Posts tagged "Product Management"

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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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From Competitive Moats to Collaborative Bridges

3 min read

In the AI era, the strongest products don’t build walls — they build bridges. Here’s why connectivity, not isolation, defines modern defensibility.

The AI ecosystem is moving too fast for moats. Every closed advantage leaks. Every walled garden gets mapped. What used to protect you now isolates you. The defensible position today isn’t the highest wall — it’s the bridge everyone else depends on to cross. For years, defensibility meant isolation. Own the data. Control the stack. Lock down the ecosystem. Those strategies worked when products were discrete and distribution was finite. You could draw boundaries around...
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The Feedback Loop Fallacy in AI Products

2 min read

AI feedback loops can lie. Learn why engagement metrics fail and how product managers can rebuild truth-centered measurement systems.

For years, product managers have lived by a simple gospel: ship, measure, learn. The faster your feedback loop, the quicker your product improves. But AI is quietly breaking this law of motion. The feedback loops we’ve trusted for decades no longer tell the truth. When feedback starts lying In traditional software, user behavior is a reliable proxy for value. If conversion rates increase or churn decreases, the product has likely improved. With AI, that assumption...
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Platform Products Need to Earn Their Keep

8 min read

Platform products need empathy and accountability. Treat them like external products — measure impact, earn trust, and prove real value.

Every company wants to build platforms. Few succeed. The promise sounds irresistible: build it once, reuse it across teams, and move faster forever. But inside most enterprises, “platform” has become a buzzword attached to sprawling systems that no one loves and everyone tolerates. Some of these platforms thrive because they are built with empathy and clarity. Others limp along as corporate mandates — used begrudgingly, updated reluctantly, and funded indefinitely. I’ve seen both ends of...
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Thinking Through Agentic Loops

3 min read

Exploring how agentic loops extend feedback loops by adding autonomy, iteration, and goal-directed action in systems and AI.

I’ve long been fond of feedback loops. Systems thinking taught me to look for them everywhere: how a fitness tracker nudges you to walk more, how customer signals shape a product roadmap, how our habits form through repeated cues and responses. Feedback loops are elegant in their simplicity: an action produces an effect, which feeds back to influence the next action. Recently, I came across the phrase agentic loops. At first, it sounded like another...
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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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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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When Work Becomes the Practice

4 min read

Moving beyond the search for meaning to the practice of creating it. A product manager's reflection on making work matter, one sprint at a time.

A colleague and an inspiring leader, Puneet Maheshwari, recently wrote something about work and meaning that stopped me in my tracks. He talked about growing up around people who never had the luxury of romanticizing "meaning" in work. For them, work was survival and dignity. Nothing more, nothing less. His insight? The question isn't whether work is a means to an end, but which ends make the means worth it. When Time Disappears For me,...
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The Massive AI Opportunity Hiding on Your Home Screen

7 min read

Most 'AI products' aren't AI-native. Use the Home Screen Test to spot the billion-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Right now, stop reading and look at your phone's home screen. Count how many apps are built specifically for AI—not regular apps that added AI features, but products designed from the ground up for the AI era. ChatGPT probably makes the list. Maybe a few others. But for most of us, the answer is surprisingly close to zero. This observation comes from Andrew Chen's recent piece on how AI will change startup building, where he...
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Platform vs Product: The AI Era Convergence

4 min read

AI is collapsing the line between platforms and products. The winners will master both, balancing ecosystems and user experiences.

“In technology, whoever controls the platform controls the narrative,” as several strategic analysts have observed. The rise of AI is testing that maxim in new ways. A single large language model can be both the underlying platform that developers build on and the end-user product millions adopt directly. For companies in the AI era, the question is no longer whether to be a platform or a product, but how to navigate being both at once....
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When to Trust Intuition vs. Metrics

3 min read

Intuition is a compass, metrics are a map. Here’s how product managers can decide which to trust, depending on the product stage.

This is a follow-up from an earlier post on the limit of metrics. Product managers often wrestle with a familiar question: Should I trust the numbers, or should I trust my instincts? The truth is, both matter — but their weight changes depending on where your product is in its lifecycle. Intuition plays a bigger role early, while metrics take over later. Knowing when to lean on which can be the difference between chasing noise...
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The Limit of Metrics

4 min read

Metrics measure the present, but intuition imagines the future. Here’s why great product managers need both — and how to define intuition.

