Farewell to 2025, welcome to 2026
Here are 5 ideas that produced the best posts of 2025. LLMs made things easier, and you still have to find high value things to do. Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #285
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
Today’s bonus newsletter is a look back at some of the essays that year that represent recurring themes.
Edition 285 of this newsletter is here - it’s December 31, 2025.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Farewell to 2025, welcome to 2026
If there’s a single theme to take away from writing 52 essays in 2025, it’s that shipping it is a good model.
Starting with the blank page is never fun, but finding a process and sticking to it helps with writing.
The product lesson? Build systems you want to keep using that remove less interesting tasks from your plate. Focus on the highest value activity for your time, and better things will follow.
With that in mind, here are 5 takeaways from 2025, ordered around the 5 most popular essays I wrote this year.
Idea 1: LLMs and Chatbots are a necessary tool in your toolbelt
If you got stuck this year thinking “how do I use a chatbot to get stuff done”, you might be thinking too much about Claude or ChatGPT the consumer product. In 2025, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and a million other companies made it a lot easier for you to use these tools for … anything you want.
I’d recommend starting with: “what can it do for me while I’m sleeping” or “what can it do that saves me time.”
Utility applications start with daily tasks
In January, I wrote about the ability of Chatbots to interact with your other apps through timed, daily tasks. This is one of the building blocks of basic applications, and it's key to bringing LLMs into daily use.
Idea 2: Internal product delivers internal leverage
Building products inside your company is not the same problem as building for an external audience. If you swing too far toward a consumer mindset, it takes too long to get anything done. If you build only for internal power users, no one will use your product.
Balancing that contradiction is a theme from 2025, especially when it comes to using “wake up and do stuff” agents that fill important gaps without requiring you to build an entire interface.
The Hidden Cost of Not Building Internal Tools
April brought this piece on the hidden cost of *not building* internal tools. When you keep combining off the shelf tools to do a custom job, eventually it makes more sense to build the custom thing.
Idea 3: LLMs are great at finding needles in haystacks
If you know what you’re looking for, LLMs are amazing at finding needles in haystacks. The trick, of course, is defining your search criteria, testing the result with evals, and delivering a deterministic result from a non-deterministic source.
One of my favorite themes from this year is automated search, where you define a target, sift results, and visualize the results. It’s a lot easier to build a market map than it was last year.
Best CRMs for Startups: 2025 Market Map by Speed, AI, and Cost
2025 marked the year when you could start building data pipelines with an LLM in the middle, creating categorization and classification options that were much too expensive or difficult to try in the past without a dedicated team.
Idea 4: Building answers to business problems is valuable
2025 turned anyone who wanted to become an engineer into an engineer. With command line tools like OpenAI Codex and Claude Code and Cursor Agent, it’s now possible to make a branch, fix production bugs, and push code like an engineer, even if it takes you more tries at the PR than some of the other team members.
The point is that engineering expertise is now a requirement in more areas of the business, so we all need to get comfortable with how to create, push, test (and maybe rollback) changes. When we combine regular tools and Saas tools, that requires more creativity.
What is a GTM Engineer, anyway?
People keep asking about 2025's trendy term, "GTM engineer." It turns out it's the same person who was able to plug data into systems, run pipelines, and get answers to business problems as in 2024. But the name moves engineering into the GTM space officially.
Idea 5: “Automagical” visual creation delivers dividends
If there’s one theme that kept surfacing for me in 2025, it’s product thoughts about graphical stories that build themselves. Whether it’s building a graphics library that does this or thinking about improvements for dataviz through products, this topic kept coming up.
It’s a great goal in product to automate things that you don’t want to do while getting them done at high quality, then switching to a new bottleneck.
Request for product: an embeddable timeline widget
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
What’s the takeaway for 2026? Keep on shipping it!
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon