The Death of Product

For the last decade, the tech industry has been powered by a single archetype:

The Cracked Engineer.

Brilliant, overclocked, and optimized for IQ at the expense of everything else.

They built fast.
They shipped faster.
And they treated emotional nuance as noise.

Their superpower was execution.
Their weakness was interpretation.

They could architect systems, but not sense people.
They could scale infrastructure, but not meaning.
They could optimize funnels, but not feelings.

And for a long time, that worked.

IQ was scarce.
The internet itself was emotionally blind.
The world rewarded speed over sensitivity.

But that era is ending.

AI has automated IQ.
Technical ability is no longer a moat.
Execution is no longer a differentiator.

The old paradigm is cracking, and with it, the archetype that defined it.
A new one is rising in its place.

THE BROKER

Tech's next generation of builders

The next generation of builders will not look like yesterday's engineers.
They will be Brokers, people who live at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and technology.

Not coders by trade, but deeply technical.
Not designers by schooling, but fluent in pattern recognition.
Not product managers, but intuitive enough to roadmap behavior at scale.

A Broker feels the problem before they define it.
They sense the emotional gap before they articulate the technical one.
They operate like root-level users in the problem directory of human existence.

Historically, their imaginations outpaced what they could build.
But with AI in their hands, that bottleneck is gone.

They do not build because they can code.
They build because they can feel what needs to exist.

They design thought.
They translate feeling into infrastructure.

This shift, from execution to interpretation and from IQ to EQ, is reshaping the entire logic of product.

PRODUCT IS NO LONGER THE POINT

Why product becomes the means, not the endpoint

In the early tech era, "What does your product do?" was the north star.
That era rewarded features, speed, and surface-level utility.

But we have entered a market of saturation and sameness.
Everyone has access to the same tools, the same data, the same talent.

Product is no longer scarce.
Meaning is.

AI tools are flooding the world with content.
Volume is no longer scarce.
Authenticity and trust are.

The next wave of value will not come from producing more output.
It will come from owning and leveraging compounding data to surface what is real, what is resonant, and what is true.

From my time working with the CPO at a previous company, securing products on cloud infrastructure, I learned something foundational:

The competitive edge is not how much data you have.
It is how much context you can extract.

The real moat is a maximized context window.
It is the ability to combine diverse data types to surface correlations that reveal the closest summarized narrative of an ecosystem.
A true view.

This is why product-first companies, the ones who treat product as the final destination of creativity, will be obsolete within two years.

Product is no longer the endpoint.
It is an instrument.

The real value is the intelligence behind the product.
The emotional accuracy of the insights it delivers.

And here is the part most people miss:

People assume emotions cannot be systematized because they feel abstract.
But abstraction is just physics we have not decoded yet.

EQ will become infrastructure.
And that is how we inch toward AGI.

This is the world the Broker builds in.
And this is the discipline they use to build.

THOUGHT DESIGN

How Brokers build in an EQ-driven world

If the last era of tech was defined by "move fast and break things,"
the next era will be defined by something far more human:

The ability to understand and be understood.

Miscommunication is the root problem of the modern world.
Every conflict, every burnout cycle, every identity crisis, every fractured community traces back to the same missing feeling:

Understanding.
Being understood.
Feeling like you understand others.
Feeling complete.

This is the emotional gap the Broker senses first.
And Thought Design is the discipline that turns that sensed need into structure.

It works like this:

A Broker starts with the missing feeling.

They build frameworks that give that feeling shape.

Those frameworks power product algorithms.

The product collects the right context.

The context becomes intelligence.

The intelligence returns the missing feeling to the user.
Completion.

At Angel, we define objective good as well-intended actions that help the entire set reach completion.
Thought Design is how you build toward that.

And our first product is the clearest example of this loop in action.

ANGEL AS LIVING EXAMPLE

How Thought Design becomes real

At Angel, we did not build a product.
We built an insight infrastructure.

A system designed to solve miscommunication at scale by making the internet emotionally intelligent.

Our first product, HomeAngel, is an AI Creative Consultant for Gen Z creators.

It interprets signals from a creator's emotional state, audience habits, and toxic engagements, turning them into conversational next steps:

• what to create
• when and where to share it
• when to protect their energy
• how to maintain identity while growing
• how to avoid distortion
• how to stay whole while scaling impact

The result is growth that does not sacrifice mental health or authenticity.
HomeAngel does not just optimize content.
It nurtures the creator.

It returns the missing feeling, understanding, at scale.

This is Thought Design in practice.
This is the Broker's loop made real.
This is how EQ becomes infrastructure.

THE FINAL TURN: CHURCH + STATE

Where the next evolution of value creation emerges

Here is the hot take:

The first company to reconcile church and state, to remove the divide between who we are privately and who we perform as professionally, will unlock the next evolution of value creation.

It will not feel like a corporation.
It will feel like a bonded collective.
A decentralized clan.

And when AI surpasses us in every intellectual task, the only thing left that is purely human will be story.
Our ability to create, carry, and share meaning.

The future will not be about building fast.
It will be about feeling first.

And that future is not coming.
It is already here.