One Knight in Product

Happy 2026 from One Knight in Product! - by Jason Knight

Jason Knight outlines the state of product management entering 2026. He notes that the discipline remains uncertain and difficult to execute despite various operating models. The focus shifts toward practical, reality-based product practice rather than performative methods. Knight details his current service offerings for B2B organizations. These include fractional product leadership for teams needing a function reboot, organizational assessments to identify structural blockers, and 1:1 coaching for emerging leaders. The document highlights key educational resources. Specifically, it mentions the Reboot Your Sales Relationship course starting in January 2026. This course helps PMs collaborate more effectively with sales teams. It also curates high-signal podcast episodes featuring industry experts. Marty Cagan discusses organizational transformation. Melissa Perri covers escaping the build trap. Rich Mironov explains the financial literacy required for product managers. Additionally, the content covers upcoming live events in London and the UK Product Events page. Knight concludes with a call for feedback to shape the future direction of the newsletter. He intends to move it beyond a simple podcast companion into a more substantive blog and resource center.

Good vs Evil PM Performance Management - by Jason Knight

Organizational leaders often react to underperforming product teams with the urge to fire everyone and start over. This approach usually fails because it ignores the root causes of poor performance. Most product managers do not inherently lack talent. Instead, they often struggle with weak leadership, rotating management, or a lack of clear success metrics. In many cases, the company culture itself penalizes effective product management because leadership does not understand the role. A constructive approach to performance management involves five distinct steps. First, leaders must establish clear standards. Using established frameworks like Petra Wille's PMWheel or Ravi Mehta's PM Competency Toolkit is more effective than building a rubric from scratch. These tools provide a credible baseline for what high performance looks like. Second, the team must be measured against these standards through self-assessments and manager reviews. Third, leaders should implement specific improvement plans. This might include individual coaching, group workshops, or hiring experienced PMs to model desired behaviors. Fourth, progress should be measured over a reasonable timeframe, typically at least three months. This allows for directional improvement rather than focusing on immediate, performative changes. Finally, if an individual still cannot meet the standards after receiving support, they should be moved on respectfully. The distinction between skill and fit is critical. A product manager might be highly capable in a stable, late-stage environment but struggle in an early-stage startup requiring rapid iteration and high ambiguity. Performance issues are often a symptom of a broken system rather than individual incompetence. Treating people fairly and providing the necessary infrastructure for success is more productive than the nuclear option of mass firing.

The B2B Product Leadership Delusion? - by Jason Knight

The State of B2B Product Management 2025 survey reveals a significant perception gap between B2B Product Leaders and Individual Contributor (IC) Product Managers. While leaders generally believe they are performing well across several key dimensions, their teams often disagree. The survey measured performance in six critical areas: setting clear vision and strategy, aligning teams around shared goals, enabling effective prioritization, fostering a customer-centric culture, removing cross-functional blockers, and investing in people through mentorship and career development. In every category, leaders rated their own effectiveness much higher than the ratings provided by the ICs reporting to them. Three primary theories explain this disconnect. First, some leaders may simply be performing poorly due to a lack of competence or being placed in roles based on subject matter expertise rather than leadership skill. Second, leaders might be doing the work effectively but failing to communicate the results or the effort involved to their teams. This suggests that storytelling and transparency are often undervalued by leadership. Third, ICs may have unrealistic expectations or a lack of understanding regarding the constraints of the business. This is often referred to as the iceberg effect, where the majority of a leader's work in building teams and cultures remains invisible to those focused on building the product itself. The findings suggest that leaders must prioritize expectation setting and open communication, while ICs need to better understand the broader business context and the specific challenges of the leadership role.

Beyond "AI Product Managers" - How Proper PMs Can Start Thinking About AI Product Strategy

The current tech landscape is experiencing an AI Hype Hangover. While social media remains saturated with claims of LLM magic, many practitioners are exhausted by the constant stream of unverifiable promises. Despite this fatigue, business leaders and boards continue to demand an AI strategy, often leading product teams into unproductive cycles of building useless features. Effective AI strategy is simply good product strategy applied to new technology. To navigate this, product managers should evaluate initiatives based on two criteria: whether they solve a real, painful user problem and whether the solution is unique or easily replicable. This framework creates four distinct categories for AI features. Vanity features or AI-washing provide low value and low defensibility; they serve as a marketing tax to satisfy stakeholders. Gimmicks offer high defensibility but low value, often manifesting as technically impressive projects that solve problems no one cares about. Commodities provide high value but low defensibility, such as AI-suggested email replies. These are defensive table stakes required to maintain market credibility. Differentiators represent the high-value, high-defensibility quadrant where teams solve unique problems in ways competitors cannot easily copy. A balanced product strategy requires a portfolio approach, deliberately allocating effort across these categories while keeping the focus on solving genuine user pain points rather than implementing technology for its own sake.

Product Management Isn’t Like the Books - and Other Lessons from Productized 2025

Jason Knight highlights the significant disconnect between the idealized product management frameworks found in popular books and the actual daily experience of practitioners. He observes that the industry is currently saturated with content that often presents a "Better World" scenario where following specific rules leads to guaranteed success. This creates a psychological burden for product managers who feel they are working for a "bad" company if they cannot replicate these perfect environments. Knight clarifies that even the authors of these books often only achieved those ideal states a few times in their careers. The core of his message is the introduction of Minimum Viable Improvement (MVI). This concept encourages teams to move away from the pursuit of perfection and instead focus on incremental, high impact changes. By identifying the most critical bottleneck and fixing it, teams can demonstrate success and gradually shift the product culture. This approach avoids the paralysis that comes from trying to implement massive transformations all at once. The Productized 2025 conference also hosted experts like Chui Chui Tan, who discussed the complexities of building products that thrive across different cultures, a topic highly relevant for international expansion. Rich Mironov presented on the idea that business cases are essentially stories about money, emphasizing the need for better communication with stakeholders. Other sessions explored how AI is influencing creativity and the necessity of redesigning product organizations to stay competitive in the AI era. The collective insights from the event suggest that while frameworks are useful guides, the most effective product leaders are those who can navigate uncertainty and prioritize practical progress over theoretical purity.

Is That Your Final Answer? Why Product Managers Should Always Present a Recommendation

Product managers often fall into the trap of presenting multiple options without a clear recommendation, leading to a loss of influence and the dominance of the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion). This behavior frequently stems from a lack of psychological safety, analysis paralysis, or previous experiences where their ideas were dismissed. When a PM fails to take a stand, they effectively delegate their strategic role to executives who may lack the granular context necessary for the best decision. To regain control, PMs must adopt a mindset of active recommendation. This involves exploring several options thoroughly and mapping out their pros and cons rather than just presenting a single path. Gathering evidence from diverse sources, including customer success, sales, and even executive signals, is critical. Using frameworks like Itamar Gilad's Confidence Meter can help quantify the risk and certainty of different bets. Building coalitions with other departments before high-stakes meetings is another essential tactic. By aligning with allies in sales or engineering, a PM can defuse objections early and present a united front. During the presentation, the PM should provide a fair hearing to all alternatives but conclude with a strong, rational argument for their preferred choice. Even if the recommendation is overridden, the PM must take full ownership of the final decision to maintain professional credibility and avoid becoming a passive bystander in their own product's development.

Waiting for the Product Management Ombudsman? You Might Be Waiting a Long Time!

Many product managers and UX professionals feel marginalized by leadership teams that do not understand or respect their craft. While industry leaders advocate for best practices, many practitioners face resistance, suspicion, and demands for immediate ROI. There is a common desire for an industry solution or an ombudsman to enforce standards, but this is a misconception. Product management does not exist within a single, coherent industry with a regulatory body. Instead, it operates across diverse companies shaped by founder biases and market pressures. To effect change, practitioners must act as internal agents of change rather than waiting for external salvation. This requires moving away from ideological high horses and book talk that relies on jargon like MVPs or hypothesis-based development, which can sound like a foreign language to non-product leaders. Instead, PMs should frame their initiatives as solutions to problems leadership already prioritizes, such as high churn or stagnating sales. Proving the ROI of product practices is essential, even if difficult. Practitioners should seek cross-functional allies in Sales, Marketing, or Customer Success who have experienced better-functioning organizations to build a united front. Change is an incremental process. PMs must be willing to lose small battles to maintain credibility and long-term influence. In some cases, external help from consultants or coaches can provide the necessary perspective to validate internal efforts. Ultimately, if an organization shows zero appetite for change, practitioners must decide if the environment allows them to perform their role effectively.

When the CEO Speaks, Should You Always Treat It as Gospel?

Product managers frequently struggle with the Conditor ex Cathedra phenomenon, where casual remarks or spitballing from a CEO are misinterpreted as official mandates. This behavioral pattern creates a destructive cycle: a CEO mentions a new technology like AI or a recent conversation with a major client, the product manager panics and immediately pivots the team's focus, and the original roadmap goals are missed. Ironically, the CEO often forgets the casual suggestion and later criticizes the product team for failing to deliver on the primary objectives they originally agreed upon. The term is borrowed from the Catholic concept of the Pope speaking with ultimate authority only when from the chair. In a corporate context, founders and leaders often brainstorm or play devil's advocate to keep teams sharp. When a product manager treats every suggestion as a decree, they inadvertently cause roadmap instability and team frustration. To break this cycle, PMs should avoid reacting in the moment. Instead of stuttering through an immediate response to look like they have everything covered, a more effective approach is to acknowledge the idea and promise to discuss it with the team later. Strategic patience is essential in these high-pressure interactions. Waiting a few days before following up allows the PM to ask the CEO if the new idea is truly more important than existing commitments. This follow-up should seek specific context: why is this important now, and what evidence supports the shift? The response from the CEO usually falls on a spectrum from just thinking aloud to a genuine, high-priority shift. If a change is necessary, the PM must own the new initiative rather than blaming leadership. Conversely, CEOs must recognize the weight their words carry and clearly distinguish between brainstorming and formal directives to prevent unintentional organizational whiplash and maintain team velocity.

4 Different Ways To Transform a Product Organisation

Product transformation involves shifting how decisions are made, how products are built, how they are released, and how success is measured. Decision making should move from reactive, sales-led requests to proactive, evidence-based strategy. Building requires equal partnership between product, engineering, and design with short cycles. Releasing involves deep alignment with go-to-market teams rather than just throwing features over the wall. Success measurement requires defining metrics before release and using observability to track impact. Alignment serves as the critical fifth element to prevent constant escalations and random requests. Change is difficult due to organizational biases and the inability of product leaders to sell the value of change effectively. There are four primary ways to approach this transformation. First, some companies choose to remain feature factories, though they often struggle by expecting the benefits of a true product company without changing their behavior. Second, the big bang approach attempts to change everything at once, which is high risk and often leads to political infighting. Third, the iterative approach applies product management principles to the transformation itself by building a backlog for change and delivering small increments of impact. Fourth, the golden team model creates a single exemplar team to demonstrate the power of product thinking in a controlled environment. While Marty Cagan advocates for the golden team model to show quick results in top-down transformations, an iterative approach may be more suitable for bottom-up efforts where there is less initial appetite for radical change. The right choice depends on the urgency, the available talent, and whether the push for change is coming from leadership or the product team itself.

