Guardrails Are Not Constraints

Move fast and break things works great when you can fix what broke. Surveillance is different: once the data exists and the capability ships, “guardrails” are often just policies standing between power and abuse. Hard constraints aren’t optional.

The Verb Is Not the Moat

TiVo eventually collected $1.6 billion in patent settlements, which was almost enough to distract everyone from the fact that it had lost the actual business a decade earlier. A case study in revenue that funds avoidance.

Product Management, Meet Winston Wolf

You don’t involve Winston Wolf if you have a "strategy." You call Winston Wolf to handle a messy shit sandwich and after it's handled, Winston Wolf does not call you back or visit you. And product managers around the world are nodding their heads right now.

Faith Based Product Development

Faith-based product development runs on one belief: that a leader's confidence can substitute for a plan. Here's how to spot the symptoms before the gap between the story and the schedule collapses on you.

Toxic Product Management

Toxic product management isn't rare — it's just rarely named. After watching one particularly bad case unfold firsthand, here's what actually lets unsuited PMs into roles where they can do real damage.

The Scanner is the Symptom

Substack shipped a scanner to catch AI writing, on a platform whose own growth playbook spent two years rewarding the exact posting volume now under suspicion. A look at what happens when you build enforcement for a problem your incentive structure created — and never touch the incentive.

The Vetting Function Nobody Owns

What a Senate campaign in Maine can teach you about proxy metrics, buyer/user splits, and shipping without QA, yeah, Product Management is a lifestyle

The Fiberglass Plant and the Photomask Writer

Everyone's calling the AI buildout 'industrial.' A fiberglass plant and a photomask shop are both industrial — and only one of them can fund itself.

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 5: "The Reckoning"

AI isn't disrupting product management as a category. It's disrupting the execution layer of it specifically. If you've been telling yourself you're on the strategic side of that line, this post is about whether that's true.

The Role That Hollowed Itself Out: A Eulogy for Product Management

The title survived. The ceremonies survived. The Jira boards are still getting groomed. What didn't survive: the function that made product management worth having in the first place. A diagnosis.

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Post 4: The Ticket Queue Is Not a Career

Part 4: The promise bifurcated, and many were sold a bill of goods. For most, the grind of the feature factory was lived experience

The Deskilling Machine: How We Hollowed Out Product Management — and What AI Is About to Do to Everything Else

Or, this is the removal of the Cargo Cult technocrats, hired to work, but not to have a purpose. You surely have come across these drones.