• An AI PM project analyzing what's broken, what to build, and how to measure success at one of the fastest-growing AI products in the world.

💡 WHY PERPLEXITY

• Perplexity sits at a genuinely interesting product inflection point, is it a search engine, a research tool, or an AI assistant? That identity tension, combined with $500M ARR and a $21B+ valuation, makes it one of the most analytically rich AI products to tear down right now.
• I chose it because it's a product I use daily, which means my observations are grounded in real experience, not just surface-level research.

📌 WHAT I DID

✦ Researched real user pain points across Reddit communities (r/perplexity_ai, r/artificial)

✦ Identified patterns across 6 recurring complaints and selected the 3 with the strongest business impact

✦ Designed 3 prioritized feature recommendations, each with a target user, mechanism, and outcome metric

✦ Defined a Northstar metric grounded in habit formation and compounding user value

✦ Produced a one-page PM teardown document designed to communicate like real product work

📝 KEY FINDINGS

3 Things Broken: → No memory across sessions, breaks the habit loop for the highest-value users → Source quality has no trust signal, hallucination anxiety persists despite citations → Pricing opacity destroys trust, community betrayal after repeated undisclosed limit changes

3 Things I'd Build: → Research Memory Layer, cross-session threads for Pro users (target: +15–20% 30-day retention) → Source Trust Score, credibility signal per citation (target: increase free-to-Pro conversion) → Pro Transparency Dashboard, real-time limits + changelog (target: reduce Pro churn post changes)

Northstar Metric: → Weekly Research Return Rate — % of Pro users returning within 7 days with 3+ continued queries

🧩 WHAT THIS PROJECT DEMONSTRATES

✦ I talk to users before forming opinions ✦ I connect product problems to business outcomes ✦ I think in metrics, not just features ✦ I can produce PM-quality work independently, without being hired to do it

🗂️ THE DELIVERABLE

📄 Full one-page teardown PDF below

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YThcQGz9wanXnGlk4dOIMYEcR1MREYxU/view?usp=sharing