from it after the fact. If you don’t understand these motions, AI will always feel like chaos. But once you do? You start to see exactly where a model helps—and where your judgment still matters more than ever. This isn’t a prompt guide. It’s a map. A way to finally see how your job works under the hood, and how to stay relevant—not by working faster, but by working clearer. I wrote it because I needed it. You might too. #product #productmanager #productmanagement #startup #business #openai #llm #ai #microsoft #google #gemini #anthropic #claude #llama #meta #nvidia #career #careeradvice #mentor #mentorship #mentortiktok #mentortok #careertok #job #jobadvice #future #2024 #story #news #dev #coding #code #engineering #engineer #coder #sales #cs #marketing #agent #work #workflow #smart #thinking #strategy #cool #real #jobtips #hack #hacks #tip #tips #tech #techtok #techtiktok #openaidevday #aiupdates #techtrends #voiceAI #developerlife #cursor #replit #pythagora #bolt

You know, if you're feeling overwhelmed by AI right now, like every new model, including the new one from OpenAI just today, makes you feel a little bit more replaceable, you're not alone. A lot of us are feeling it. Smart people, thoughtful people, and it's not because you're doing something wrong. It's just because the ground is moving faster than most of us have words for. You probably know your role. You know what you're responsible for. You know your outputs, what you ship, what you write, what you build. But if I asked you to describe how your work actually moves, how input turns into a decision, how a customer complaint can become a roadmap item, how your thinking becomes something others can build on, that one's harder. A lot of people have trouble explaining that. And that's not actually on you. It's because no one's ever taught all of us how to see the workflow underneath our work. That's where the value lives, in that motion. And that matters because that is where the leverage from AI occurs. If you want to use AI to supercharge your work, that's the level you have to be operating at. Here's an example to make it a little bit more concrete. Sensemaking. Sensemaking is the process of turning messy, scattered inputs into something concrete, something real, something actionable. Maybe it's user research. Maybe it's, I don't know, a pile of support tickets. Maybe it's a dense call transcript. It's something. You dig through it all. You have to figure out what's going on. That's not a task, per se. You can't put in a little box what that looks like. That's actually a whole motion. And if you understand it, you can use AI to support it so you can be more effective, so you can go faster. And if you don't, you're not really accelerating. You're just going to be doing the same thing over and over again with sensemaking. Now, you may say to me, I don't do sensemaking, Nate. That's fine. There are a few key workflows underneath a lot of different roles. Sensemaking is just one of them. I actually wrote up a whole post that details seven workflows that underlie a lot of what we do day to day. Your job probably includes multiple of these. Decision making is one. Sensemaking is one. There's like five others. The point is that if we understand the workflow, if we understand the motion that gets us from the starting point to delivering value, that's when we can start to see where AI actually plugs in. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get a really concrete sense of what are the workflows in tech that matter? Why do they matter? And how can AI be used concretely to actually level them up so that we feel we have something to start with in our AI journeys and it doesn't feel as overwhelming? This post is completely free because I think it just needs to get out there. So I think it's like 30 some pages and it's not all prompts, actually. It's like a lot of thoughtful writing about these seven workflows. So feel free to go check it out. Throw the link in. Cheers. And as always, if you don't want to read it, you can just get more of me here on TikTok.