Product managers love metrics. Dashboards, OKRs, funnel charts — these tools are everywhere. They give us a sense of control, objectivity, and accountability. But metrics have limits. They can only measure what already exists. They tell you how a current feature is performing, but they can’t tell you what to build next. This is where intuition comes in. What Intuition Really Means in Product Work In product management, “intuition” often gets dismissed as gut feel....
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Apple’s Sugar Water Trap

4 min read

Apple’s iPhone 17 shows the sugar water trap risk as AI reshapes tech. A lesson for product managers on balancing incremental progress with bold bets.

Steve Jobs once asked John Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” That question pushed Sculley to leave Pepsi for Apple, and it has lingered ever since as a reminder of the difference between comfortable success and transformative ambition. The launch of the iPhone 17 makes the metaphor newly relevant. On paper, Apple delivered a strong upgrade: a Promotion display...
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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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Learning How to Learn Is Your Real Superpower

5 min read

Learning how to learn is the real superpower for product managers. It’s not about speed, but reinvention, adaptability, and enjoying the process.

“It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week by week. The only thing you can say for certain is that huge change is coming.” Demis Hassabis, speaking at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, in the same context, said the most important skill of the future isn’t coding, design, or even...
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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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The Hidden Cost of UX Friction in Enterprise Systems

4 min read

Enterprise systems often rely on mandates, not UX. But small friction compounds into real business risk. Here’s why PMs can’t ignore it.

Following up on my earlier piece: Build, Buy, or AI-Build, in which I noted Marty Cagan's view that AI will not easily replace enterprise solutions, even in the age of “vibe coding.” His reasoning is sound: enterprise products are deeply embedded in intricate workflows, with business rules and integrations that can’t be swapped out overnight. Today, tools like Copilot or low-code builders tend to play a helper role rather than a wholesale replacement. But this...
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One Question Every Product Manager Should Ask in Roadmap Reviews

2 min read

A simple question can sharpen roadmap reviews: what will this feature replace in the user’s life? Here’s why the replacement lens matters.

Roadmap reviews tend to focus on timelines, dependencies, and long lists of features. These discussions are important, but they often miss a single clarifying question that can cut through the noise: What will this feature replace in the user’s life? Asking this question changes the framing. Instead of thinking about what a feature adds, the conversation shifts to what it displaces. Users don’t have unlimited time or attention. Every new feature competes with something they...
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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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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

3 min read

OpenAI’s GPT-realtime unifies voice AI into a single model. See why its technical leap and early adopters make this the moment voice AI goes mainstream.

For years, voice AI has felt like a half-step behind its text-based counterpart. The standard architecture relied on a clunky chain: speech-to-text, a language model for reasoning, then text-to-speech. The result was often laggy, robotic, and disconnected from the flow of natural conversation. OpenAI’s new GPT-realtime changes that dynamic. By unifying speech recognition, reasoning, and speech synthesis into a single model, it eliminates the pauses and disconnects that made past systems frustrating. The model not...
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AI in Product Management

3 min read

AI is moving fast in product management, from PRDs to prototypes. Here’s what research shows, what’s missing, and how PMs can lead.

AI in product management is no longer a question of if. It is a when. And when we say 'when,' we are not talking about years. We are talking months, given the pace of innovation and adoption. A new study in Management Review Quarterly, “Where does AI play a major role in the new product development and product management process?” by Aron Witkowski and Andrzej Wodecki, maps out the current state of AI in product...
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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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The Big Squeeze in B2B and the Challenge of Lasting Defensibility

5 min read

In B2B, escape velocity isn’t enough. Startups must turn rapid distribution into lasting defensibility before incumbents close the window.

AI has created the fastest-scaling companies we’ve ever seen. Lovable, for instance, hit $100 million ARR just eight months after launch. As Brian Balfour observes in The Big Squeeze, “Escape velocity elevated Lovable from obscurity to household name. And now the company has a real chance to build a large and successful business. But there’s no guarantee they’ve found long-term defensibility or can turn this wave of interest into a sustainable business.” That tension—between speed...
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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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Observability Now Includes Watching AI

2 min read

AI observability means monitoring accuracy, drift, and hallucinations, not just uptime. PMs must treat it as a core product feature.

When product managers think of observability, they usually mean uptime, latency, or error rates. But as AI becomes central to user experiences, that definition must expand. Observability now includes monitoring model accuracy, hallucinations, prompt injection, and real-time behavior. As Datadog’s CPO Yanbing Li notes, AI systems add a new layer of complexity to enterprise monitoring. Why AI demands a new observability lens Traditional software is deterministic. If a server or a function fails, you can...
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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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Build, Buy, or AI-Build

4 min read

Vibe-coding opens a new AI-build path, but Marty Cagan’s point on business rules shows its limits. Can AI ever capture this hidden and complex logic?