Hype-y New Year - How to Cut Through the AI Noise as a Product Manager

The 2025 landscape is characterized by extreme AI hype, with predictions suggesting the end of product management, software development, and traditional SaaS. These claims are largely driven by investors and techno-optimists who argue that exponential AI growth will lead to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by summer. However, technical benchmarks like OpenAI's o3 scoring 88% on the ARC-AGI test are often disconnected from real-world utility. OpenAI has even shifted its definition of AGI toward a financial metric: generating $100 billion in profit, rather than a purely technical or sentient milestone. LLMs currently provide an illusion of reasoning by regurgitating training data, a phenomenon documented in research by Apple. While these systems are excellent for brainstorming and general research, they frequently fail when tasked with expert-level detail or nuanced transcript summarization. Relying solely on automated summaries can lead to missed critical details in complex client problems. For product managers, the strategy for 2025 involves moving beyond the AI Product Manager label to focus on specific use cases and value delivery. PMs must understand the limitations of these tools and act as a translation layer between hype and reality within their organizations. Success requires testing small, verifying all outputs, and maintaining sound judgment rather than following the 'number go up' mentality of hype-mongers. The goal is to identify where AI-generated content is 'good enough' to solve problems without sacrificing necessary human-level quality.

Product Management Isn't Dead and It's Not AI That's Going To Kill It

Product management remains a deeply human craft centered on empathy, vision, and influence without authority. While generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming indispensable tools for daily tasks, they lack the reasoning and nuance required for high-level decision making. LLMs can produce convincing and well-formatted text, but they fundamentally do not understand the content they generate. This creates a paradox where AI can speed up experts who know how to verify the work, but it leads novices to accept mediocre or incorrect outputs because they lack the expertise to judge the quality. The current AI landscape faces significant hurdles, including the potential for model collapse as LLMs begin training on AI-generated 'slop' and the massive financial costs required to maintain these systems. Despite claims from tech leaders about reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) soon, current models often produce 'vanilla' strategies that are merely lists of obvious features rather than true competitive insights. The real danger to the product management profession is not the technology itself, but the narrative pushed by influencers and cost-cutting executives. If leadership views product management as a series of mechanical tasks like writing tickets or documentation, they may attempt to automate the role out of existence. To remain relevant, product managers must focus on the aspects of the job that AI cannot replicate: resolving stakeholder debates, negotiating scope, empathizing with users, and making complex judgment calls. Using AI as a brainstorming partner or research buddy allows practitioners to automate routine work and dedicate more time to these high-value human activities. The best product managers will use AI to complement their abilities rather than replace their judgment.

The ONLY Measure of Product Management Success is the Success of Your Product

Product management success is fundamentally defined by the success of the product itself. While the industry often focuses on the mantra of outcomes over outputs for product features, this same logic must apply to the professional performance of the product manager. A practitioner can follow every industry best practice, conduct dozens of user interviews, and maintain a perfect burndown chart, but if the product fails to deliver tangible value to its stakeholders, the product manager has not truly succeeded. This perspective challenges the idea that a PM can be successful simply by being a good operator within a failing product. The definition of a product manager remains elusive because it is highly dependent on organizational context. There is no ISO standard for the role, which means it is often shaped by company maturity, founder biases, and the specific market being served, whether B2B, B2C, or B2G. In a B2B environment, success is a complex balancing act between three distinct stakeholder groups: the business, the customers, and the users. The business focuses on recurring revenue, retention, and profit. The customers, who are often the economic buyers, prioritize ROI, regulatory compliance, and solving specific business use cases. The users, who interact with the tool daily, require ease of use and effective problem solving. Best practices in product management, such as developing a product vision or gathering first-hand customer evidence, should be viewed as hypotheses rather than immutable laws. These methodologies represent the most likely path to success based on historical patterns, but they are not the goal in themselves. The primary objective is to deliver value across the stakeholder triangle. If a specific process or working norm does not serve the product's success in a given context, it should be adapted or discarded. Ultimately, the role requires a high degree of adaptability and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to achieve the desired outcomes for the business and its users, regardless of whether those actions fit a standard textbook definition of the role.

Cheap! Cheap! The Perils of Low Cost Being your ONLY Advantage

Pricing strategies for software products typically follow three main frameworks: Cost Plus, Competitor-Based, and Value-Based pricing. Cost Plus uses the production floor and adds a margin, while Competitor-Based pricing focuses on matching or undercutting rivals. Value-Based pricing is widely regarded as the most effective method because it aligns the cost with the perceived benefit to the customer, ensuring no money is left on the table. However, many companies fall into the trap of using low cost as their primary competitive edge. This approach faces several critical hurdles. According to Van Westendorp pricing research, there is a specific threshold where a product becomes so inexpensive that potential buyers begin to doubt its quality and suitability. Beyond perception issues, a low-price strategy is difficult to defend against established incumbents. Larger competitors can often afford to lose money on specific product lines to undercut smaller rivals and drive them out of the market. Additionally, new entrants may find even more efficient ways to lower costs, leading to a race to the bottom. Without a clear functional or brand differentiator, companies operating on razor-thin margins lose the ability to reinvest in their own future development. The core challenge for any low-cost provider is determining how they would respond if a competitor offered the same service for five dollars less.

In Defence of Product Owners - by Jason Knight

Jason Knight addresses the growing trend of industry influencers criticizing the Product Owner role. These critics often argue that Product Owner is not a valid job title but merely a role within the Scrum framework. They frequently label POs as backlog managers or glorified business analysts who are destined to be replaced by AI. Knight points out the irony in these criticisms by referencing the Scrum Guide. While the guide does mention backlog management, it also explicitly states that the entire organization must respect the Product Owner's decisions for them to succeed. This implies a level of strategic authority that many Product Managers struggle to achieve in their own organizations. The article identifies a common organizational pattern where the Product Manager handles high-level strategy and stakeholder negotiation while the Product Owner is tasked with writing requirements and managing the development team's queue. This vertical split is often criticized for being inefficient and creating too many hand-offs between commercial and technical teams. Knight agrees that a single, unified role is often better, but he emphasizes that individual Product Owners are rarely in a position to change their company's hierarchy or job titles. Knight offers several points in defense of the role. He notes that being a Product Owner is an excellent entry point for those looking to understand the mechanics of software development. He also observes that many Product Managers are essentially performing PO duties while maintaining a more prestigious title. In some cases, non-technical Product Managers actually rely on Product Owners to handle the technical complexities they cannot manage themselves. The focus should be on providing coaching and systemic change for those who want to expand their scope, rather than demeaning those who are simply doing their jobs within a specific corporate structure.

Can Every Sales-Driven Company be Transformed to Being Product-Led?

The feasibility of transitioning a sales-driven company to a product-led model depends heavily on leadership mindset and market dynamics. Many organizations use the term product-led loosely, ranging from fully empowered product teams to simple self-service onboarding. In contrast, sales-driven companies typically focus on short-term revenue, long sales cycles, and building custom features for large prospects or whales. This environment often forces product managers into a short order cook role where they lack the authority to defend a long-term roadmap. A truly product-led company prioritizes the needs of the many over the few and makes decisions based on evidence rather than individual opinions. Data shows that 37 percent of companies have sales teams larger than their engineering teams, which often leads to go-to-market expansion outpacing product capabilities. For product managers seeking change, the most effective strategy is to build trust by speaking the language of leadership. This means framing product initiatives in terms of revenue and results rather than using jargon like OKRs or discovery. Change is often a long game of marginal gains. Practitioners should look for Overton Windows, which are moments when existing systems break and make organizational change seem sensible. Ultimately, the goal is alignment and collaboration across the entire company rather than a dictatorship by any single department.

Can You Really Build a Product With Hard Single-Stack Developers?

The challenges of building software products are significantly amplified when engineering teams are composed of hard single-stack developers. A stack is defined through three core areas: the front-end, which includes UI running in browsers using frameworks like React or Angular; the back-end, which handles server-side logic and APIs using languages like NodeJS or Java; and the database, which manages data storage. While specialization is common, developers generally fall into three categories: full-stack, soft single-stack (who prefer one area but help elsewhere), and hard single-stack (who strictly work on one area and may reject others). A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the "Everlasting Feature Request" problem. In this scenario, a standard feature requiring both UI and API changes becomes fragmented. Because hard single-stack developers cannot or will not cross boundaries, the work is split into silos. This necessitates detailed technical specifications and creates a cycle of dependencies. If a front-end developer finds an issue with an API, they must wait for a back-end developer who might already be on another task. This results in mini-waterfalls where features take weeks or months instead of days. This structure harms the product in four specific ways. First, product managers are forced into engineering management, writing technical tickets instead of focusing on strategy. Second, delivery speed plummets due to scheduling conflicts and hand-offs. Third, developers lose a holistic understanding of the product. Finally, developers lose empathy for the user because they are disconnected from the end-to-end experience. To mitigate these issues, companies need strong engineering managers who can bridge technical gaps. Product managers should strictly focus on user requirements rather than technical task distribution. Planning must account for the inherent delays caused by dependencies. Most importantly, all developers should be exposed to customer feedback to build empathy. While expertise is valuable, the goal is to nudge hard single-stack developers toward a more flexible approach to improve overall product agility.

Making a Good Bet: Building Products with Incomplete Information

Jason Knight explores the tension between data-driven decision-making and the necessity of moving forward when information is incomplete. The discussion is sparked by a quote from Aakash Gupta suggesting that unquantifiable or unknowable impact does not preclude an initiative from being the highest priority. Knight identifies several blockers that lead to analysis paralysis: a lack of coherent product strategy, absence of usable quantitative or qualitative data, past product trauma from failed large-scale bets, and psychologically unsafe environments where failure is punished. He also notes that product management purism, where teams dogmatically follow book-based recipes, can hinder progress in low-functioning cultures. To counter these, he suggests a Thinking in Bets framework where success is viewed as a probability rather than a binary. Practical techniques for moving forward include the sniff test using gut feel and peer discussion, identifying and testing the riskiest load-bearing assumptions, and searching for signals in whatever data is available. He introduces the concept of Devil's Advocate as a Service (DAaaS) by using LLMs to bounce ideas and challenge biases. The most critical recommendation is reducing the size of the bet by building the smallest possible version of a product or feature to validate assumptions before committing significant resources. This approach allows teams to test the water with a smaller bet so they can make a bigger bet with confidence later. Finally, Knight emphasizes the importance of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, noting that building small things only works if teams are willing to fold and stop development if the initial results are poor. He argues that good product management is as much an art as a science, requiring comfort with ambiguity and the ability to react to new information. The article also touches on the role of product leaders in coaching teams to improve decision-making appetites and mindsets, ensuring that product management does not become the place where good ideas go to die.

