At a recent tech conference I attended in San Francisco focused on product management, I heard legendary product leader and author Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product Group, warn the audience that we shouldn’t let process be a substitute for thinking. He was talking about product building, but it struck me as apt instruction for just about everything we’re facing in business right now.

As a strategist, I believe wholeheartedly in process—it’s why I developed the IDEA Framework for Strategy. It’s also why I spend so much time writing about it. Process gives structure and can make problems easier to solve, primarily by focusing attention on the individual components of an issue while working through a deliberate sequence designed to deliver us to a solution. However, it can also be easy to get stuck inside that process, or for that process to feel like thoughtful work without actually being thoughtful work.

One of the fundamental (and existential) issues we’re facing as a society right now is how to hold on to our cognition while using these ever-evolving and ever-enticing frontier models. Thinking is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, and it’s getting easier and easier to outsource our thinking to these machines. But who can blame us? They often come up with answers that are many times better than what we could come up with. Which is precisely what makes them useful.

Even so, it’s sometimes an impulse we need to resist, and it’s certainly not an excuse to stop thinking. In fact, I would argue that one of the primary gifts AI is giving us is actually more time to think.

At the same conference, I watched the co-founder of Linear, a well-known product development system for teams and agents, show slides of how many agentic loops they’re running, and how their products are nearly building themselves. The automation saves the team an incredible amount of time. But his primary takeaway wasn’t that we should all automate our work away, it was that we should reallocate the time we’re saving by using AI to our teams so they can dedicate some time to thinking—about what they want to build, about what they want to learn, about what they actually want to do.

In a room full of product builders and leaders, which included the heads of Codex and ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork, the most repeated instruction was not to use more tools, or even to use them in different ways, it was to carve out dedicated time to think. Not just about the tech, but about yourself and your coworkers and your place in all of this.

So I think Marty’s right and we can’t let process be a substitute for thinking. Instead, we need to think our way through the process.