Part One: Certainty
In every product organization, there comes a moment when a decision feels too big, too irreversible, too loaded with consequence—when the pressure to be right overshadows the freedom to learn, and the very act of choosing becomes a referendum not just on strategy but on the chooser's fitness to choose at all. This is a story about one of those moments, about the particular kind of paralysis that afflicts the modern knowledge worker when confronted with equally compelling...
Put That Down, You Don't Need It
Part One: The Human Jenga Tower
There's a moment that happens in every product manager's career—usually around year three, sometimes sooner if you're unlucky—when you realize you've become a human Jenga tower. Every new request, every "quick ask," every "just this once" commitment gets stacked on top of the previous one until you're swaying precariously, one breath away from complete collapse.
I watch this happen almost every week. A PM eating cold takeout as...
Marty Cagan has shaped how many of us think about product. His work on empowered teams, product leadership, and the value of solving real problems has helped raise the bar across the industry. I have enormous respect for him. I am, and continue to be a disciple.
Photo by Maksim Goncharenok
Which is why his recent essay, Agency vs. Ambition, landed harder than expected.
In it, he argues that some product people simply lack drive. They don’t want to grow. They aren’t curious. They just want to...
We often judge a signal by two qualities: light and heat.
Light is clarity. It's easy to read—clean metrics, articulate feedback, obvious patterns.
Heat is intensity. It's urgent, emotional, and usually signals internal pressure or customer frustration.
Product Managers are trained to pay attention to signals that have both. Bright signals and hot signals. The kind that show up in dashboards or meetings with execs. They flash. They sizzle. And they’re hard to ignore. They’re clear
But not all...
We’re huddled in a conference room, trying to map the next move for our digital payments solution. The engineering lead wants a build to test the transaction-execution-happy-path end to end. The product manager wants to validate market fit. And the stakeholders just want proof that the thing can be built in the first place.
At first glance, it looks like they’re all at odds. But look more closely and you start to make out a sequence. Turns out they’re not arguing — they’re chasing different...
A Tuesday stand-up.
The feature is late.
Engineering shrugs.
Design isn’t sure what’s in or out.
Leadership is pinging in Teams:
“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we — ”
And the PM?
She’s refreshing her dashboard, scanning for any kind of signal, clinging to a vague, paper-thin sense that maybe — just maybe — everything’s okay.
But she doesn’t know.
Later, over lunch in her car in the Starbucks parking lot, second cortado in hand — ordered “not too hot” so...
I really hate the phrase “North Star Metric.” It’s painfully corporate and irritatingly buzzwordy, but everyone understands what we’re talking about, so let’s lean into it. (Pause for breath). Among the endless constellation of vanity metrics and meaningless KPIs, the North Star Metric (NSM) does a pretty good job of cutting through the noise. It’s that single, painfully clear metric that sums up whether your customers genuinely care about your product and predicts if you’re doing the right...
“You can’t win a race by committee,” Carroll Shelby growled, confronting Ford’s executives in the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari. Cut to driver Ken Miles hammering around the track, his GT40 covered with taped-on strings that chaotically reveal airflow in real time. Shelby’s vision: Real-world performance shreds theoretical perfection every single time.
Ford v Ferrari dramatizes a classic showdown between corporate bureaucracy and track-tested intuition. Shelby, a former racer...
