When to Add Product Friction & How to Reduce 12 PM AI setups to One Team OS | Kunal Thadani (Houzz)

At dating app The League, Kunal Thadani's team found that when daily matches took longer to load, people stopped skimming profiles and started actually reading. The wait wasn't a cost — it was the product saying these matches are worth your time. Now he's Senior Director of Product at Houzz, a platform for homeowners to plan renovations, and his take is that the goal was never no friction. It's to create the right kind of friction. In this episode, Kunal drops his: His three-part framework for productive friction, and The two ways friction turns toxic, including the one that punishes your most loyal customers Plus, everyone is building AI workflows for themselves right now. Almost nobody is building them for a team, and Kunal has the clearest answer I've heard in a long time for what that looks like. Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunal-thadani-72a13722/ Insider Growth Group: https://www.insidergrowthhq.com/ Houzz: https://www.houzz.com/ 0:00 Introduction 0:28 From The League to Houzz: Finding the DIY Decorating Gap 2:03 Not All Friction Is Bad 4:39 Trust Signals, Progress Arcs, Commitment Moments 6:41 The Signup Test That 10X'd Email Conversions 10:25 Two Ways Friction Fails: Fake Protection and Endless Re-Verification 15:16 Why Personal AI Setups Break Down at Team Scale 16:47 Inside the Team OS: One Repo and a Shared Product Context Layer 20:38 Claude Code in the Terminal: Mining Gong Calls and Killing Handoff Tax 24:41 Feedback Loops: Why a Team OS Improves Faster Than a Personal One 25:58 Conclusion Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket's Galileo AI watches user sessions for you and surfaces the technical and usability issues holding back your web and mobile apps. Understand where your users are struggling by trying it for free at LogRocket.com.Special Guest: Kunal Thadani.