Posts tagged "Product Leadership"

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Notes on the Modern Product Leader’s Playbook

3 min read

Notes on strategy, speed, and why modern product leadership is a leverage game.

Watched Jiaona Zhang’s Reforge talk on product leadership. It’s a dense one — part philosophy, part tactical operating manual. These are the notes (and reactions) I don’t want to forget. We’re in an in-between moment where PMs are both strategists and builders again. Jiaona calls it a new playbook, but it’s really a reminder that our leverage has changed. Mindset: From Managing to Skating Where the Puck Is The core shift is from execution to...
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Adaptability, Creativity, Tech Fluency: The Skills Defining Work Now

3 min read

The core skills once seen as future-ready—adaptability, creativity, and tech fluency—are already defining how work gets done today.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report offers a clear signal for product managers, technologists, and business leaders: the skills that matter most in the coming decade are not the same as those that powered the past. Well, the report is confirming what we are already seeing in full force: By 2030, success will hinge less on manual or routine capabilities and far more on adaptability, creativity, and fluency in technology. !Core Skills 2030...
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Rethinking Product, Market, Channel, and Model for AI Era

6 min read

How Brian Balfour’s Four Fits framework has been updated for the AI era, and what product leaders can learn from the shift.

Frameworks that endure disruption are rare. Brian Balfour’s original Four Fits framework has long been a foundational lens for growth strategy. He recently released The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era to capture how AI is shifting the constraints inside each dimension. The Four Fits have always been about scaling companies to $100M+ revenue at venture speed. To succeed, all four fits must align simultaneously. In this article, I explore the evolution...
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From Architect to Gardner to Orchestrator: The AI-era Product Leader

3 min read

How AI transforms product leadership from building to conducting. The rise of the Orchestrator mindset in product management.

Last year, I wrote about two product management mindsets: the Architect who blueprints everything upfront, and the Gardener who plants seeds and discovers what grows. That framework made sense when humans did all the work. Not anymore (or not very soon). AI is changing the game. It can architect better than architects—generating requirements, writing specs, and creating test cases. It can garden better than gardeners—running thousands of experiments, adapting in real-time, finding patterns we'd never...
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Outcomes Over Outputs For Real

7 min read

How to make outcomes real, align cross-functional teams, and still give leaders confidence with a dual lens scorecard, DORA metrics, and probabilistic forecasts.

Everyone in product circles nods when we say we focus on outcomes, not outputs. It sounds right. It signals maturity. Yet when the sprint boards fill up and deadlines loom, many organizations slip back into outputs, features shipped, story points burned, demos completed. The intent is good, but the execution gets hijacked by the process. There is so much to unpack here, I'm expecting several more posts in this series. Let's set the table first....
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Treat Your Job Like a Product and Protect Maker Time

3 min read

Product leaders must treat their job like a product and protect maker time, or risk getting stuck in execution and missing leadership growth.

Product leaders know what happens to a product without a strategy. It becomes a treadmill of backlog items, bug fixes, and reactive feature requests. The same thing happens to your career if you treat your job as nothing more than a stream of execution tasks. Just like a product needs vision, prioritization, and trade-offs, so does your work. But here’s the challenge: execution will always crowd out strategy unless you intentionally design for it. Execution...
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What Leadership Really Looks Like

3 min read

Leadership for product managers isn’t about titles. It’s about daily choices—small acts of influence, initiative, empowerment, and courage.

In the product culture series, I want to delve into who the leader is. In corporate life, “leader” is a word that gets stretched in too many directions. Sometimes it refers to someone with direct reports. Sometimes it points only to the highest rung of the ladder. But the truth is simpler: leadership is not about job level or headcount. Leadership is about how you show up. It’s about whether you create momentum, clarity, and...
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Product Culture Is Your Real Operating System

3 min read

Strong product culture drives better decisions, innovation, and outcomes. Leaders shape it daily through hiring, rituals, and behaviors.

