Soch
.Urdu for thought.
Most teams shipping AI features are guessing at whether it works and what it costs. These are notes from not guessing.
Abdul Hannan Shaikh, senior technical PM at APIMatic. Nine years in B2B SaaS.
Latest Soch
MCP's Second Spec: Reopening the Ledger
Ten months ago I wrote down what was working in MCP and what wasn't, and named two gaps. The 2026-07-28 spec shipped in July and it is wire-incompatible in both directions. One gap closed by leaving the protocol. The other has not moved. And one thing I said was already false when I published it.
What I Got Wrong About llms.txt, Fourteen Months OnNinety-seven per cent of published files got zero requests. The prediction held; the reason I gave for it did not.MCP Server Security: The Questions a PM Should Ask Before Shipping OneTwelve questions, each tied to a named incident. Only four MCP attacks have happened in the wild, and three were supply chain.
The rest
Browse and filter everythingAgent-readiness6
- What Makes an API AI-Agent-Ready in 2026: 10 Dimensions, One Free ToolMay 2026 · 12 min readTen dimensions. Five of them you can score for free, and where the grader still gets it wrong.
- GEO is the New SEO: How to Make Your Website Discoverable by AINovember 2025 · 6 min readWhat llms.txt actually does, and why assistants keep recommending somebody else's product.
- One Year of MCP: What's Working, What Isn'tOctober 2025 · 8 min readThe protocol was the easy part. Discovery and enterprise auth are still unsolved.
- API-First Is a Product Decision, Not a Tech OneFebruary 2025 · 4 min readWhy the API belongs on the roadmap, and the ceiling it puts on the product when it doesn't.
- What I Look For in a Great API Spec (As a PM)October 2024 · 5 min readThe short list worth scanning, because these failures show up in adoption numbers you own.
PM craft5
- What Product Managers Actually Do: Beyond the Job DescriptionNovember 2025 · 10 min readWhere the hours actually go, and why the job is mostly deciding what not to build.
- The Speed Paradox: Why Quick Decision-Making Separates Thriving Startups from the RestNovember 2025 · 6 min readWhy a slow team cannot feel itself losing, and what the compounding actually costs.
- What 'Senior PM' Actually Means (It's Not Years)May 2025 · 3 min readThe scope of decisions you can own without escalating. Years are a leaky proxy.
- Talking to Users: The Mistake That Killed Our RoadmapNovember 2024 · 4 min readThe interview trap that hijacks roadmaps, and the discipline that stops it.
- Why Most PMs Don't Need More FrameworksSeptember 2024 · 4 min readWhat the best PMs reach for when RICE, ICE and MoSCoW aren't the answer.
AI product management4
- Eval Design for PMs Who Aren't EngineersAugust 2025 · 5 min readHow to build a rubric that survives a real spec review, without writing a line of pytest.
- The PRD Format I Use for AI FeaturesApril 2025 · 5 min readFour sections a standard PRD doesn't have: rubric, hallucination tolerance, cost ceiling, fallback.
- DeepSeek-R1 and the Quiet Commoditization of AIJanuary 2025 · 5 min readNot “is the model good” but what changes for the AI features you’ve already shipped.
Behind the blog
Open to mentoring and advisory
Abdul Hannan Shaikh
Senior technical PM at APIMatic. Nine years in B2B SaaS.