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.
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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.
Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 3: Golden Handcuffs and Hunger Games
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
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Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 2: The Valley Mythology Machine
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
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Ubermensch in a Cubicle Farm pt. 1: The Collar Color Was Never Quite What It Seemed
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)
Product
The Farm League, the Judas Goat, and the Bill That Always Comes Due
Or: how the AI ecosystem is running the oldest con in tech, and why so many product managers are apparently fine with that
Product
Who Killed the Product Manager?
(or: how we quietly dismantled the one role that understood the whole business)
Product
The True Religion of American Pricing Psychology
What a gallon of gas can teach you about anchoring, asymmetry, and the stubborn math of consumer behavior
Product
A Pragmatic PM's Guide to Generative AI
What it gets right, what it gets wrong, and how to use it without getting torched. There is no doubt that AI can greatly augment your work, and help you get to defensible positions without getting bogged into the tactical morass
Product
The Craft of Product Management
My near three decades in the product management trenches has reinforced that product management isn't a recipe, it is a craft, and it is a craft honed by repetition and practice.
Product
How We Got Here: Three Decades of Product Management's Identity Crisis
Product management has transformed significantly in my 3 decades of experience, but it has still remained true to its original goals: how to meld business context to solving customer problems
Product
The Toolbox Doesn't Make the Carpenter
Having been in product management as long as I have, the evolution of the tools that do product management tasks, and while they are slick, they don't make you a product manager.
Product
The Old Dog's New Trick: AI as a Force Multiplier in Building Technical Training
For a long time, I was a sceptic, someone who resisted the use of GenAI in my day to day. I thought that it wouldn't be able to deliver the goods. That changed when we pivoted our development process, and the tools became an essential part of the workflow.
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Do I keep this alive?
At a crossroads, is the Product Bistro worth keeping alive, or should it be allowed to slip into the long goodnight. Help me decide!
tech
OpenAI's Problem
OpenAI's ChatGPT is impressive, but the competition is catching up (and surpassing them in places). That is making their lack of a defensible moat an Achilles Heel.