I look at product features through a lens of value adding features, commodity/basic non value adding features, and negative value adding features (commodity fea

I look at product features through a lens of value adding features, commodity/basic non value adding features, and negative value adding features (commodity features done poorly). A good example is sign up and sign in functionality. You have to have it. It doesn't do anything valuable. But if you do it poorly it removes value from your product. I like this as an example because lots of product owners try to innovate with this and then somehow botch the job and create needless onboarding friction or otherwise annoy their users. And other product owners try to play it safe and simply copy what others do without wasting much energy on the topic. Which is why in 2026, you still see companies insisting on good old email+password based signup processes. Because it is what everybody else does. Both are creating negative value for their products by either over or under engineering something that is pretty important but essentially a commodity thing. Worst case, this can result in a lot of potential users abandoning an attempt to use the product before they ever even experience the amazing feature set it has to offer. You see this a lot in product design. Most projects are 90% copy paste jobs with a lot of common, non differentiating and completely bland/unremarkable stuff. LLMs are very good at copy pasting. But there are a lot of decisions that when you challenge them a little bit would result in a very different and arguably better product. A good onboarding experience can make all the difference. And then there's the simple notion of what is the quickest way to validate that your value adding features are good enough. Which mostly boils down to finding a way where you get those in the hands of users without wasting most of your time on the non value adding stuff that is nice to have but otherwise won't make a difference. LLMs kind of allow you to compress the time you waste on this stuff and do a better job of it. Which is a different way of saying that you will create negative value if you don't use LLMs or otherwise botch the job.