Always steal, never copy.

👋🏼 Hi, I’m Moiz. I'm a Fractional Head of Product who helps top climate-tech teams build product from strategy, discovery, to execution. You’re receiving this because you’re building in climate and we’ve crossed paths. Each issue distills one proven concept that I use with my clients - and gives you a way to apply it to your work.

Here's what's inside:

• Why stealing matters more than ever in the age of LLMs
• An example of stealing, not copying - How Picasso deconstructed Velázquez's Las Meninas
• How to avoid building generic products that are copied
• A 3-step framework that teaches you to Steal

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Worth Repeating

"Good artists copy, great artists steal"

- Pablo Picasso

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas"

- Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs told everyone in Silicon Valley to ruthlessly steal from brilliant people and attributed the line “good artists copy, great artists steal” to Pablo Picasso. I've been sitting with that quote a lot, especially in the LLM age, when content creation is almost free and infinitely abundant.

It got me wondering: who did Picasso actually steal from?

Picasso Stole from Velazquez

To understand Picasso's quote, let's look at how he approached Velázquez's 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas. I’m not an art historian, so I won’t go deep on the painting—but I will talk about how Picasso stole from it. Here's Velazquez's piece:

Picasso was fascinated by its intricate narrative structure and wanted to learn from it, so he created 58 variations of the painting in his studio in Cannes. Here's a few:

By the end it was a Picasso, inspired by Velazquez. He didn’t replicate it; he deconstructed it, reimagined it, and made it entirely his own. What Picasso did goes beyond imitation. It’s about absorbing the essence of an idea worth stealing and then making it uniquely yours.

But it's easier than ever to copy these days. So you have to learn how to steal.

Why LLMs make you a copier (unless you learn how to steal)

LLMs are prediction machines trained on the internet's collective average. Ask ChatGPT for a product roadmap or user research questions and you'll get something…generic.

It's probably indistinguishable from what a dozen other PMs might generate. That's copying.

To Steal means 3 things:

1. Taste — knowing what good looks like in your domain
2. Judgment — understanding which ideas matter for your context
3. Fundamentals — applying fundamentals of your craft and recognizing when the basics are off

The LLM gives you raw material. Taste, judgment, and fundamentals are what turn that material into something only you could have made.

Try This: A Framework for Stealing, Not Copying

Step 1: Find something worth stealing​
It has to fascinate you and it has to work.

You can choose to study your competitor's onboarding or user experience. Or look at how the best in your field explain or visualize complex ideas.

The point is to choose things that clearly work on you or your users, and that feel just out of reach of your current ability.

PS - I once went deep on how I'm fascinated by my Contigo.

Step 2: Reverse Engineer it​
Instead of admiring it, immerse yourself and pull it apart.

• Ask: Why does this work on the user? Is it the sequence of information, the visual hierarchy, the language, the opinionated defaults?
• Map it out: what happens first, second, third? Where is friction intentionally added or removed?
• Translate to your context: how would this flow look if it were for heat pump installers, low-income households, or policy advocates instead of tech workers?

Reverse engineering builds your fundamentals and taste. You stop seeing “magic” and start seeing structure.

Step 3: Steal it​
After immersion, you've earned the right to steal.

• Keep the underlying structure, but rebuild the execution for your users, your constraints, your strategy.
• Use an LLM here as a collaborator: ask it to generate variants, edge cases, and alternative phrasings
• Then edit ruthlessly so the final version sounds like your team, not the model.

Finally, you may choose to do this outside of your product work - a recipe, moving furniture around, whatever. Point is to go through the phases and produce something that you stole.

From Insight to Action

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