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Commercial Rigor: The #1 Skill Nobody Teaches (But Every $200k Job Demands)

Along with 50% off The Invisible Advantage, an overview of Google's nano-banana, and an AI email tool I implemented at a $30M company.

Author

Rahul Desai
September 02, 2025

Welcome to this week’s edition of The DesAI Digest. The pre-order window for The Invisible Advantage is coming to an end and my publisher is giving 50% off for Labor Day — you can even get access to career coaching with me for significantly reduced rates vs. my typical $200/hr.

Without further ado, here’s the agenda:

  • 🛠️ Career Strategy = Commercial Rigor — The Most Important Professional Skill

  • 🤖 AI Tactic X Execution Insight = Making Email Better with AI

  • 🧠 Curiosity Corner = Do you have nano-banana? 🍌

  • 💼 Job Board = Earn $200k defining the future of AI

🛠️ Career Strategy

Commercial Rigor — The Most Important Professional Skill

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 2 of The Invisible Advantage, about “commercial rigor”, the single most important skill any professional can have:

I learned about commercial rigor from Brandon Chu, who spent seven years as a product executive at Shopify. During his tenure, he helped grow the company’s valuation by a staggering 3500% (from around $2B to $70B). When sharing his approach to product management, he mentioned his “rigorous process to solve the puzzle: What will my team invest in next:

Your goal with prioritization is to always be doing the work that maximizes customer value created over time.

In order to prioritize between projects, you need to estimate two data points:

  1. the amount of customer value that will be produced

  2. the amount of time it will take to finish the project…”

If you want to learn the definition of commercial rigor and see how it applies to the job market, subscribe below!

🧠 Curiosity Corner

Do you have nano-banana? 🍌

Get your mind out of the gutter!

No it’s not a dirty joke. Nano-Banana is the nickname for Google’s latest AI image model (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image). It’s at the peak of its powers when you want to edit existing images. You describe the change you want: removing a background, blending two photos, keeping a character consistent across scenes and the model does it.

Here’s why it’s interesting: the model carries “world knowledge” into its outputs, which means it can handle more than cosmetic edits. You could ask it to stack things while respecting physics or create variants on a design while holding on to style and coherence. This opens a door to using AI for tasks that were previously either too technical or too time-consuming, especially for people who aren’t trained designers.

Give it a shot, it’s very cool! Here’s an example where, given a screenshot from Google Maps, nano-banana can show the on-the-ground point of view.

💼 Job Board

Earn $200k defining the future of AI!

Here are the 3 coolest remote job openings I’ve seen this week:

If you want the jobs, please sign up for the newsletter :)

That’s it for this week.

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

P.P.S. if you liked this, forward it to a friend. And if you hated it, forward it to an enemy.