Buy! Buy! Buy! The Pros and Cons of Building Everything Yourself

The decision to build internal tools versus purchasing off-the-shelf solutions is a recurring tension in product development. Teams often default to building because of a desire for greenfield projects, an underestimation of technical complexity, or the perception that existing engineering labor is cheaper than a SaaS subscription. These rationalizations frequently ignore the long-term burdens of software ownership. Building internal versions of commoditized technology leads to significant maintenance requirements, including security patches, library upgrades, and scaling challenges. This diverts engineering talent away from core product features that deliver direct value to customers. Most companies fall into the trap of believing their requirements are unique, when in reality, they are often just accommodating legacy processes that could be improved by adopting industry-standard tools. Strategic building should be reserved for fundamental intellectual property or features that provide a genuine competitive advantage. If a capability is a differentiator that helps the business win in the market, building is justified. Conversely, if the requirement is a commodity platform, buying is almost always more cost-effective. A hybrid approach is often the most efficient: purchasing a platform that handles the majority of the workload while using its SDK or API to build the specific, high-value customizations that are truly unique to the business. This allows teams to maintain focus on their primary mission while leveraging the continuous innovation and support provided by specialized vendors.

Products versus Services, the Horror of LinkedIn Collaborative Articles, and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery

The distinction between product-led and service-led organizations often reveals itself in the terminology used for users. Companies that refer to "clients" rather than "customers" frequently exhibit poor product management hygiene because a client expects bespoke work while a customer buys a repeatable solution. This distinction is critical for unit economics. Scaling a professional services firm requires adding headcount or increasing fees, whereas a product model scales through repeatable software. A spectrum exists to categorize these business models. Pure products are standard versions bought by everyone. Service-enabled products include automated software with high-value human support. Product-enabled services use technology to make manual engagements more efficient. Finally, professional services are entirely bespoke for individual clients. Understanding where a company sits on this scale helps leadership align their pricing and growth expectations. Regarding industry trends, LinkedIn collaborative articles are criticized as low-quality content designed to train AI models. While contributors may offer smart insights, the platform structure prioritizes engagement over substance. Practitioners are encouraged to host their original thoughts on their own platforms rather than feeding the LinkedIn algorithm. In the realm of product methodology, continuous discovery remains a vital practice despite recent industry pushback. The core challenge for all teams is an imperfect understanding of customer pain points. Effective product coaching focuses on defining specific customer segments and demanding concrete evidence for decision making. This approach counters the "feature factory" mentality where sales requests drive the roadmap without validation. Small, incremental changes and a focus on "working small" are often more effective for organizational transformation than large, disruptive shifts.

Transforming with Marty Cagan! Plus... Stepping on a Succession of Rakes

Companies frequently cycle through product leaders because the underlying organizational structure is flawed, a phenomenon termed rake-setting. This occurs when leadership teams inadvertently or intentionally create environments where failure is inevitable. Common rakes include a next deal always wins sales-led mentality, overreliance on internal subject-matter experts instead of customer data, and restricting product teams from direct customer contact. When these leaders fail, they are replaced by others with different skill sets, such as marketing-focused or tech-focused leaders, but the cycle repeats because the structural issues remain unaddressed. The leadership team often fails to realize that the problem lies in the environment they have created rather than the specific individual in the role. Marty Cagan's book, Transformed, addresses these systemic issues by introducing the Product Operating Model. Unlike his previous works, Inspired and Empowered, which focused on product teams within tech-first companies, Transformed provides a roadmap for legacy organizations to bridge the gap toward becoming effective product-led entities. While some critics view Cagan's standards as unrealistic for traditional firms, the core principles serve as essential benchmarks for marginal gains and long-term improvement. The model emphasizes moving away from project-based delivery toward a focus on solving problems and achieving outcomes. A critical indicator of a healthy product organization is the relationship between the product manager and the team. A PM should not act as the boss but as a peer in a collaborative cross-functional partnership. Product leaders must ensure PMs do not simply throw specs over the wall but instead involve engineering and design as equals. Failure to correct a PM who dominates the team reflects a leadership deficiency, either through tacit approval or an inability to fix the culture. Effective transformation requires moving beyond outcomes over outputs rhetoric toward structural changes that empower teams to solve problems rather than just deliver features.

AI Product Management, AI Product Managers and the Opposite of Strategy

Jason Knight argues against the necessity of specialized AI Product Manager roles, suggesting that product management should focus on solving user problems regardless of the specific technology used. He posits that everything looks like a nail when a PM only has an AI hammer. Effective product management requires a relentless focus on user, customer, and business needs rather than being constrained by a specific method. Whether the solution involves AI, a decision tree, or simpler logic, the focus must remain on the outcome for the user. Regarding AI implementation, Knight warns against forcing AI into products without proper planning, as this often leads to poor user experiences. He advocates for using Large Language Models (LLMs) as inputs rather than outputs. In this model, AI serves as a sparring partner for sense-checking, proofreading, or brainstorming. It should not generate the final content seen by users, which risks becoming bland, grey nothingness. He emphasizes that product management remains a human-centric field because most product problems are fundamentally people problems. There is a specific paradox in AI usage: the people who can trust AI output are those who already know the truth, while those who do not know the subject cannot trust the output at all. The discussion on strategy highlights Roger Martin's framework from the book Playing to Win. Knight suggests a simple test: if the opposite of a strategy sounds stupid, then it is not a strategy but a generic goal. For example, claiming a strategy is to be customer-centric fails this test because no one chooses to be non-customer-centric. A real strategy involves an integrative set of choices that positions a company on a specific playing field to win. Finally, the text reviews key industry literature. Marty Cagan's Transformed focuses on moving to a product operating model, offering practical advice on objection handling and stakeholder management. Rich Mironov's The Art of Product Management remains a foundational text for those advancing in the field, emphasizing the nuanced skills required for leadership in tech.

5 Different Types of Debt That Can Hinder Your Product Organisation

Product organizations often accumulate various forms of debt that hinder scaling and growth. While technical debt is the most recognized, four other types significantly impact performance. Technical debt involves intentional compromises to reach market faster, such as avoiding over-optimization for scale that may not be needed yet. It is distinct from poor quality code. Product debt occurs when inefficiencies within the product lead to challenging unit economics, often requiring manual services to support the solution. Organisational debt stems from a collection of legacy decisions made for specific reasons that eventually create unnecessary structures or processes. Vision debt, a term from Radhika Dutt, describes survival-driven decisions that deviate from the company's core purpose, usually to secure immediate revenue. Revenue debt is a specific manifestation where unstructured sales-led growth leads to a disparate customer base with conflicting needs. This makes it difficult to focus or decline requests because significant revenue is tied to fragmented segments. Addressing these debts requires a structured approach similar to financial recovery. The first step is a comprehensive audit to identify and name the specific debts. Organizations must then map the impact of each debt and calculate its metaphorical interest rate. This interest manifests as hits to efficiency, high costs to serve, or a reduced ability to ship new features. Not all debt must be eliminated immediately. Some low-risk debt can be carried long term if it serves a strategic purpose. The goal is to manage debt purposefully rather than allowing it to accumulate by mistake. Effective management involves avoiding high-interest payday loans and ensuring that the cost of carrying debt does not outweigh the benefits of the initial compromise.

The Ultimate Guide to Fractional Product Leadership

Fractional product leadership involves providing high-level strategic guidance and steering on a part-time basis. This role is distinct from interim leadership, which typically implies a full-time commitment for a fixed period. Fractional leaders are best suited for organizations that require senior expertise to navigate transformations or prepare for funding rounds but lack the budget for a full-time executive. Success in this field demands rapid onboarding, intense context-switching capabilities, and a degree of emotional detachment to maintain objectivity. Administrative setup is a foundational requirement. In the UK, practitioners often choose between sole trader or private limited company structures. The latter offers better tax efficiency and liability protection but involves higher administrative overhead. Essential business components include a dedicated bank account, professional indemnity insurance, and VAT registration for those exceeding the £85,000 turnover threshold. Client acquisition is driven by high-power micro-networking rather than broad social media reach. While a following can spark initial interest, sustainable work comes from referrals, investment firms, and direct outreach to past colleagues. Defining a specific niche, such as B2B sales-led SaaS companies in the £1M to £10M revenue range, allows a practitioner to stand out in a crowded market. Engagement terms must be clearly defined in service provider contracts. These should specify the length of engagement, availability (often 1 to 2 days per week), and fee structures. Daily rates for experienced product leaders in the UK generally fall between £750 and £1,250. Contracts must also address IR35 compliance to avoid being classified as a disguised employee, which carries significant tax risks. On the job, the focus remains on high-leverage activities that force-multiply the team's efforts. Fractional leaders should avoid getting pulled into tactical minutiae like performance reviews or routine support issues. Managing multiple clients requires strict compartmentalization, with the client of the day receiving total focus. Relationships typically conclude once specific deliverables are met or a permanent hire is onboarded.

Those Dreaded Sales-Led Feature Requests - by Jason Knight

B2B product managers often face pressure from sales teams to insert specific features into the roadmap to close high-value deals. This tension arises from misaligned incentives. Salespeople focus on quarterly revenue targets and closing named logos, while product teams prioritize long-term OKRs like retention and NPS. When these priorities clash, the conflict usually escalates to the CEO, often resulting in the product team being forced to comply. Effective product management in these scenarios involves several tactical steps. First, product managers should treat sales teams as partners. This includes reviewing recorded calls on platforms like Gong to understand the true urgency of a request. Second, direct discovery with the prospect is essential. Using techniques like the 5 Whys helps determine if the request is a genuine need or if workarounds exist. Third, validating the request with 3 to 5 existing customers in the same segment ensures the feature has broader market applicability. When building the feature, the goal is to limit the blast radius by delivering the smallest possible version that satisfies the requirement. Engineering should focus on creating generic, extensible solutions using feature flags or configuration options rather than hardcoded, customer-specific code. The concept of the checkbox attribute is a key addition to the Kano Model. These are features that may see low usage but are necessary for procurement questionnaires or to help internal champions secure budget. Building products that are easy to buy is just as important as building products that users love.

