tech
Anthropic's amended S-1 has an empty line where October's revenue should be. With a $1.5 trillion ask, $895B in compute commitments, and OpenAI's round coming up short, that blank is now the most important number in tech.
Product
While the AI industry burns billions racing toward the frontier, Apple is betting that the real prize belongs to whoever makes the technology useful.
Product
Every roadmap has an official version and an unofficial one. The unofficial one carries real risk and doesn't show up anywhere leadership looks, until it does.
Product
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.
Product
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.
Wisdom
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.
Product
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.
Tales and tips from a lifetime of 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Part 4: The promise bifurcated, and many were sold a bill of goods. For most, the grind of the feature factory was lived experience
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.
We've been tracing an argument across this series. Post 1 went back to the industrial-era construction of the white-collar professional identity. Post 2 followed that architecture into Silicon Valley, where it got turbocharged with founder mythology and libertarian individualism. Today we get to the mechanisms that
Having set the table in the first installment of this, let's talk about how the California environment paved the way for an anti-organising mindset
Tech in general is very resistant to organizing. As we enter the AI age, it seems like this missed opportunity will haunt the industry. A look at how this began (a series)
Or: how the AI ecosystem is running the oldest con in tech, and why so many product managers are apparently fine with that