In my recent post on build vs buy in the age of vibe-coding, I argued that the classic binary is breaking down. Thanks to generative AI tools, teams now face a third option: AI-build. Instead of waiting for engineering capacity or relying entirely on vendors, product managers can prototype, test, and even wire together solutions themselves using natural language. Marty Cagan just published a piece on build vs buy in the age of AI. He...
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Vibe-Coding Is Early But Already Changing SaaS

3 min read

Vibe-coding is still early, but already empowers non-technical builders while pressuring SaaS vendors to deliver leverage beyond features.

In a recent Every article, Dan Shipper highlights people who replaced expensive SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives. The stories aren’t just about cost-cutting. They show how quickly software creation is becoming accessible to people who never considered themselves builders. This is still early days. Vibe-coding — natural language prompting to generate working tools — is in the first phase of its maturity curve. It often takes a few iterations to get things right, as Shipper’s...
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How Product Leaders Can Adapt and Thrive in the AI Era

5 min read

Practical playbooks for product leaders to adapt and thrive in the AI era using wedge expansion, jobs-to-be-done, and dual transformation.

In the first post of this series, we looked at why AI disruption affects startups, giants, and companies with product-market fit differently. We saw that structural forces—like scale economies, network effects, and capability stacks—shape who adapts and who stalls. This post turns from why to how. The real challenge for product leaders is not predicting disruption but navigating it. While AI is reshaping every industry, companies that apply structured playbooks are better positioned to adapt...
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The Informal Committees Behind B2B Buying

3 min read

B2B buying isn’t decided by end users alone. Informal committees shape decisions, and product managers must map their jobs-to-be-done.

When we think about product adoption, the focus usually falls on the end user. Product managers map user needs with frameworks like jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), ensuring the product fits a real workflow. But in B2B, adoption doesn't always equal purchase. Deals often hinge on an informal buying committee — a shifting group of individuals who influence or approve decisions, even if they never use the product directly. This isn’t a boardroom-style committee. It’s a loose network...
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Why Startups Struggle and Giants Stall in the AI Era

7 min read

Why AI disruption challenges startups and giants while firms with product market fit adapt faster, explained through proven strategy frameworks.

Sam Altman has observed that both startups and large companies face unique struggles during the current wave of AI disruption, while firms that already have product-market fit often adapt more effectively (OfficeChai). Startups, despite their speed, often lack the foundation to scale. Giants, despite their resources, get trapped in bureaucracy. Companies with strong user adoption and proven fit, on the other hand, can use AI to deepen their advantage. This raises an important question for...
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Making Product Decisions with a Bets Mindset

3 min read

How leading product teams use betting principles to make smarter decisions, test ideas fast, and adapt quickly to real-world results.

When you build products, you’re making bets — not certainties. The best product teams don’t pretend to know the answer or wait until all data clears the fog. Instead, they “think in bets.” That means approaching each decision like a poker player, not a chess grandmaster. Most people treat product roadmaps as if they’re a set of sure things: follow steps A, B, and C, and you’ll win. But real product work faces incomplete data...
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Start with Product and Target for Effective Distribution, Not Channel

3 min read

Learn why smart product managers match channels to product and target, not trends, with a simple hospital software example.

When it comes to getting your product into the hands of customers, many new product managers start with the channel. They ask, “Should we sell through partners, go viral, or build a sales team?” Ben Horowitz puts it simply: “A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target … that you wish to pursue.” In other words, the product and the target market come first. The...
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Love the Problem, Solution will Follow

6 min read

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Learn seven techniques to uncover customer needs and build products that create lasting impact.

When you’re building a product, it’s easy to get excited about the “how.” The sleek design, the advanced tech stack, the long feature list. But here’s the hard truth that separates great products from forgettable ones: don’t fall in love with the solution; fall in love with the problem. This mindset shift can be the difference between a product that thrives and one that just exists. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour...
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Beyond the Deliverable - The Strategic Product Mindset

4 min read

Learn how to move beyond delivery and adopt a strategic product mindset with practical steps, proven frameworks, and customer-first thinking.

"Strategic thinking." Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The kind of thing we expect from leaders, not just order-takers. But here’s the truth: it’s not an inborn talent. It’s a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Like learning to ride a bike, or in our world, learning to ship something that truly matters. Too often, what gets labeled as “strategy” is really just a diagnosis or a broad policy statement. What’s missing are the coherent...
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