A bumper December catch-up post - by Jason Knight

Jason Knight provides a comprehensive update on recent product management and go-to-market resources, focusing on community building and expert insights from his podcast. The update introduces a new Slack workspace for asynchronous networking and One Knight Knetworking, a weekly Zoom-based speed networking event for product professionals. These initiatives aim to facilitate peer-to-peer connections in a field that often lacks structured networking opportunities. The post highlights five significant podcast episodes featuring industry experts. Maja Voje discusses her book GTM Strategist, focusing on finding product/market fit by identifying mission-critical problems and avoiding common pricing mistakes. She emphasizes that many startups leave money on the table by failing to align their pricing with the value provided to early customer profiles. April Dunford shares insights from Sales Pitch, explaining how to move beyond standard product demos to create pitches centered on differentiated value. Her approach focuses on crafting a narrative that makes the product's unique advantages obvious to the buyer. Petra Wille introduces Strong Product Communities, offering a guidebook for developing bottoms-up communities of practice within product organizations to improve team performance. This model encourages practitioners to learn from one another rather than relying solely on top-down training. Richard Blundell covers the Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders, emphasizing that founders should act as the primary salespeople and cautioning against hiring product managers too early in a startup's lifecycle. He argues that founder-led sales are essential for establishing the initial GTM motion. Finally, Steve Portigal discusses the second edition of Interviewing Users, providing practical advice on making an impact through effective user research. The collection serves as a high-signal directory for B2B SaaS leaders and product practitioners looking to refine their GTM strategies and organizational structures.

Accidentally Incompetent: Cycling Around the Four Stages of Competence

The four stages of competence model describes the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a specific skill. While traditionally viewed as a linear path, the model is more accurately described as a circular journey where practitioners can move both clockwise toward mastery and anti-clockwise toward regression. The four stages include unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. Moving clockwise involves active development. Transitioning from unconscious to conscious incompetence requires external feedback and gap analysis to identify unknown weaknesses. Moving to conscious competence involves focused training and coaching, ideally driven by intrinsic motivation. Reaching unconscious competence requires high repetition and getting the reps in to build muscle memory, similar to the Japanese martial arts concept of Shuhari, where a system is mastered so completely it is no longer consciously needed. Regression occurs when skills are not maintained. Moving from conscious competence back to conscious incompetence happens through lack of application; theoretical knowledge fades without real-world practice. The most dangerous shift is from unconscious competence back to unconscious incompetence. This happens when a master stops paying attention to how the game is changing, leading to accidental incompetence in a new environment. To manage these cycles, individuals must practice self-reflection and maintain humility regarding their weaknesses. People managers should provide continuous feedback through weekly 1:1s rather than relying on annual reviews. Organizational leaders must foster psychological safety, ensuring employees feel safe admitting what they do not know. Without this safety, a culture of perceived invincibility prevents the necessary honesty for skill development.

Product Managers Aren't Responsible for the Delivery of their Products

Product management often suffers from a labeling problem where the word manager implies a hierarchical leader or a delivery driver. This misconception leads to the delivery trap, where product managers (PMs) become bottlenecks by authorizing every task, micromanaging tickets, and handling support or QA. When a PM spends the majority of their time wrangling the team, they sacrifice high-leverage activities like customer discovery, market analysis, and strategic alignment with leadership. This behavior often stems from a lack of trust or a misunderstanding of the role, where the PM feels they are not contributing unless they are moving tasks around like chess pieces. Delivery should be defined as the technical execution handled by developers and designers, including coding, design sequencing, and testing. These tasks are best managed by the experts in those fields. The PM's role is to provide context on the why and when, then step back to offer feedback. To shift toward a shared responsibility model, teams can rotate Scrum Master duties, have developers lead product demos, and involve the entire team in writing tickets. This reduces communication overhead and ensures that no single person is a point of failure. True product development is a team sport. In high-performing teams, the product trio (PM, designer, and lead developer) works toward common goals rather than relying on the PM as a gatekeeper. This autonomy allows PMs to focus on business success and market trends. If a PM cannot take a holiday without the team stalling, the organization has a structural issue that needs fixing. Beyond the core argument, the text highlights industry debates such as the rebuttal to McKinsey's developer productivity metrics by Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck. It also references SaaS growth data from ChartMogul regarding the journey to 10 million dollars in ARR and the importance of proactive rather than reactive strategy.

The Release Train at Re-Platform 9¾ (Years Until It's Complete)

Re-platforming is the process of migrating software from one technology stack or infrastructure to another, often at significant expense and over a long duration. While these projects frequently result in a system that appears functionally identical to the original, they are often necessitated by a combination of technical, operational, and business factors. Technical drivers include legacy codebases, unscalable architecture, and security vulnerabilities. Operational drivers involve system instability and inefficient cloud spending. Business drivers often stem from mergers, regulatory requirements, or the inability to support new features required by customers. Most organizations start re-platforming far too late because they prioritize feature development over technical debt, leading to a crisis point where the system can no longer function. To succeed, re-platforming must be treated as a business decision and a product problem rather than a waterfall project. Product leaders should frame technical challenges in business terms to secure buy-in early. Instead of a big-bang migration, teams should focus on delivering vertical slices of functionality to provide incremental value. This approach may require running parallel systems and accepting temporary inefficiencies, but it reduces risk and allows for the prioritization of high-value components. Additionally, product managers should look for opportunities to unlock small customer value enhancements during the migration rather than waiting for a total completion. Continuous collaboration with engineering is essential to prevent the new platform from accumulating debt immediately after launch.

Why Product Management is Hard - A Tale of Two Pities

Product management is a uniquely challenging role that requires balancing strategic vision with granular execution. The difficulty often manifests in two distinct scenarios, frequently categorized as the good and bad product manager. However, these labels often reflect systemic failures in leadership and hiring rather than individual incompetence. If a company tolerates poor performance or hires the wrong profiles, it is a leadership problem that needs addressing through coaching or better performance management. In the first scenario, product managers function as glorified message handlers. They spend their time translating business requirements into technical tickets, managing projects for founders, and acting as a cost center. This creates a delta of despair, which is the gap between how a PM wants to work and how the company forces them to work. To improve this, PMs should work backwards from mandates to create evidence-backed business cases and ensure delivery is a shared responsibility with the engineering team. This frees up time to focus on long-term product vision and marginal gains in how the team operates. The second scenario involves good product managers in empowered organizations. While they have more autonomy, they face the 2D zoom problem. This involves constant context switching between high-level strategy and excruciatingly specific details. They must also code-switch between different departments, such as Sales, Marketing, and Engineering, each with its own vocabulary and motivations. This leads to high cognitive load and exhaustion, even in well-functioning teams. To mitigate these challenges, PMs should sharpen their storytelling and use frameworks like The First Minute to get to the point quickly. It is also critical to apply discovery techniques to internal colleagues to build empathy and understand their motivations. High-performing PMs must prioritize high-leverage tasks and avoid the temptation to be the lender of last resort for every minor issue. Despite these hardships, the role remains rewarding because of the scale of impact and the satisfaction of solving significant user pain points.

A Podcast Episode Bonanza and Pondering the Tricky Relationship between Sales and Product Management

Sales and product management alignment is critical for B2B SaaS success. A quadrant model helps categorize organizational health based on these two functions. Companies that are bad at both face stagnation and internal panic. Those with good sales but poor products often survive through high-touch demos and roadmap promises, though this creates friction for product teams. Organizations with great products but weak sales experience stalled growth and mutual blame. The ideal state involves high proficiency and deep collaboration in both areas. Product managers in sales-led environments should participate in deal review meetings. These sessions allow sales to present late-stage opportunities to cross-functional teams, ensuring product is aware of potential commitments before contracts are signed. PMs must also engage with go-to-market elements like pricing, packaging, and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) definitions rather than focusing solely on engineering delivery. If PMs spend all their time on developer story points, they lose influence over the strategic decisions that drive revenue. The newsletter also features insights from four industry experts via recent podcast episodes. Andres Glusman, CEO of DoWhatWorks, discusses measuring growth experiments through A/B testing across multiple businesses to identify winning patterns. Erika Klics provides strategies for tech leaders navigating job searches by leveraging their unique professional edges. Yana Welinder explains Kraftful's pivot to an AI-powered co-pilot for product managers, highlighting how AI is automating the synthesis of massive amounts of user feedback to change how PMs work. Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery, explores why software must remain in a releasable state and how product managers can support engineering teams in achieving that goal. The central message across these discussions is that product management is evolving to be more integrated with both technical delivery and commercial outcomes.

Three Mindsets that Can Cripple Product Managers, and Why we Need to Forget the Funnel

Product managers often struggle to demonstrate progress due to specific psychological traps and outdated marketing models. The traditional sales funnel, while a staple for a century, fails modern recurring revenue SaaS businesses because it ignores the post-acquisition customer journey. Transitioning to Customer-Led Growth and utilizing Jobs to be Done frameworks allows for a more holistic view of the customer experience. To diagnose internal friction, the Problem / Action Canvas provides a structured way to identify current behaviors and their results. For instance, a PM might spend excessive time with developers because they are comfortable with technical topics, which leads to missing non-technical issues. Tracking time buckets is a practical step toward ensuring effort is distributed across all necessary functions. The three specific mindsets that hinder effectiveness are the Messiah, the Martyr, and the Victim. The Messiah mindset involves an expert entering a new company with the belief that their previous successes and Product Thinking can fix everything. This often leads to alienation when the honeymoon period ends and colleagues grow tired of the idealism. The Martyr mindset occurs when a PM takes on unnecessary work to feel busy and receive praise. While they are seen as hard workers, they often fail to move big initiatives forward and eventually find themselves bypassed by colleagues. The Victim mindset is a downward spiral where the PM feels ignored and powerless against the company. This mindset creates a defensive whirlpool that damages reputations and leads to poor career decisions. Overcoming these traps requires a commitment to humility, inquisitiveness about existing company structures, and pragmatic prioritization. PMs must be adaptive, remaining strong on principles while staying flexible on details. Acknowledging that some cultures are fundamentally broken is necessary, but maintaining clear boundaries and attempting to succeed first prevents the cycle of panic-buying a new role that may have similar issues.

