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Day: August 22, 2025
Minister’s announcement ‘has created further uncertainty’, advocates say and they are ‘collectively disappointed’ by the lack of engagement
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Disability representative groups say they are “collectively disappointed” after being blindsided by the Albanese government’s plans to divert children with mild to moderate developmental delays or autism from the NDIS.
Ten of Australia’s biggest disability groups have urged the new NDIS minister, Mark Butler, to commit to co-designing a new program for mild-to-moderately impaired children in a joint statement on Thursday evening.
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- AI sped up coding. Now, the real challenge for startups is product management.
- If a prototype takes a day, waiting a week for user feedback is “really painful,” said Andrew Ng.
- The former Google Brain scientist said his teams are “increasingly relying on gut” to make faster decisions.
AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management, said Andrew Ng.
The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published Thursday that AI-assisted coding has compressed the startup loop.
Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, “my friends and I, we’ll just build on a weekend,” Ng said.
“The bottleneck is deciding what do we actually want to build,” he added.
In the past, a prototype might take three weeks to develop, so waiting another week for user feedback wasn’t a big deal. But today, when a prototype can be built in a single day, “if you have to wait a week for user feedback, that’s really painful,” Ng said.
That mismatch is forcing teams to make faster product decisions — and Ng said his teams are “increasingly relying on gut.”
The best product managers bring “deep customer empathy,” he said. It’s not enough to crunch data on user behavior. They need to form a mental model of the ideal customer.
It’s the ability to “synthesize lots of signals to really put yourself in the other person’s shoes to then very rapidly make product decisions,” he added.
Ng did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The great product manager debate
Ng’s comments come as the debate continues in the startup world over the role of product managers.
Product managers have been referred to — both affectionately and critically — as “mini-CEOs” of the products they oversee. They act as a bridge among engineers, sales teams, customer service, and other departments, ensuring that products align with user needs.
Some tech leaders have said that product managers are key in the age of AI.
Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published in March that product managers play a crucial role in setting up “feedback loops” to make AI agents better.
But others argue that product managers add little value.
Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published last month that product managers don’t make sense early on in a company’s early days.
Microsoft wants to increase the number of engineers relative to product or program managers, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in March.
The call for executives to go “founder mode” — a concept coined by the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and touted by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky — has some leaders questioning whether they should delegate product decisions to product managers.
In 2023, Chesky merged product management with marketing, and Snap told The Information in the same year that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company’s decision-making.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Jalin Hyatt didn’t find any solace in his make-up touchdown.
A Berlin garden of flavorsome herbs revives a monastic health tradition from the Middle Ages
Humpy Wheeler, a pioneering motorsports promoter and former president and general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway, has died, NASCAR said. He was 86.
Defend Our Juries says ‘trick of using street bail’ will not work if participants insist on being taken to a police station
Protesters at the next mass demonstration against the ban on Palestine Action will withhold their details from officers to force en-masse processing at police stations in an effort to make it “practically impossible” to arrest everyone.
On Friday, Defend Our Juries, the pressure group behind the protests, will open sign-ups for its next demonstration to be held in London on 6 September. The group said it would only go ahead if 1,000 people agreed to take part, making it the largest protest opposing the proscription of Palestine Action since it was banned in June. More than 2,500 people have already expressed interest in taking part.
Corridors of nectar-rich plants encourage pollination and brighten up city streets at the same time
Take a closer look at the colourful plants dotted along an initially unassuming Bristol alleyway and you’ll see them teeming with insects. Bumblebees, hoverflies and ladybirds throng around a mixture of catmint, yarrow, geraniums and anemones. “It’s buzzing with pollinators now,” Flora Beverley says.
Just over a year ago, the alley we are walking down was a dreary, litter-strewn dumping ground. Now, thanks to the pollinator pathways project, it is filled with nectar-rich plants and bee hotels. Colourful murals line the walls. A neighbour and her son passing by stop to tell Beverley they watered the plants yesterday. The local people who helped to transform the pathways continue to maintain them too.
Exclusive: Lib Dem leader says giving Tesla a foothold in Britain’s energy market could be national security risk
Elon Musk’s company, Tesla, should have its application to supply energy to UK homes blocked on national security grounds, Ed Davey has told ministers.
The Liberal Democrat leader argued that giving the electric car manufacturer a foothold in the British energy market would be “a gravely concerning move considering Elon Musk’s repeated interference in UK politics”.
A brute suspected of savagely beating a woman unconscious during a sold-out concert at the Rose Bowl this week has been arrested, according to reports.