What Michael Novack is working on now
What I'm working on
right now.
A snapshot. Not a resume. Updated every few weeks so you can see the bets before they pay off, not after.
Day Job
Director of Product at Lyft Business. Leading product vision and execution across our B2B portfolio, from enterprise to SMB. Riders use it without thinking about it. Companies build their ground travel on top of it.
Building
Field Kit
Three AI product tools, on this site. Decision Simulator, Experience Mapper, Compass Check. Live streaming from Claude. Model routing and cost called by hand.
Ask Enzo
A streaming agent with seven tools over my own portfolio data. Voice and structure rewritten in the last two weeks to land in plain English.
builtbymikey.com
This site is the artifact. Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, Anthropic. Every case study has metrics. The /api/profile and /llms-full.txt endpoints feed AI agents directly.
Thinking About
Agents as product, not feature. The 2024 reflex was “ship a chatbot.” The 2026 unlock is shipping the agent the way you would ship a teammate: with scope, defaults, tools, and a clear job to be done. Field Kit is my sandbox for this.
Evals as the new product spec. The team that writes the eval set first ships faster than the team that writes the PRD first. Same energy as test-driven development, ten years later.
Ruthless model routing. Haiku for fast structured calls, Sonnet for judgment, Opus when you can spend the time and money. Most teams over-route to the biggest model and pay for it in latency, cost, and quality. The right call is per-task, not per-product.
Reading
- Karpathy on AI as the new operating system.
- Anthropic's research on agents that plan, not just chat.
- Shreyas Doshi on product judgment in the AI era.
- Lenny Rachitsky's last few interviews with AI product leaders.
Inspired by Derek Sivers' /now movement. If you're hiring for Head of AI Product or VP Product roles, this is more useful than my resume. Get in touch.