Mural CPO on How to Put AI in Multi-Player Mode for Your Team; Why AI Made Work Lonelier, Not Better | Elaina O'Mahoney

August 26, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Elaina O'Mahoney, CPO at Mural, argues that the AI era has made work lonelier and less collaborative, not more. While AI lets individuals generate ideas and prototypes in minutes, it has pushed everyone into solo mode—working alone in a chat box with an LLM, sharing words in a doc, and losing the shared visual context that makes decision-making fast. The real bottleneck has shifted from creativity to shared context: "Am I playing the same game as you are? And do I actually know where you started?"

Why visual collaboration disappeared

O'Mahoney observes that "visual collaboration is actually absent in the AI era." People are spending more time dictating to LLMs or typing alone, then sharing artifacts back into siloed tools. The result is that teams have many more ideas but less ability to converge on a decision. The core problem is not generating options—that is now cheap—but building enough shared context so that people can make high-quality decisions together. Mural's approach is to spatially connect artifacts (docs, prototypes, slides) so that everyone sees the same picture and understands the "why" behind a decision, not just the output. "It's really that the game is about now," she says. "How do we get to the disagreements faster? How do we get to where the challenges and the bottlenecks are so much faster when it's visual?"

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Visual Collaboration Is Missing in the AI Era** - Elena O'Mahoney (CPO at Mural) argues that AI has made work more solitary and less visual, shifting the bottleneck from creativity to shared context.
2 (01:18) **Shared Context, Not Creativity, Is the New Bottleneck** - The core problem is no longer generating ideas but creating a system for faster, aligned decision-making now that ideas are abundant.
3 (05:44) **The Competitive Landscape and Future Casting** - Elena describes how product leaders must shift from long-term strategy to creating in-the-moment feedback loops and system-level thinking.
4 (08:55) **Design Is for Everyone, Not Just Designers** - Elena argues that everyone can be a designer, and visual tools help teams get to disagreements and bottlenecks faster.
5 (11:25) **Ship to Set the Tone, Not Just to Release** - As a leader, you should model shipping workflows and prototypes, not just writing strategy docs.
6 (13:56) **Lowering the Bar for AI Adoption in Large Enterprises** - The key is creating safe, low-risk environments for people to try and fail with AI, especially in large companies.
7 (17:10) **Forward Deployed Engineers (and Lawyers) Are Your Champions** - The best people to drive AI adoption might not be engineers—they could be in legal, finance, or any department that has automated their work.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Visual collaboration is missing from the AI era. That's the provocation Elaina O'Mahoney, Chief Product Officer at Mural, brings to this episode of The Product Podcast with Carlos (CEO at Product School). We spend all day alone in our tools, typing or talking to an LLM, and when it's time to collaborate we drop words into a doc instead of thinking together visually. Elaina makes the case that AI has quietly turned work into "solo-player mode," and that the teams who win next will be the ones who rebuild shared context and multiplayer collaboration on top of it.

Elaina and Carlos get into why ideas are now cheap (you can go from a thought to a working prototype in hours) and why that makes shared context, not idea generation, the real bottleneck. She argues that everyone is a designer at heart, that product leaders should replace the five-page strategy doc with a fast prototype that conveys the North Star, and that "shipping" can mean a workflow or an agent, not just a production release. They also dig into the crowded "where work happens" landscape (Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear, Notion) and the blank-canvas gap around how and why decisions actually get made, how to create safe spaces for people to try AI and fail inside large enterprises, and the pricing tension between legacy seat-based SaaS and AI-native usage models.

What you'll learn:
- Why Elaina says visual collaboration is "absent" in the AI era, and why that matters
- The "solo-player mode" problem: how AI made work lonely, and what multiplayer should look like
- Why ideas are now cheap, and how that shifts the bottleneck to shared context and faster decisions
- Why the real blank space isn't planning or chat, but how and why decisions get made
- The case that everyone is a designer, and how visual thinking speeds up decisions
- How a CPO ships to demo a direction (a prototype instead of a strategy doc)
- What's still scarce in an AI world: data science, taste, and synthesizing analytics
- How to create safe, low-risk spaces for teams to try AI and fail inside big enterprises
- Why smaller "champion" teams beat top-down rollouts, and how internal builders spread practices
- The pricing dilemma: seat-based SaaS vs. AI-native usage models

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Intro: Elaina O'Mahoney, CPO at Mural
01:31 Mural's origin as a collaboration canvas
03:01 Multiplayer vs. AI's solo-player mode
04:23 Ideas are cheap now: idea to prototype in hours
05:44 The competitive landscape and convergence
08:31 The blank space nobody owns: how decisions get made
09:22 Lowering the bar so everyone can design
11:33 Everybody should be shipping now
12:25 Shipping to demo, not to production
14:04 Creating safe spaces to try AI in the enterprise
17:10 Forward-deployed engineers
19:14 Building a community around Mural
22:11 The pricing dilemma: SaaS vs. AI-native usage
24:07 Measurin