Seshan: Long docs no longer signal rigor; prototypes and mocks win
Tara Seshan · AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead) · Aug 30, 2026 · at 56:01
Tara Seshan, OpenAI product lead, explains how AI has transformed internal product communication norms at OpenAI compared to her prior tenure at Stripe.
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“A long dock is not a signal that you thought through something because you can easily produce a long dock That indicates that you haven't, and so actually the point, maybe one of the biggest changes I've experienced personally in my day-to-day, which has been a big, maybe jarring change, is I used to think in a document and then do some translation of that into a presentational artifact, and that would be my indication that I had thought through a problem, and this is what we're going to do, and the team moves in that direction, and now I am way more on mocks, not docs, or prototypes, not docs, And if I have something that people can try and interact with, or even better, I have, like, results where we tried this, we ran an AB, here's, like, the results, this is why I think we should, like, go in this direction. That is a way better communication tool than, like, the doc itself.”
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