Embracing Change to Innovate and Why You Should NEVER Divide by Effort When Prioritising

Jason Knight examines the difficulty of defining success metrics for product management and critiques the reliance on quantitative prioritization frameworks. The discussion begins by questioning how to distinguish the impact of a PM team from the influence of sales or executive leadership. While some suggest measuring development efficiency, the core of the document focuses on the limitations of frameworks like RICE, ICE, and WSJF. Knight argues that these numeric systems often represent a "quantitative false beard," where subjective guesses about impact and effort are treated as objective facts. He notes that even the "confidence meter" championed by Itamar Gilad is subject to the varying perspectives of different stakeholders. A primary concern is the tendency of these frameworks to divide value by effort. This calculation systematically deprioritizes the most valuable initiatives if they happen to be complex or time-consuming. Over time, this leads to a backlog filled with "easy stuff" while the most significant opportunities are perpetually delayed. Knight even satirizes this with his "NEVER framework," which mocks the formulaic approach often found in sales-led B2B organizations. To counter this, the author advocates for prioritizing based on value alone. If a high-value project is too large to handle, the solution is not to deprioritize it but to use user story mapping to break it into smaller, deliverable segments. This approach allows for incremental progress on the most important goals rather than settling for low-impact quick wins. Additionally, the document features insights from Greg Coticchia on innovation management. Coticchia highlights that innovation is not limited to new technology; it also involves repositioning products and developing new business models to serve different user segments. The overarching theme is that product leaders must move beyond rigid scoring systems and focus on delivering meaningful value through iterative development and clear user focus.

The Product Operations Manifesto, and why you should Reverse Egg-ineer your Ideal Customer Profile

Many B2B companies suffer from revenue debt, a condition where early organic growth leads to a dispersed customer base with conflicting needs. When a startup sells to anyone willing to pay, the product eventually loses its focus and positioning. To resolve this, product leaders must reverse engineer their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by looking at their existing customer data to find the most profitable and successful segments. The process starts with a temperature check. Asking colleagues which single segment they would focus on if forced to choose often reveals significant misalignment between sales, product, and leadership. A well-defined ICP identifies a group of customers with similar pain points and jobs to be done, making messaging and product development more efficient. While startups are traditionally advised to focus on a niche from day one, those with revenue debt must work backward from their current data. Data collection is the next step. Leaders should aggregate CRM, helpdesk, and finance data to calculate metrics like sales cycle length, win/loss rates, annual contract value (ACV), and churn. For B2B SaaS, slicing this data by firmographics, such as company size, sector, age, and location, reveals which intersections produce the highest lifetime value. The Fried Egg framework helps communicate these findings. The Yolk is the core ICP where all strategic and product efforts are concentrated. The White represents secondary segments that can use the product as-is; they are not actively targeted but are accepted as inbound. The Frying Pan contains segments that are more trouble than they are worth and should be disqualified immediately. Success depends on securing leadership alignment. Product managers must use their data analysis to convince executives that the current approach is inefficient. This is not a one-time task; markets shift, and the ICP must be reviewed periodically to ensure the company remains intentional about its growth strategy.

Balancing the need to be Customer-Focused with the need to "Innovate"

The tension between being customer-focused and the drive to innovate is often presented as a zero-sum game, but this is a logical fallacy. True innovation involves finding better ways to solve a user's most important problems, regardless of whether the solution uses high-tech tools like AI or low-tech improvements. Innovation for its own sake, without grounding in a specific use case or job to be done, often results in products that nobody uses. Grounding every technical advancement in a clear user problem is essential to avoid muddling the product proposition. A common pitfall in growing companies is the feature death march. This occurs when a product lacks a coherent strategy and accumulates revenue debt by building disconnected features for a fragmented customer base. In these scenarios, the sales team constantly demands new capabilities to show progress, but the product fails to serve any single segment well. To combat this, product managers must focus on the core offering and potentially deprecate features that do not align with the primary market segment. This requires moving away from stack-ranking features based solely on immediate revenue potential. Roadmapping also presents challenges, particularly when leadership demands long-term projections. Data suggests that over 34% of product professionals are asked to provide roadmaps spanning two years or more. These documents are frequently comforting fictions that fail to account for the unpredictability of the market. Instead of treating roadmaps as fixed commitments, they should be viewed as flexible guides. When leadership or investors push for specific shiny features that seem disconnected from user needs, product managers should apply discovery skills internally. Understanding the context behind these requests, such as industry shifts or internal C-suite dynamics, allows PMs to align these initiatives with actual customer problems. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure every new feature or technical advancement provides tangible value to the user while supporting the business strategy.

Fostering a Culture of Experimentation, and is Product-Led Growth Really For You?

Knight's Law suggests that product teams often prioritize initiatives matching the existing system architecture over actual user needs. This tendency can lead to rearchitecting users around technical choices rather than solving their most painful problems. In B2B SaaS organizations, building a culture of experimentation requires navigating these architectural biases and constant business requirements. Product-Led Growth (PLG) does not replace Sales-Led Growth (SLG). Instead, it addresses different segments more effectively. For large enterprise deals, sales teams remain essential, but PLG can improve lead quality by demonstrating value upfront. This synergy allows for better resource allocation across different customer tiers. For teams in requirement-heavy environments, a tactical framework is necessary. In B2B contexts with low user counts or mission-critical applications, traditional A/B testing is often impractical. Teams should focus on experimenting with customers through early access and beta programs rather than experimenting on them. Technical enablers like feature flags and tools such as LaunchDarkly or Optimizely are crucial for making experimentation feasible without engineering friction. Internal buy-in depends on using the right language. Product managers should avoid academic jargon like design thinking and instead use business-centric terms such as de-risking and customer collaboration. Starting with small, less certain initiatives allows teams to prove value without disrupting the entire roadmap. Success requires transparently sharing results, including failures, to shift the organizational focus from mere output to validated learning.

(Don't) Scream If You Want To Go Faster, and How to Best Share Roadmaps with Stakeholders

OKRs function best when they define desired changes in customer behavior, known as outcomes, and the metrics used to measure those changes. They are intended to inspire empowered teams to find their own path to a goal rather than measuring progress toward a specific feature or output. While specific paths are sometimes necessary, they should remain outside the OKR framework to maintain the integrity of the system. Data suggests that 60 percent of product managers now work with OKRs that are not entirely feature based, indicating a positive shift toward outcome oriented management. In the context of accelerating product development, radical transparency with CEOs and business leaders is essential. Leaders often demand more speed without understanding the underlying constraints or the technical debt involved. By being transparent about trade offs and involving executives in the decision making process, product leaders can secure necessary buy in and reduce friction. This approach is discussed in detail with Ed Biden of Hustle Badger, who emphasizes that speed is often a byproduct of clear alignment and reduced waste rather than simply working harder. Roadmaps serve primarily as communication tools rather than strict delivery plans. Effective roadmaps focus on high level themes and initiatives instead of granular feature lists. Commitments to specific dates should generally not exceed quarterly granularity to allow for necessary flexibility. Because roadmaps are storytelling devices, they must be easily accessible and shared frequently across the organization, including in sales, marketing, and leadership meetings. To keep stakeholders engaged, product managers should focus on the delta between updates. Repeating the same status for ongoing projects leads to stakeholders tuning out. Highlighting what has changed, such as deprioritizing a specific initiative due to new evidence, provides more value and keeps the conversation focused on strategic shifts. Experimenting with different communication formats, such as video or audio messages, can also help break the monotony of standard slide decks and ensure the message is retained. The value of a roadmap lies in its ability to align the organization on the current direction and the reasoning behind it.

Using AI in Product Management, Moving to Software Value Streams, and Handling Customer Feedback when Everything’s Urgent

Jason Knight explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and product management, emphasizing that while tools like ChatGPT-4 are transformative, the core need for product vision and strategy remains. The discussion highlights that PMs must focus on solving real problems rather than just deploying technology for its own sake. A significant portion of the newsletter covers an interview with Luke Hohmann regarding the transition from software value streams to software profit streams. This concept argues that Agile frameworks often focus too heavily on ephemeral value and should instead align more closely with a company's financial goals and sustainability. The newsletter also provides a practical framework for B2B product teams struggling with urgent customer feedback. Knight suggests a tiered approach to prioritization. First, teams should use Jobs to be Done methodology to understand the underlying problem. Second, they must distinguish between legitimate blocking bugs and feature requests disguised as bugs. If a workaround exists, the issue is not truly urgent. Third, non-critical requests should be moved to a periodic review process with support teams rather than being squeezed into sprints. Finally, Knight addresses the difficulty of saying no to large customers, noting that while compromising principles for revenue is a business choice, it should not become the default mode of operation.

Getting Good at Competitor Analysis, and should we charge the Customer for that Feature Request?

Product managers in high-performing companies act as strategic partners by questioning assumptions and challenging the status quo. In less effective environments, this questioning is often labeled as negativity, leading PMs to adopt a feature factory mindset. Maintaining a positive, context-seeking approach is essential for effective disagreement and commitment. Competitor analysis should focus on leadership rather than imitation. Blindly copying a competitor's moves assumes they are acting rationally, which is not always the case. A better strategy involves understanding the landscape while building unique capabilities that others cannot easily replicate. The dilemma of charging for feature requests often arises in sales-driven B2B contexts when a prospect requires a roadmap item sooner than planned. While 62 percent of surveyed professionals favor charging, there are significant trade-offs. Charging can set a dangerous precedent where the roadmap is dictated by the highest bidder and may give customers an undue sense of ownership over product direction. Furthermore, one-off revenue is less valuable to SaaS valuations than recurring revenue. Conversely, charging for accelerated delivery can increase customer commitment and provide necessary cash flow. The ideal approach is to maintain flexibility. If a feature is widely applicable, taking payment to prioritize it is acceptable, provided it does not lead to restrictive contracts or statements of work that hinder the product's general utility. Converting these requests into recurring subscription fees is a potential alternative to preserve SaaS valuation.

The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization & What to do when your CEO says "Just Build This"

The content addresses the tension between product managers focused on outcomes and executives demanding specific outputs. When a CEO issues a "Just Build This" directive, winning an ideological battle in the moment is unlikely. Instead, product leaders should focus on preventing future occurrences while handling the current request constructively. Key strategies include questioning the underlying assumptions of an idea rather than the idea itself. This approach avoids making stakeholders feel personally attacked. Another tactic involves retro-fitting the desired outcome from the requested output. By treating a feature as an answer to a question, product teams can work backwards to identify the original problem and uncover broader opportunities. The document also highlights insights from Eisha Armstrong on the transition from a services mindset to a product mindset. Fear of change is identified as the primary barrier to digital transformation. Additionally, the outdated "move fast and break things" mantra is challenged by Dani Grant, who argues that quality is a collective responsibility and essential for modern productivity tools. To avoid becoming a "feature factory," the author emphasizes doubling down on direct product discovery. Synthesizing feedback from various teams helps identify whether a requested feature is truly a market requirement or a one-off request for a specific customer. Using these requests as precursors for forward-thinking discovery allows product teams to stay ahead of the roadmap.

