The AI Paradox: Why Product Managers Need More Human Skills in the Age of Automation
AI now does a lot of the analysis and forecasting product managers used to do by hand. The PMs I've seen do well with it aren't trying to out-compute it. They lean harder on judgment, which is the part the tools can't supply.
From Reactive to Strategic: The 90-Day Framework for Product Leadership Transformation
In Pendo's 2019 survey, product people said 73% of their time went to tactical work and 27% to strategy. The individual-contributor PMs thought strategy deserved about half. I spent a year on the wrong end of that split, firefighting across 7 teams, and this is the 90-day approach that got me out.
The Framework Came Out of a Pile of Unread Books
Over twenty-five years I bought more than two hundred books on disruption and strategy, and read almost none of them. The pandemic gave me time to start and a 2024 layoff gave me time to finish. This is where the framework came from.
The Hidden Innovation Hiding in Your Organization
The best ideas I've worked with came from a customer service manager and from an architect tinkering in his spare time, and I've learned to go looking for people like them before a competitor finds the idea first.
Product Communities vs. User Communities
Most organizations invest heavily in external user communities and ignore the internal networks inside their own walls, which is where I've seen a lot of the best product ideas come from.
Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven
I learned the difference between data-informed and data-driven the hard way, after my team spent months copying a competitor's experiments that turned out to be broken.
The Remote Product Leader's Playbook
I once managed development teams on three continents. One team never pushed back and another pushed back on everything, and learning to lead both of them from a distance taught me more about leadership than any team down the hall ever had.
Scenario Planning for Product Managers
Most product managers build strategies as if the future were predictable. I watched a growing education company shut down because its leaders had planned for exactly one future, and I think the teams that last are the ones that prepare for several at once.
The Consultation Revolution
Most product meetings are built for people to react to updates, when they should be built for making decisions. I think running them as consultations gets you better calls, and it gets people outside the product team to understand what you're building and why.
Building Your Product Career Moat
The product management job you have today won't exist in five years. The role will still be there, but almost everything that makes you valuable in it is changing fast.
The Empowerment Paradox
The more control you give away, the more influence you gain. I learned that on a mobile revamp where the plan my teams built beat the one I would have handed them, and it got funded because they wanted it too.
Healthy Constraints: How the Right Limitations Unlock Innovation
Most product teams treat constraints as the thing that breaks the plan. In Product-Led Alliance's State of Product Management research, 49.2% of product professionals named resource or capacity constraints as a source of misalignment between strategy and roadmap. I've seen the other side too: one of my products got a new feature out of a project that had no budget at all.
The Product Manager's Guide to Organizational Change
Product managers are often the first to see that the organization has to change for the product to work, and we almost never have the authority to make that change happen. I had to do it anyway after a company I worked at bought five competitors in two years.
Building Your Learning Community
Most product managers work as solo practitioners. One of the best fixes I've seen for a stuck problem came from a new analyst working on it on the side, and I think teams can set themselves up to get that kind of help on purpose.
Existential Questions: The Strategic Tool Most Product Managers Are Afraid to Use
The most useful strategic tool I've had never came from a framework. It was being willing to ask questions that made the room uncomfortable, like "Should this product exist at all?" or "What if our entire market understanding is wrong?"
The Adaptive Advantage
Volatility is the normal state for product teams. In Product-Led Alliance's State of Product Management research, 47.5% of product professionals named shifting short-term commitments and 43.9% named frequent changes in leadership direction as sources of misalignment between strategy and roadmap. Anti-fragile teams get stronger from that kind of stress. My best example is a product I inherited with a data integrity mess and a mandate to grow twentyfold.