This week has ranged far and wide, so it's hard to pick just one thing that I'm thinking about in agent experience land... so let's make it meta: product teams need help learning how to think about all the pieces and how they fit together to form a strategy.
Agent primitives are a big part of an agent experience strategy; everyone needs to have some idea of how MCP, Skills, and agent-related protocols may serve agents in their product surfaces. And there's also a lot to consider around how historically human-facing surfaces are now used by agents, like CLI, documentation, and even blogs and marketing materials - it's all fair game to an agent.
Product teams don't have a framework to build a shared understanding of how these primitives may apply to their product surfaces. People who are building agents are thinking about this stuff, and people who are building products that agents may use are largely left out. Ambitious or connected PMs and engineering teams have a head start in thinking about this stuff, but it’s almost entirely self-serve through various company blogs, YouTube channels, or if you’re very lucky, some research papers. But PMs or engineering teams who aren’t highly absorbed in this space don’t have good resources to bring them along. And even the ones who are thinking about this stuff may be making decisions based on incomplete information, a view of only one of these lenses, or an incorrect understanding of how any of this works.
Related, when it comes to agent experience, I am seeing some people equate one or more of these primitives as the entire strategy around agent experience. But that can’t be your entire strategy, because these primitives are all optional and for the most part, you can’t assume your customers will be using them. Some customers won’t or can’t use your MCP or Skills, and if your agent experience strategy relies on these primitives, you’re leaving out all those customers.
I don’t have a good solution for this. It’s clear that product teams need enablement materials and education aimed at where they are now so they can better understand and plan for an agent experience strategy. I am doing my best to calibrate to what teams need and provide something useful for them. But there are so many teams that need so many different things, and good enablement takes time and refinement, so the pace feels glacially slow in an area that is moving so fast and that everyone needs to understand months ago.