Investing in Good Ideas, why Product Management is Hard, and Prepping for that Next Big Talk

Product management is uniquely challenging due to constant context switching and the need to shift zoom levels rapidly. PMs must move between technical developer discussions, high-level leadership strategy, and granular user research multiple times a day. Rather than being the source of all ideas, a product manager acts as an investor in good ideas. This involves playing the role of a Socratic Police Officer who asks probing questions to extract insights from others and synthesize them into a cohesive direction. The document also provides a structured six-step framework for preparing presentations. First, prioritize the core message by identifying what the audience must know. Second, write a complete colloquial script to establish a narrative flow before creating any visuals. Third, read the script aloud with a timer to identify clumsy phrasing or logical gaps. Fourth, design slides that use images and short phrases as visual anchors rather than text-heavy scripts. Fifth, transition from the full script to concise presenter notes with a maximum of three bullet points per slide. Finally, rehearse repeatedly in various environments to build comfort with the material. Additionally, the text highlights the value of mentorship through the My Mentor Path platform and discusses the career transition of Pooja Parthasarathy from high-frequency trading to product leadership. It emphasizes that while PM work is exhausting, the ability to shape category-defining products is a significant reward.

Falling in Love with Problems, and who SHOULDN’T Product Management report through?

Product management effectiveness is frequently misjudged based on the volume of direct customer requests. While robust discovery aims to identify needs early, random requests are an inevitable reality of business and do not signify a failing team. This perspective aligns with the philosophy of Uri Levine, founder of Waze and Moovit, who argues that entrepreneurs must fall in love with the problem rather than the solution. His approach emphasizes rapid experimentation and the necessity of failing fast to find a successful path forward. The organizational reporting line for product management serves as a clear statement of company priorities. A poll of practitioners identified the CMO as the least desirable reporting line, as it often results in a focus on marketing events and flashy features over core product health and technical debt. Other reporting structures carry specific risks: * Reporting to a COO often prioritizes process efficiency and engineer utilization over experimentation. * Reporting to a CTO can lead to technical feasibility and internal arguments overshadowing business value. * Reporting to a CEO may turn the product team into a delivery arm for the founder's personal vision, limiting their ability to push back. The emergence of the Chief Product Officer (CPO) role offers a solution for necessary C-level representation. This ensures product has an equal seat at the table alongside sales, marketing, and engineering. However, success in this role requires a balance of practitioner expertise and the ability to communicate effectively with the broader C-suite. Ultimately, the quality of the individual leader and their willingness to trust the team's expertise is more important than the specific reporting line.

Storytelling for Alignment, and the Essential Interview Questions that PMs should ask to find out what they're Getting Into

Product management success often hinges on understanding the commercial reality of a business before joining. A common misconception in software development is that every ticket in a backlog will eventually be completed. In reality, backlogs frequently become dumping grounds for support queries and sales requests. Long-standing tickets are rarely prioritized based on age; instead, they often represent outdated feedback that should be cleared to provide clarity. Embracing "no" over "one day" is essential for maintaining a functional product focus. Storytelling serves as a primary tool for cross-functional alignment. Product leaders should act as Chief Storytelling Officers to ensure the entire organization understands the core narrative and strategy. This alignment is critical when navigating new roles, where asking the right questions during the interview process can prevent future regret. Five specific areas provide high-signal data for prospective PMs. First, requesting face time with the CEO or founder reveals the true culture and the level of autonomy the product team actually possesses. Second, understanding Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and revenue per employee helps identify if a business is truly product-led or heavily reliant on manual services. Third, analyzing revenue distribution highlights customer concentration risks, as having a few large clients often leads to "customer specials" that hijack the roadmap. Fourth, knowing the financial runway indicates whether the company is in a "wartime" state, which often leads to cutting corners and abandoning product best practices for immediate cash. Finally, meeting cross-functional leaders from sales, engineering, and customer success provides a realistic view of internal priorities and potential friction points.

Prioritising Career vs Company, and why OKRs are the Gateway Drug to Good Product Management

This document outlines tactical frameworks for product managers to handle competing demands and advance their careers. It introduces the HWIP framework to evaluate professional service requests that might distract from core product work. HWIP stands for: How much money is it worth, What happens if we don't do it, Is the opportunity cost understood, and are there Product enhancement opportunities. The text also highlights a discussion with Jeff Gothelf on using OKRs as a gateway drug to shift organizational focus from feature delivery to solving meaningful problems. A central theme is the tension between being a high-performing individual contributor and moving into leadership. The author describes the indispensable trap, where being too good at current operational tasks prevents career progression because managers fear the pain of replacement. To combat this, a 2x2 matrix is provided to categorize tasks based on their value to the company versus their value to the individual's career. The framework encourages product managers to aggressively avoid tasks that serve neither, and to delegate or divest tasks that are good for the company but stall personal growth. Finally, it mentions My Mentor Path, a free platform designed to help product professionals connect for career guidance.

Evidence-Guided Product Development and The Ambiguity of "Outcomes over Outputs"

Product management mentorship remains a critical need, as evidenced by the high engagement surrounding the launch of My Mentor Path, a platform designed to connect practitioners. Evidence-guided development strategies often utilize the GIST framework, popularized by Itamar Gilad, to shift organizations away from rigid, delivery-focused roadmaps toward more flexible, outcome-based planning. While numeric prioritization frameworks are sometimes viewed with skepticism by product leaders, they serve as valuable tools for initiating internal conversations and ensuring that teams are asking the right questions about value and impact. These scores should be revisited frequently as new information is learned to ensure the roadmap remains relevant. A significant challenge in modern product organizations is the semantic ambiguity surrounding the phrase 'outcomes over outputs.' Product teams typically define outcomes as specific changes in user behavior and outputs as the actual features or code being built. In contrast, commercial stakeholders such as sales, marketing, and executive leadership often perceive outcomes as the features they can actively sell to customers, while viewing the labor of developers and designers as the output. This fundamental disconnect frequently results in cross-talk and a lack of strategic alignment between departments. Sales teams represent a unique case of outcome-driven behavior within the corporate structure. For these professionals, outcomes are strictly measured by the amount of revenue booked per quarter. Their outputs consist of the operational activities required to close deals, such as conducting meetings and managing the pipeline. Because sales teams are generally indifferent to which specific customer provides the revenue as long as their financial quotas are met, they are often the most outcome-oriented group in the company. To resolve these misalignments, product leaders must move beyond simply repeating industry catchphrases. Success requires translating product goals into analogies and language that resonate with the specific incentives and pressures of non-product stakeholders. By framing product strategy in terms of commercial impact and operational efficiency, product managers can better advocate for a shift away from the feature factory model and toward a culture of evidence-based development.

Product Management in Practice and what to do when Everything's a Top Priority

Product management often diverges from theoretical frameworks found in textbooks. In practice, the role is frequently messy and ambiguous. Many organizations suffer from a lack of product leadership at the executive level, leading to a product black hole where tactical reactions replace coherent strategy. This environment typically results in fragmented products, high customer churn, and a sales team over-promising features to close deals. When everything is labeled a top priority, product managers must shift from a defensive posture to a pragmatic firefighting mode. The first step involves adjusting expectations and accepting that innovation might be paused to stabilize the existing platform. Utilizing methods like MoSCoW prioritization helps identify truly essential tasks by forcing stakeholders to justify why specific initiatives are must-haves. The goal is to achieve a base level of quality across all products rather than making one thing perfect while others fail. To prevent a recurrence of this tactical debt, product managers must actively shape the conditions for success. This includes defining a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and user personas to guide sales and marketing efforts. Establishing a rigorous sales enablement process and deal review meetings ensures that new commitments align with the product strategy. Communication is vital; product leaders must constantly evangelize the link between company strategy and product initiatives to prevent assumptions from filling the void left by silence. If a company culture fundamentally resists this strategic rigor, practitioners may need to evaluate their long-term fit within the organization.

Going Global! And why your colleagues (probably) aren’t crazy

International expansion requires thinking about growth before a company is officially ready to execute it. While overengineering from the start is unnecessary, building flexible foundations ensures that teams do not have to start from scratch when the time comes to enter new markets. Chui Chui Tan, an international growth adviser, emphasizes that culturalisation and market expansion are strategic efforts that benefit from early consideration of cultural differences and workplace manifestations. This approach aligns with the concept of iterative development, where small builds are checked, improved, and evolved into great products. Internal friction often arises when product managers view their colleagues as irrational or difficult. Drawing from negotiation principles used by the FBI, there are three primary reasons why stakeholders may appear to be acting against product goals. First, they may be ill-informed, operating on incorrect data or false assumptions about product capabilities and market focus. Second, they may be facing hidden constraints such as budgetary issues, technical debt, or fragile account health that are not visible to the product team. Third, they may have competing interests driven by different compensation structures or historical biases. Resolving these conflicts requires breaking down silos through direct communication. Product managers should apply the same discovery skills they use for customers to their own colleagues. This involves conducting reverse discovery to share product goals while actively seeking to understand the motivations and pressures facing sales, marketing, and engineering teams. Building these cross-functional relationships and meeting in the middle is essential for long term success in complex organizational environments.

Getting Tech Teams Closer to "The Business", and The Twelve Days of Product Christmas

Effective communication between technical teams and commercial stakeholders is essential to move engineering away from being viewed as a cost center. Douglas Squirrel highlights that providing engineers with full business context and focusing on profit allows them to contribute more significantly to organizational goals. Many companies fail by trapping expensive talent in endless discussions and rigid backlogs without explaining the underlying why of the work. By fostering better conversations, organizations can bridge the gap between product development and commercial success. The Twelve Days of Product Christmas provides a curated selection of high-impact podcast episodes from the One Knight in Product series. The selection process used a Python-based play-off system to ensure quality episodes from earlier eras were not overlooked due to lower historical download counts. The podcast's growth is categorized into three distinct phases: the pre-Cagan era starting August 2020, the post-Cagan era after March 2021, and the 2022 period where compound returns significantly increased reach. The curated list features prominent industry figures and specific strategic themes. Marty Cagan discusses building effective product organizations. April Dunford covers positioning and product-market fit. Rand Fishkin explores escaping VC culture and focusing on lifetime value. Melissa Perri addresses product operations and the build trap. Russ Laraway focuses on management and employee engagement. Irene Yu explains technical skills for product managers. Rich Mironov deals with B2B product management challenges. Diane Wiredu discusses messaging and product/message fit. John Cutler explores product thinking and avoiding feature factories. Crystal Parker provides advice on landing product management roles. Allen Holub discusses agile development and product roles. Christina Wodtke covers radical focus and OKRs. This collection serves as a comprehensive resource for practitioners looking to refine their GTM strategy, improve organizational culture, and master specific product management disciplines. It emphasizes the need for product leaders to balance technical execution with strategic business alignment.

