What is Piper Morgan?
An AI-powered product management assistant — a colleague who helps you stay on top of everything without losing sight of what matters.
But that's not quite the whole story.
The experiment
Piper Morgan started as a question: What if we built an AI assistant according to our actual values, instead of optimizing for engagement metrics?
No venture funding. No growth targets. No pressure to ship fast and fix later. Just one product manager with decades of experience, a $0 infrastructure stack, and the time to do things right.
The result is an ongoing experiment in ethical AI development, documented in public from day one.
Who's behind this
Christian Crumlish (xian) has been building social software and digital products for 20+ years. AOL. Yahoo. The State of California. 18F. Author of Product Management for UX People (Rosenfeld). Currently exploring what it means to have AI as a genuine collaborator rather than just a tool.
Piper Morgan is built with significant help from Claude (Anthropic) and a methodology that treats AI agents as professional colleagues — with appropriate boundaries.
The name
Piper Morgan is named in the tradition of AI assistants with human names, but with intention. Piper suggests someone who leads, who sets a tempo. Morgan suggests wisdom, guidance, mentorship. Together: a colleague who helps you think bigger.
(And yes, there's a bit of a wink at "PM" in the initials.)
Where this is going
The immediate goal: a working tool that helps product managers do their jobs better.
The larger ambition: demonstrating that AI development can be thoughtful, transparent, and humane — that you don't have to choose between capability and ethics.
We're building in public because we think the process matters as much as the product. Maybe more.