How to get better every week with AI - by Adam Faik

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How to get better every week with AI<br>Paste a real transcript into any LLM. Ask it to review you, not the user. Debrief your hardest meetings. Automate the Friday retro with a skill.

Adam Faik<br>Aug 03, 2026

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A few years ago, at a previous company, I sat through a leadership training I’ve mostly forgotten. One idea survived. The most senior product leader in the room told us to end every week the same way: write yourself three or four honest lines about how the week went, and what you’d do differently on Monday. His pitch was simple math, borrowed from the idea James Clear made famous in Atomic Habits: get 1% better every week, and compounding does the rest. I’ve written that little Friday retro almost every week since, and it works.<br>For years, though, the habit had a flaw I couldn’t see. The reviewer was me. My memory of the week is a friendly narrator: it remembers the demo that landed, and it quietly forgets the question I dodged in a tense meeting. Every Friday I graded my own homework, and every Friday I passed. A retro written from memory is a review of the week you’d like to have had. Better than nothing, but it plateaus fast.<br>Then one afternoon I pasted the verbatim transcript of a user interview I’d just run into Claude. Not to summarize it (I do that all the time). I asked it to review my interviewing: how I phrased questions, what I missed, how much I talked. It found three leading questions in my first ten minutes and quoted them back word for word. Nobody had reviewed my work at that level of detail in years.<br>Everyone I know uses AI to do the work: draft the spec, summarize the research, write the update. Almost nobody uses it to review how they work. The first use saves you hours this week. The second one compounds, because it makes every next interview, meeting, and decision slightly better than the last. That’s the 1% from the training, and AI finally makes it cheap to collect.<br>The whole practice fits in one picture.

The gap. I’ll show you why nobody reviews your actual craft anymore, and why the feedback you do get says more about the giver than about you.

The loops. The three I run (interviews, meetings, the Friday retro) with the exact prompts I use, plus six more worth trying, from your forecasts to your 360 packet.

The honesty problem. Here’s how to stop the model from flattering you, because by default it will.

The team angle. You’ll build a skill that asks your PMs your own 1:1 questions before they ever reach you.

By Friday you can have run your first loop on a real artifact from your own week. You get the kind of specific, evidence-quoting feedback nobody has given you since you got senior, and you can get it every single week. The first loop needs nothing new: any LLM chat works (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), and the raw material is the transcripts your meeting tools already produce (Zoom AI Companion, Gemini in Google Meet, Granola, or a voice memo on your phone). And if you lead PMs, you’ll leave with two skills worth an afternoon each: one that reviews your week on a schedule, one that preps your team for 1:1s.<br>Your reviewer is ready. Let’s put it to work.

Nobody reviews your work anymore

Think about the last time someone watched you work and told you something true about it. Not your outcomes: your craft. The way you ran the interview, the way you handled pushback in the room. If you lead product teams, the honest answer is probably “years ago.” Your manager sees headlines and results, not how you got them. Your team won’t critique you upward. The more senior you get, the less anyone reviews how you actually work. What’s left is the official cycle: twice a year, compressed into themes like “communicate more.”<br>And hold even that loosely. In The Feedback Fallacy (Harvard Business Review, 2019), Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall assembled the research on how well humans rate other humans. The headline finding has a name, the idiosyncratic rater effect: more than half of any rating of you reflects the rater, not you, and no amount of training fixes it. In their words, feedback is “more distortion than truth.” Your manager’s read on your “communication” says as much about their definition of communication as about yours, and that stays true for the best managers you’ll ever have. The little feedback that reaches you arrives filtered through someone else’s lens, and the research says the filter is most of the signal. Not a reason to dismiss your manager. A reason not to make two filtered data points a year your only mirror.<br>Performance-heavy fields treat this as a solved problem. Athletes and musicians review tape after every game and every recital. Atul Gawande wrote the canonical essay on this, Personal Best (2011): a surgeon at the top of his field plateaued after eight years, then started improving again when he put a reviewer back in his operating room. The research on expertise...