Papers for
product management teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Software teams use new method to align AI agents with team intent
Mind the Intent Gap: A Methodology for Collaborative Agent-Driven Software Engineering
Abstract: AI agents have entered software teams, first as tools and now as team members. They produce in minutes what used to take days, yet the expected gain in delivery often fails to appear. We argue that they are entering processes designed for people, which quietly relied on people to cover three of their weaknesses. The team's intent was never fully written down, because colleagues filled the gaps. An AI agent fills them too, though by guessing, and drifts from what the team had in mind. The reasoning behind each deliverable was already lost from one step to the next, and AI agents now inflate and deflate the documents passed along. The reasoning people did alone was partly private and now moves into AI tools that keep it private by nature. We present CAIA, for Collaborative Agentic Intent Alignment, a methodology for software teams that brings agents into the way they work. A knowledge base describes the product that a project maintains. For each Change, a micro-team aligns on its intent before agents evolve the product and propose updates to the Knowledge Base. The proposed CAIA methodology emerged from an industrial need and is already in use at Ni2, with a platform built to support it. We present the methodology and outline our plans to evaluate it further.
Agent system improves API specs with validation and market analysis
Agent4Spec: An LLM-based Agentic System to Optimize API Specifications through Automated Validation and Market Analysis
Abstract: API specifications serve as critical documentation for modern software development, directly impacting integration efficiency and client code generation. While recent advancements have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate initial specifications from source code, existing approaches treat this process as a one-time event - overlooking the needs for continuous validation, long-term maintenance, and market-driven evolution of these artifacts. To address this issue, we present Agent4Spec, an autonomous multi-agent framework featuring two distinct pipelines: (1) a validation pipeline that detects and self-corrects OpenAPI syntax errors, and (2) a market analysis pipeline that conducts competitive research, identifies functional gaps against industry leaders, and automatically generates missing API-spec functionalities. We evaluate Agent4Spec on two curated datasets of API specifications spanning both general-purpose and industrial scenarios. Among 9 SOTA LLMs, the top-performer achieves 100% syntax error detection rates and over 95% implementation success for proposed corrections, while securing over 50% adoption rates for suggested endpoint improvements, representing a practical tool for API development.
Customer context graph improves voice of customer analysis with frontier ai
From Retrieval to Customer Context: Evaluating Frontier-Model Systems for Voice-of-Customer Analysis
Abstract: Organizations increasingly use frontier language models to analyze customer feedback, but answer quality also depends on how that feedback is organized and made available. We define a \emph{customer context graph} as a unified model of customer and business context. Typed relationships connect customer objects (feedback, conversations, users, and accounts), operational objects (tickets, support agents, opportunities, and competitors), and analytical or action objects (taxonomy concepts, evidence, insights, work items, and outcomes). This lets an agent investigate not only what customers say, but why, who is affected, what action followed, who owns it, and whether it was resolved. For this experiment, the graph is populated from public Cursor feedback; the same architecture can support any type of feedback source. We compare Agentic RAG, a Deep Research Agent, and a Customer Context Graph-backed Agent on the same 9,432 public Cursor feedback records using 30 realistic product, incident, comparison, and metadata questions. Without exhaustive ground truth, we jointly score responses on answer quality (coverage and organization), analytical depth (specificity and decomposition), and evidence quality (citation support and traceability), using a comparative rubric calibrated on 28 of the 30 questions. We sample cited records against their claims and weight the three dimensions equally. Under this aligned rubric, the Customer Context Graph-backed Agent scores 0.961 overall, versus 0.710 for the Deep Research Agent and 0.651 for Agentic RAG, and leads the Deep Research Agent on 27 of 30 paired questions (sign-test p < 10^(-5); strictly best on 26 of 30). Its largest advantage is analytical depth (0.967 versus 0.642), reflecting more specific, hierarchically developed findings with quantified themes and traceable evidence...
Augur simulates reactions to product and policy changes before release
Augur: A Synthetic Decision Lab for Rehearsing Reactions to Product and Policy Changes
Abstract: Before a product or policy change ships, the question that matters is how people will react to it. Augur rehearses that reaction offline: it builds a typed knowledge graph from the change documents, populates a grounded persona market, simulates the interaction, and returns an auditable decision memo recommending one of five actions. We assemble Gold-50, fifty real product and policy episodes whose real-world outcome is known, adjudicated against the public record, and score the five-way release verdict against it. Our central finding is methodological and negative: most of the measured gap between frontier cloud models and open-weight models we fine-tune and serve offline is attributable to an under-specified evaluation, not a difference in capability. We show this three ways. First, the prompt envelope alone can dominate the score: holding weights, cases and scorer fixed, one system -- a LoRA-SFT adapter on Qwen3-32B -- swings from 0% to 73%. Second, in a matched 2x2 ablation, defining the decision taxonomy in the prompt -- with no model change -- lifts every frontier model by +24 to +34pp; under the under-specified prompt, Qwen3-32B LoRA-SFT served offline beats all three frontier models (paired McNemar, Holm-corrected), and once the prompt is fair no significant difference from any of them is detected. Third, agreement with the distillation teacher rises without accuracy following, and the full pipeline amplifies a systematic "over-doom" bias rather than improving the verdict. Separately, we validate the reaction layer on its own terms: blind judges across four model families find the synthetic reaction recovers 67-90% of the concerns the public actually raised, and a pre-registered ablation locates its value -- largest where the decision is hardest, redundant near ceiling. The pipeline that regenerates every number and figure here is available from the authors.