Just wrapped three great days at Pendomonium. Here's what stood out.
Aaron "Ronnie" Chatterji — Chief Economist at OpenAI
His read on where the market is heading:
- Power users are using AI 7x more than the average user.
- The tools they're using are getting more sophisticated every couple of months.
Aaron "Ronnie" Chatterji, Chief Economist at OpenAI
Pendo Is Leaning In Hard
- Leo interprets retention data and auto-generates reports and onboarding guides.
- Novus can auto-tag, build track events, and submit PRs.
But here's the warning nobody should ignore: the "smooth brain effect" is real. AI outputs look so polished and complete that teams skip discovery entirely. AI amplifies teams with strong foundations. It exposes teams without them.
Vrushali Paunikar, CPO of Carta — My Favorite Session
- Product sense isn't subjective art — it's predictable science. Observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.
- Companies are laboratories. Products are experiments.
- We should spend 50% of our time driving adoption after we ship, not just celebrating the launch.
Vrushali Paunikar, CPO of Carta
My Takeaway
Pendo isn't just a product analytics tool — it's an operating system for how product teams understand their customers, measure what matters, and drive adoption at scale. Features like Leo and Novus aren't replacing us — they're giving us leverage to do the work that actually matters: connecting data to decisions, scaling customer feedback loops, and keeping teams anchored to outcomes over outputs.
The teams that will win aren't the ones with just the best AI tools. They're the ones with the strongest foundations: clear principles, disciplined discovery, and a genuine obsession with the customer.
Pendomonium reminded me why I love this work. Not just because of the tooling or the AI demos, but because of the people in the room who genuinely care about customers and building products that matter.