The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams, and is Scope Creep Really a Thing?

Product management success relies on the ability to pivot and avoid the sunk cost fallacy. A notable example is the production of the film Back to the Future, where the lead actor was replaced weeks into filming to ensure the final product met the creative vision. This principle applies directly to product development: it is never too late to change direction if the current path does not serve the product's best interests. Continuing down a wrong path due to previous investment is a common trap that limits potential. Saeed Khan identifies five core dysfunctions that plague product management teams: poor job definitions, under-skilled product managers, poor processes, unclear objectives, and weak product leadership. These systemic issues often lead to friction, slow development, and lackluster sales. Addressing these requires radical honesty about the state of the organization rather than blaming individual performance. Weak leadership in particular can prevent a team from aligning on a cohesive strategy, leading to wasted effort across the board. The concept of scope creep is frequently misunderstood in agile environments. In traditional project management, scope creep is a risk involving changes to project scope without control procedures, impacting the iron triangle of time, cost, and scope. However, the Agile Manifesto prioritizes responding to change over following a plan. In a truly iterative environment, what is often labeled as scope creep is actually a healthy adjustment based on extrinsic customer feedback. To manage work effectively, tasks should be broken down into small units. In-flight tasks should rarely be modified. Instead, teams should complete the current task and then evaluate the next most important item based on new information. The primary danger is intrinsic scope creep, where internal stakeholders add requirements without validation. True agility means focusing on solving customer problems better than the competition, regardless of fixed long-term plans. The goal is not to be agile for its own sake, but to solve problems at a price customers can afford.

Exploring the Key Skills of Innovators, and Weighing up Job vs Mission in your Career Journey

This newsletter explores the fundamental skills required for innovation and provides a framework for evaluating career satisfaction through the lens of mission and job quality. A central highlight is an interview with Bob Moesta, co-creator of the Jobs to be Done framework, who identifies five bedrock skills for innovators: Empathetic Perspective, Uncovering Demand, Causal Structures, Prototyping, and Trade-offs. Mastery of these skills is presented as essential for entrepreneurial success. The content also addresses the controversial claim that Product-Market Fit is dead, referencing a white paper by Andrea Saez and Dave Martin that challenges traditional venture capital perspectives. For B2B product discovery, the discussion focuses on the unique challenges of accessing and interviewing customers in a business context. A significant portion of the text is dedicated to a career matrix that plots Mission (personal resonance with the company's purpose) against Job (the quality of the work environment and culture). This matrix creates four quadrants: All In, Hold your Nose, Enjoy the cash, and Run for the Hills. The concept of the delta of despair is introduced to describe the gap between a product manager's expectations and the actual company reality. The author emphasizes that while no company is perfect, individuals should monitor whether this gap is shrinking or expanding over time to determine their long-term viability in a role.

Improving Agility when you’re anything but Agile, and why we're living in a Generalist World

Product managers often face a gap between agile theory and the reality of being treated as backlog administrators. This disconnect frequently stems from organizational silos and a 'big-bang' release culture that treats unreleased features like excess warehouse inventory. When software sits unreleased, it creates risk and prevents the business from realizing value. To overcome these hurdles, product leaders must avoid blaming development teams and instead recognize that many engineers have never worked in a truly agile environment or have been discouraged by previous failures under IT-centric leadership. Framing the need for agility in business terms is essential. Rather than citing the Agile Manifesto, practitioners should use data to highlight the risks of large releases, such as missed deadlines and customer disappointment. Addressing technical debt requires a product management approach to prioritization, tackling the most critical bottlenecks incrementally rather than attempting massive re-platforming projects. In B2B environments where customers may be risk-averse, using feature flags and early access plans can mitigate concerns. If continuous deployment of working software is not yet possible, teams should still avoid 'black box' development by showing non-working software or local demos to stakeholders and customers. This practice ensures early feedback and prevents the need for costly late-stage rewrites. Additionally, the rise of the generalist is highlighted through the work of Milly Tamati and Generalist World, suggesting that professionals who wear many hats are increasingly valuable in complex, modern work environments.

Pulling out of Growth Stalls, and can I do MVPs in Enterprise B2B?

Growth stalls frequently occur after periods of significant expansion. If the underlying factors are not addressed, these stalls can persist for years or even decades. Identifying the signs early and understanding why previous strategies stopped working is essential for recovery. In the B2B sector, implementing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is often complicated by a common misunderstanding of the term. Many teams treat an MVP as a version one or simply the fastest way to get a product to market, frequently ignoring the critical Build-Measure-Learn loop required to validate impact. To successfully launch an MVP in an enterprise environment, product managers should follow a structured approach. First, set realistic expectations regarding the small, risk-averse user base typical of B2B niches. Second, prioritize deep problem definition over reactive building based on sales requests. By focusing on the underlying problems rather than specific feature requests, PMs can identify unique solutions that customers may not have considered. Third, recruit customer advocates or design partners who are personally invested in solving the problem. Fourth, maintain a constant feedback loop by showing mockups and static data early in the process to ensure the solution remains on track. Fifth, transition these partners into early adopters who provide the ultimate validation: a willingness to pay. Finally, manage the assumption gap by ensuring sales and marketing teams clearly understand the product's current limitations to prevent overpromising in contracts.

Full Spectrum Messaging and how to Handle the Inevitability of Team Change

Effective communication within product organizations requires a strategy called Full Spectrum Messaging to overcome the common problem of stakeholder misalignment. Many product managers struggle because they rely on repetitive, uniform updates that stakeholders eventually tune out. To combat this, PMs should tailor their messages specifically to the audience. This means avoiding the mistake of sending technical developer updates to sales teams or high-level business summaries to engineering. Each group has a different base-level understanding and vocabulary, so updates must be translated to resonate with their specific needs and goals. Varying the medium is equally important for engagement. While some people prefer dense text, others engage better with audio or video content. Utilizing a mix of long-form text, short snippets, Loom videos, and audio clips caters to different learning styles and ensures the message stands out in a crowded digital environment like Slack or email. Repetition remains essential, but it must be executed through diverse styles to remain engaging. A key tactic is pattern breaking, which involves using humor, non-sequiturs, or unexpected juxtapositions to create a record-scratch moment that captures attention. This approach mirrors effective product marketing, where standing out is necessary for survival in a sea of identical content. Beyond communication, the inevitability of team change must be managed through frameworks like Dynamic Reteaming. Whether change occurs through growth, attrition, mergers, or layoffs, it is a constant factor in the lifecycle of a company. Heidi Helfand’s work on this subject highlights that even long-lived mission-based teams will eventually evolve. The focus for leadership should not be on preventing change, but on managing the transition effectively and treating people with respect. By combining robust communication strategies with a flexible approach to team structure, product leaders can maintain alignment and morale even during periods of organizational turbulence. This dual focus on how we speak and how we organize is critical for navigating the complexities of modern product development.

Product Manager Onboarding Done Right, and How to Work with Subject-Matter experts

Product management onboarding presents unique challenges because the role often sits at the center of organizational ambiguity. In many companies, an underdeveloped product culture can hinder a new manager's ability to land effectively. Success in a new role requires aligning teams quickly and delivering outcomes through fast feedback loops and constant communication with developers. A critical component of B2B product management involves navigating relationships with subject matter experts (SMEs). These individuals possess deep industry knowledge but varying levels of product experience. A quadrant model categorizes these stakeholders into four groups. Potential Disruptors have both industry and product expertise. Essential Informers know the industry but lack product building experience, often acting as customer proxies while potentially harboring status quo bias. Customer Enquirers are generalist product managers who rely on discovery and strategy. Helpful Observers provide basic sense-checking. Working effectively with SMEs requires a specific tactical approach. Dismissing their expertise is a mistake that creates defensive barriers. Instead, product managers should acknowledge their history and listen openly to their opinions. While SMEs may present their requests as obvious or mandatory, these should be treated as jumping-off points for discovery. Applying Jobs to be Done (JTBD) thinking allows a manager to abstract a request back to the original problem. Communication regarding the roadmap is essential for maintaining these relationships. When a request is not prioritized, the rationale must be explained through the lens of product vision and strategy. A key tactic is to attack assumptions rather than the ideas themselves. This approach prevents stakeholders from becoming defensive and allows for objective discussions about evidence and market needs. Building constructive relationships with SMEs is vital because leadership teams often value their perspective highly, and failing to collaborate can lead to being overruled or facing unnecessary escalations.

Moving to Substack, thinking about lay-offs, and swearing about the design industry

Jason Knight announces the transition of the One Knight in Product newsletter from Revue to Substack, a move triggered by the instability of Twitter's product roadmap following its acquisition. The primary focus of the document is a framework for handling layoffs with empathy and professionalism, specifically in response to the mass terminations at Twitter. Knight emphasizes that layoffs represent a failure of leadership or market strategy rather than individual employee performance. He advocates for a people first approach that prioritizes transparent communication, objective selection criteria, and active support for departing staff. The post details specific tactics for managers, such as treating selection processes as public records to ensure fairness and using a high-bar diagram to reassure affected employees of their professional value. Additionally, the document features a podcast highlight with Mackenzie Daisley of Brieft, discussing systemic issues in the design industry and the importance of persistence after failed pitches. Knight also introduces Product People, a service providing interim product management and team scaling for founders.

Mental Health for PMs, the Importance of Messaging, Web3, and thinking about Revenue Debt

Revenue debt arises when a company prioritizes short-term revenue gains over long-term product scalability. This often manifests in B2B SaaS when leadership accepts custom requests from any prospect to secure ARR, leading to a product that is a hodgepodge of disconnected features. Such a strategy creates significant maintenance costs and prevents the product from standing on its own. Over time, this scattergun approach to sales results in a customer base with few shared characteristics, making renewals difficult and slowing growth as the initial network of the founders dries up. To resolve revenue debt, companies must transition from a quasi-services mindset to a product-led approach by implementing a formal deal review process. This process ensures that sales teams are validating prospects against a strictly defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). A coherent company vision and strategy are necessary to provide a framework for these decisions. Without a clear strategy, teams default to chasing any available money. Sales enablement plays a critical role here by providing the team with materials that emphasize benefits and value over a list of features. Beyond revenue strategy, product managers face unique mental health challenges due to the high-pressure, central nature of the role. Effective messaging is also highlighted as a top-down strategic effort rather than a simple marketing task. For those in the job market, the PEARL framework is recommended over the STAR method for senior-level interviews to better demonstrate impact and seniority.

