Few&Far

It’s Tech News Thursday! Here’s what’s been happening in tech this week 🌐 There is rising concern around Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos. The company says it’s too powerful to release publicly due to potential cybersecurity risks, triggering urgent global conversations across governments, regulators and the financial sector. The UK’s AI Security Institute has already flagged it as a significant step up in threat level, and there’s a growing sense that models are advancing faster than the frameworks designed to manage them. Even some of the more experimental evaluations, including putting Mythos through 20 hours of psychotherapy, point to how seriously organisations are trying to understand and assess these systems beyond just technical benchmarks. In more serious news, a man has been charged following an alleged attack at the home of Sam Altman. Thankfully, no one was harmed. The incident has also pulled in wider media context, after Altman suggested a recent New Yorker profile about him may have contributed to escalating tensions, a comment he later walked back. The situation has sparked broader conversations around the intensity of the AI debate and the need to keep it grounded in constructive, democratic dialogue. Meanwhile, Google is cracking down on “back button hijacking”. Those frustrating sites that trap you and mess with your browser navigation. From June, sites using these tactics risk being down-ranked or removed entirely. A win for user experience everywhere. And a big one for London 🇬🇧 OpenAI is opening its first permanent office here, with space for 500+ employees in King’s Cross. A clear signal of the UK’s importance in the global AI landscape, even as broader infrastructure challenges continue to bubble under the surface. See you next Thursday ✌️

Great energy at Flutter London (a Meet-Up group) last night ⚡ Hosted at Pod, it was a packed evening of sharp insights, great conversations, and a genuinely lovely crowd of familiar and new faces. Big thanks to George M. for bringing it all together and a special shoutout to Dean Jennings and Toby Irvine from Pod for keeping everyone very well fed and watered 👏 Highlights: - RAOUF RAHICHE sharing practical ways to seriously speed up Flutter CI pipelines - Matthew Meades walking through Tewke’s 5-year journey building a smart light switch with Flutter on embedded devices And of course, the real magic: the conversations in between. So many thoughtful chats on where Flutter is heading and how teams are scaling right now. Proud that Few&Far could support such a great community event, until the next one. Shout out Tom for helping to facilitate! 🚀

Thanks to Nick Charalambous, Lara Thomas, Folayemi Shoge at Few&Far for hosting, and to Martin Eriksson for facilitating an insightful conversation yesterday morning. There was a room of senior product leaders. VPs, CPOs, founders who have been doing this for a long time. We voted on the topic and operating model won - because everyone in the room is sitting with the same uncomfortable truth: the way product teams are structured, the ceremonies we run, the roles we've defined, was designed for a world where building was expensive. That world is gone. A few things that came up that I keep turning over: 📍 The "say no" problem is getting harder. When building is cheap, discipline isn't about shipping faster. It's about having the clarity to decide what you're never going to build. 📍 The agent layer is getting commoditised faster than most people realise. The real differentiator is the unique data and context sitting underneath it. 📍 The PM role isn't shrinking. If anything, it is moving back to where it was always supposed to be. Not delivery. Not backlog management. Figuring out what to build and whether it's worth it. #ProductLeadership #AIStrategy #OperatingModel #CPO

Last week, we hosted a Product Design Leadership Roundtable at Creandum’s office, facilitated by Nad Chishtie, Founding Designer at Lovable. The conversation centred on a big shift happening across teams right now: design is no longer just design. A few themes that stood out: - Role blur is accelerating. Designers are increasingly expected to move beyond Figma and into code. In some teams, one designer supports 20 engineers, making technical fluency less of a “nice to have” and more of a necessity. - AI is supercharging output, but raising the bar. What used to take days now takes hours. Designers are building multiple high-fidelity prototypes daily, often wired into real design systems. But speed is exposing gaps in quality, consistency and decision making. - Accountability feels unclear. Many designers are comfortable shipping small changes, but less so owning production-level code. There is a growing tension between capability and responsibility. - Design quality is under pressure. When anyone can generate something functional, good design becomes the differentiator. Strong design systems, guardrails and quality checks are becoming critical. Huge thanks to Nad for facilitating such an open and thoughtful discussion, and to everyone who shared their perspectives. Heldiney Pereira Jon Massey Max Fumagalli Ivy Mukherjee Gus Waller

Senior Product Managers in the SaaS space, I have had an awesome new role come in…. I'm working with a fantastic business in the Cybersecurity space that have an incredible client list, a very experienced new VP Product who is shifting the business to becoming more product centric and build on their ARR. This will give the successful candidate an opportunity to gain experience that will level up your career. Build new products, help implement new processes and dramatically impact commercial success. Reach out directly to me if you have: - Experience working in a complex SaaS business as a PM for at least 4 years - New Product Development experience, from research to building and iterating - Strong communication skills and stakeholder management experience - Recent experience working in a start-up environment The salary range is £90k-£100k and you need to be able to work in the London once per week, however our client can't sponsor at this time. Nick@fewandfar.io

$23 million raised, five years in. A huge congratulations to the Natter team! 👏🚀🎉 The funding is a milestone, but the real story is the problem they’re solving. Enterprises have long relied on broken listening tools, from surveys no one trusts to interviews too slow to act on. Natter replaces all of that, delivering business-critical insights from real employee voices, at scale, in hours, not weeks. Already working with Accenture, ServiceNow, etc., the traction at this stage is seriously impressive. This raise enables deeper product investment and continued growth across the team, and we’re proud to be partnering with Natter to help build it. They’re currently hiring across Engineering, Data and Product in London and New York. If you’re interested, get in touch.

🚀 PERM SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER (FINANCE), £90K, REMOTE (FROM UK/IRELAND) 🚀 I'm on the hunt for highly strategic Senior Product Managers who have experience building products which are sold into banks/the finance sector. If you have the below requirements, please apply to the advert below: ✨ Greenfield, 0-1, new product development experience ✨ Experience building products for the Financial Services/FinTech industry, or building products which are sold into banks ✨ Highly strategic (versus delivery-focused) - experienced in defining the product strategy, vision and roadmap from scratch ✨ Highly technical, able to work closely with Engineers on highly technical concepts (bonus points if you've previously been a Software Eng, although this isn't required) Please click on the advert below for more information & to apply! (Sponsorship isn't offered unfortunately) https://lnkd.in/ex6njZDE

An 18-month investigation into Sam Altman has been released... in case you missed it, here's what’s happening in tech this week 🌐 🧠 Inside the Sam Altman / OpenAI exposé A major investigation into Sam Altman by The New Yorker has revealed internal concerns from engineers and leadership at OpenAI. The report draws on 100+ interviews, internal memos and Slack messages, at a crucial time as the company heads towards IPO. Engineers claim Altman lacks hands-on experience in programming and machine learning and he’s said to occasionally mix up basic AI terminology in technical discussions. Former staff describe him as highly strategic, but not deeply technical and internal memos from 2023 show board members questioning whether he should be in control. 🪙 Why Adam Back keeps getting linked to Bitcoin Adam Back, a British cryptographer and early Bitcoin contributor, has again denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. So why him? Back created Hashcash, a system referenced in the original Bitcoin white paper, and his writing style and timeline have been found to closely match Satoshi’s. A new investigation pointed to similarities in emails and forum posts, plus the fact that Back was active right up until Satoshi disappeared. Back says it’s a coincidence and “confirmation bias.” The mystery continues. 🧑💻 Chrome finally fixes tab chaos Google is rolling out vertical tabs to Chrome. Tabs move to the side, making it easier to read titles and manage groups, especially if you’ve got 20+ open (be honest). You can turn it on with a right-click, and it stays as your default. See you next Thursday ✌️