The Pile I Was Buying But Not Reading
Early in my career I worked as an organizational design and change management consultant, and I had studied technology and innovation management as an undergraduate. That combination left me with a deep interest in how innovation and creativity get managed. Over twenty-five years it also left me with something else: a pile of more than two hundred books on technology disruption, organizational theory, people management, and business strategy. I had bought them all. I had read almost none of them.
The pandemic finally gave me the time to start working through the pile. But I did not just want to read. I wanted a framework for the study itself, a way to capture the data, the stories, the examples, and the models that resonated with what I had lived. So I decided to turn the whole exploration into a course, and the work took far longer than I expected. Five years later I had it all cataloged. What finally gave me the space to turn it into something people could use was getting laid off from my tech job in 2024.
Why Product Management Frameworks Stop Working
Most product management methodology was formalized during a period of relative institutional stability and cheap capital. Product launches often fail on poor change management, and product teams spend their days reacting to shifts rather than driving strategy. That reactive cycle is not a personal failing of the people running it. It is what the old methodology produces when it meets a world it was not designed for. The reading list I was working through kept circling the same diagnosis: the distinction between cyclical market variation, which the existing methodology was built for, and civilizational transition, which it was not.
The most common leadership failure stems from trying to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges.
A technical problem has a known solution and someone trained to apply it. An adaptive challenge is one where the team's existing assumptions, capabilities, and authority structures are themselves part of what has to change. Most product management frameworks teach technical work. The Adaptable Product Framework is built for the adaptive work the existing methodology never names.
What I Was Trying to Build
Nine reinforcing steps that run inside a quarterly cycle. The team produces a vision of service, maps stakeholders, surfaces assumptions, monitors trends, prepares scenarios, audits judgment, runs safe-space resets, sets healthy constraints, and builds a learning community. None of those steps are new ideas in isolation. The contribution is that all nine live together, reinforce one another, and accumulate into a longitudinal record over many quarters.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
Gramsci's line is the frame I kept coming back to in the reading. The leaders most likely to matter over the next decade are not the ones waiting for the old conditions to come back. They are the ones who can lead through the interregnum with discipline rather than react to it with exhaustion. That requires a tool. Not a slide deck.
How to Know a Framework Is Worth Building
- Ask whether the framework names a problem the existing tools assume away. A roadmap tool assumes the strategy is stable. Adaptive work begins where that assumption breaks.
- Ask whether you can run the framework on yourself this quarter without permission. If the smallest unit of practice requires a consultant, an org chart change, or budget approval, it will not get adopted in the field.
- Ask whether the framework leaves an artifact behind. If running it for an hour produces nothing a new VP could read in six months and understand, the practice will not survive leadership turnover.
- Ask whether your version of the framework is honest about cost. Adaptive practice takes time that teams currently spend pretending they have a stable plan.
- Ask whether you can articulate which traditional methodology assumption it is replacing. If you cannot, you are layering, not adapting.
The Adaptable Product Framework was distilled from two hundred books and twenty-five years of doing the work. The courses, workshops and coaching here are where I teach it. The nine steps also became working software for communities running the cycle together, which now lives separately as SharedForesight.