The most important product decision you make is not the roadmap. It’s not the features you prioritize or the markets you enter. It is the culture you build. Culture is not a poster on the wall or a slide in a town hall. It is how decisions get made when nobody is looking. It is how teams respond to setbacks, how they argue about priorities, how they treat customers when tradeoffs get hard. Culture is...
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Curiosity Beats Tenure in the Age of AI

3 min read

Junior developers’ curiosity and adaptability make them the most AI-native talent. Cutting them now risks weakening future innovation.

Key Takeaway The jury is still out on whether AI will replace or empower software developers, but dismissing junior talent is a short-sighted approach. Their curiosity and adaptability make them the best positioned to thrive in an AI-driven future—qualities that matter more than years of experience. Why This Matters AI is reshaping the nature of engineering work. Leaders face pressure to cut costs and experiment with automation. Some argue junior developers are the most “replaceable”...
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Why Empathy, Not IQ, Defines Success in the AI Age

3 min read

Empathy and critical thinking—not IQ—are the keys to thriving as a product leader in the AI era.

Walk into any workplace today, and you’ll see AI embedded in daily tools and workflows. It drafts emails, generates reports, and even proposes design ideas. What it can’t do is sit across from someone, understand their frustration, and respond with care. That distinctly human capacity is becoming the true differentiator. Carnegie Mellon professor Po-Shen Loh puts it bluntly (video): “The only sustainable trait in the age of AI is the ability to care about people...
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Architect vs. Gardner: Product Development Mindsets

5 min read

Product leaders must know when to act as Architects and when to act as Gardeners. Learn how to balance precision and adaptability in product development.

Product development demands vision and execution. But the mindset you bring to the work often shapes outcomes as much as strategy or process. Two powerful metaphors illustrate this tension: the Architect and the Gardener. Both have value. Both can lead to success. But knowing when to adopt one mindset over the other—and how to balance them—can mean the difference between building structures that endure and nurturing products that adapt. The Architect Mindset Architects design with...
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Cultivating Strong Product Culture

5 min read

Learn how to cultivate a strong product culture by empowering teams, aligning leadership, and focusing on outcomes over features.

Culture may feel intangible, but in product organizations it’s one of the strongest predictors of success. Teams with the right culture move faster, make better decisions, and consistently build products that matter. Teams without it often drown in process, produce outputs that don’t add up, and lose trust with customers and stakeholders. A strong product culture doesn’t appear by accident. It is cultivated deliberately through leadership choices, organizational design, and team habits. Technology as an...
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Cultivating True Agile: From Process to Outcome

5 min read

Agile is not stand-ups or sprints. Learn how to cultivate true agility by focusing on outcomes, empowering teams, and decentralizing decisions.

Few words in technology are as overused—and misunderstood—as Agile. Too often, teams say they are Agile because they run sprints, hold stand-ups, or use Jira boards. But rituals without outcomes are just theater. True agility is not about process compliance. It is about creating organizations that learn quickly, adapt continuously, and deliver meaningful results. Agile Theater vs. True Agility The Agile Manifesto was written to emphasize people, collaboration, and adaptability. Yet many organizations reduce it...
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Making Better Product Decisions

2 min read

Great product leaders know not all decisions are equal. Learn how to apply the one-way vs. two-way door lens to improve decision speed and quality.

Great product leaders aren’t defined by their roadmaps, but by the decisions that shape them. Roadmaps shift. Markets change. But decision quality compounds over time. One useful lens comes from Jeff Bezos: the idea of one-way vs. two-way doors. One-way doors are irreversible. Once you step through, it’s costly to turn back. These require deliberation, diverse perspectives, and often leadership involvement. Two-way doors are reversible. If the decision doesn’t work out, you can step back...
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The Questions Great Product Leaders Ask

2 min read

Great product leaders don’t rely on perfect foresight. They ask sharper questions that cut through ambiguity and lead to better decisions.

Great leaders aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions matter. Nowhere is this truer than in product decision-making. When facing ambiguity, strong product leaders resist the urge to rush into solutions. Instead, they slow down just enough to ask sharper questions that cut through noise. A few that consistently elevate decision quality: Do we have the expertise to make this decision? If not, who needs to be in...
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