Product
The Off-Balance-Sheet Roadmap
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
Product
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.
Product
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
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.
Product
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.
Product
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.
Product
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
Product
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.
Product
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.
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