Strong Product Leadership in the Age of AI - Petra Wille

The Future of Darts is Digital (And AI is Refereeing)

Obviously Awesome 2.0: What's Changed in Product Positioning?

The State of B2B Product Management

Vibe Coding: The New Product Team Superpower?

Let's Get Real About Synthetic Users

How Just Eat Takeaway Scales to 60 Million Customers | Jessica Hall's CPO Story

How to Do User Research in the Age of AI | Michele Hansen

Stop Making Alibi Progress & Start Making REAL Progress

CPO Stories: Sean O'Neill - Syncron

CPO Stories: Georgie Smallwood - Moonpig

We Should All Prioritise Product Delight!

CPO Stories: Katya Denike - Holland & Barrett

CPO Stories: Jamie Mercer - TrustedHousesitters

CPO Stories: Shiri Mosenzon Erez - commercetools

Shiri Mosenzon Erez, Chief Product Officer at commercetools, outlines the strategic approach to enterprise composable commerce. Commercetools operates as an API-first engine that enables global retailers and manufacturers to build flexible, resilient commerce stacks by mixing and match best-of-breed components. This modularity allows for constant uptime and high scalability across both B2C and B2B sectors. The product organization, comprising roughly 55 people across UX and product management, utilizes a strong CPO and CTO pairing model. Strategic prioritization is managed through value stream mapping, which helps the team decide whether to build, buy, or partner. This framework is essential for maintaining focus in a highly flexible platform environment and prevents the team from being pulled in too many directions by diverse customer needs. Regarding AI, the focus has shifted from basic data tagging to sophisticated conversational assistants and dynamic pricing. Commercetools employs an MCP layer that allows customers to integrate their preferred AI agents into the commerce ecosystem. This approach treats AI as a modular component of the broader commerce value stream rather than a monolithic add-on. Leadership at commercetools emphasizes a shift in the Product Manager profile. While the foundation was originally technical, there is a growing requirement for PMs to demonstrate business acumen and engage directly with stakeholders. This evolution ensures that the product roadmap remains strategy-led rather than purely reactive to customer requests, aligning development efforts with company-wide KPIs and long-term growth objectives.

CPO Stories: Hannah Kershaw - Domestic and General

Domestic and General operates as a billion-pound growth organization providing repair and replacement services for household appliances across 12 markets. With 6.5 million subscribers, the company functions as a behind-the-scenes powerhouse, managing customer journeys for major retailers and manufacturers like Argos, AO, and Hotpoint. Hannah Kershaw, the Chief Product Officer, discusses the complexity of this partner-led model, where the company must coordinate logistics and customer experience without directly employing repair technicians. Kershaw details the transformation of the product function from a traditional delivery model to domain-based product teams. This evolution involved moving from customer-aligned and partner-aligned squads to structures that reflect strategic focus and incorporate feedback from engineering. A key distinction in their organizational design is the separation of Product and Proposition. Digital product managers focus on platforms and user experiences, while proposition managers handle the commercial performance and insurance aspects of the offerings. To establish the value of a dedicated product function at the executive level, Kershaw focused on delivering tangible outcomes early on. Improving online claims processes and conversion rates served as critical proof points that built credibility and generated internal demand for product-led methodologies. Her philosophy emphasizes pragmatism over product purism, balancing industry best practices with the operational realities of a high-growth, partner-centric business.

CPO Stories: Simon Cross - Native Instruments

Benji Portwin's Hot Take: ADHD Can Be A Product Management Superpower

Shobhit Chugh's Hot Take: Product Managers Should Relentlessly Self-Promote

Valeria Stromtsova's Hot Take: PMs Must Take the Lead in Designing Sustainable Solutions

CPO Stories: Bhavesh Vaghela - London Marathon Events

Kanika Tolver's Hot Take: Some Project Managers are Actually Product Managers

CPO Stories: Maud Larpent - Treatwell

Alex Rastatuev's Hot Take: Product Onboarding and Customer Success Beats Features

CPO Stories: Debbie McMahon - The Financial Times

Rich Mironov: Product Managers Need to Understand the Language of Money

Tami Reiss's Hot Take: All Product Managers Are Leaders, Even If They Don't Think So

Alexander Murauski's Hot Take: The Language Your Product Speaks Is A Part of Your Product's Design

Andriy Burkov: The TRUTH About Large Language Models and Agentic AI

Sam Greenwood's Hot Take: We Need to Rethink Product Management in the Age of Societal Collapse

Olha Yohansen-Veselova's Hot Take: Product Managers Need To Become Growth Managers

Elena Verna: Solopreneurship, Memes & Getting Started with Product-Led Sales

Zoe Laycock's Hot Take: Product People Need To Take AI Ethics Seriously

Myles Sutholt's Hot Take - Leaders Need to Get Better at Using Data for PM Performance Reviews

Martin Eriksson: Most PMs Aren't Good At Strategy - Enter The Decision Stack!

Martin Eriksson, co-founder of Mind the Product and co-author of Product Leadership, addresses the widespread lack of strategic clarity in modern organizations. He observes that a significant majority of employees are unaware of their company's strategy, often because the strategy itself does not exist or consists only of vague, non-committal vision statements. Eriksson defines strategy as a coherent set of choices designed to achieve specific goals. When leaders refuse to make these choices, they inadvertently limit the company's ability to achieve meaningful results by attempting to pursue too many conflicting priorities simultaneously. To solve this, Eriksson introduces the Decision Stack, a framework designed to align high-level vision with daily execution. This stack ensures that every decision made at the product level is grounded in the broader company objectives. He acknowledges the difficulty product managers face when trying to build a product strategy in a vacuum. If a company strategy is missing, he advises PMs to take the initiative by creating a straw man proposal. This draft serves as a provocation to force leadership into a conversation about priorities and direction, rather than allowing the organization to drift. The discussion also touches on the evolution of the product management role. Historically, PMs were viewed as tactical executors responsible for writing specifications and managing delivery. Consequently, many PMs today lack formal training in strategic thinking. Eriksson asserts that these are learnable skills and that leadership must shift from micromanagement to coaching and delegation. He specifically critiques the recent trend of "Founder Mode," arguing that while leaders should be deeply involved, this approach often justifies "hero syndrome" and micromanagement. Such behaviors create single points of failure and prevent the development of autonomous, aligned teams. By using the Decision Stack, organizations can move toward a model where teams are empowered to make day-to-day decisions that consistently support the long-term vision.

Martijn Versteeg's Hot Take: PMs Need to Spend Less Time Learning and More Time Doing

Martijn Moret's Hot Take: Most PMs Neglect Data Due To a Lack of Time and Skills

Adam Dille's Hot Take: The Product Trio is Outdated - Enter the Product Square!

Grace Yusuff's Hot Take: Introversion is a PM Superpower

Assaph Mehr's Hot Take: AI Is Just A Tool - What Matters Is How We Use It

Matt Maier's Hot Take - AI Will Lead to a Post-Employment World (...and That's Good!)

Yael Mark: Why Product Managers Should Care About Behavioural Science

Behavioural science serves as a critical tool for product managers to understand how users actually think, act, and interact with their environments rather than how they are logically expected to. By acknowledging human bugs and irrational behaviours, PMs can design products that address real world pain points both inside and outside the application. A central theme is the ethical application of these principles. Ethical design aligns behavioural tactics with the user's own goals, such as using streaks in Duolingo to encourage language learning. This stands in contrast to manipulative patterns that exploit users for profit without providing genuine value. Cognitive biases like anchoring, cognitive dissonance, and the sunk cost fallacy significantly impact product outcomes. For instance, Amazon Prime leverages cognitive dissonance by appealing to a user's environmental consciousness to encourage consolidated deliveries, which simultaneously reduces shipping costs. While AI offers new opportunities to accelerate research by simulating user responses, it currently struggles to fully replicate human cognitive biases even when prompted. To overcome internal scepticism, PMs should demonstrate the ROI of behavioural science through small wins and measurable KPIs. Simple adjustments, such as reworking copy to focus on gains rather than losses, can be validated through A/B testing to show significant impact without requiring extensive development resources.

Eisha Armstrong: Commercialize! Get your Productized Services to Market

Eisha Armstrong, co-founder of Vecteris, outlines the strategic framework for professional services firms transitioning to productized offerings. A successful commercialization strategy requires five core elements: a clear market understanding, a defined monetization approach, a marketing strategy, a structured sales process, and a plan for renewability. Leaders must prioritize these elements during the initial design phase rather than attempting to figure them out after the product is built. Selling to existing customers is the most effective path for B2B services firms. Data indicates that bundling products with current service offerings is more successful than attempting to enter new markets with cheaper, standardized products. Many firms struggle when going downmarket because they lack the necessary brand recognition and established relationships in those segments. Packaging often presents a greater challenge than pricing. Effective packages must be designed around specific market segment needs with a clear narrative for why a customer would upgrade. Simple tiered structures like "good, better, best" often fail if they lack a logical rationale for the value progression. Successful commercialization requires significant organizational change and the development of new capabilities. Firms frequently make the mistake of using existing service-oriented sales and marketing teams to sell products. Instead, organizations must budget for specialized talent and new skills. The shift to recurring revenue also necessitates a change in performance metrics, moving from annual revenue targets to customer lifetime value. This transition is a multi-year process that requires sustained commitment from leadership to overcome the inherent friction of changing a business model.

Andy Budd: Solving the Growth Equation to Derive Product/Market Fit

Andy Budd's framework for achieving product market fit centers on the Growth Equation, which balances driving factors against dragging forces. Driving factors include audience size, motivation, speed to value, stickiness, and virality. Dragging factors consist of friction and competitive pressure. The goal is optimization rather than finding a single static solution. A critical failure point for many startups is overestimating the scope of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Founders often spend 18 months building complex solutions before testing traction, leading to a doom loop where they build features no one wants. Success requires getting a simplified version into users' hands quickly to validate demand. Targeting sophisticated Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) too early is another common mistake. Mature customers often have extensive requirements that distract from core product development. Instead, startups should focus on underserved beach-head customers to establish a foothold before expanding. Regarding go-to-market strategy, founders must personally lead early sales and marketing efforts. Hiring external sales agencies or senior salespeople too early often fails because these hires lack the founder's vision and cannot build the initial sales playbook. In the earliest stages, the role of a product manager is frequently closer to project management. Founders often remain too attached to the product vision to allow a PM to challenge strategic directions immediately. Proper product management usually emerges later as the company scales and the founder begins to step back from daily product decisions.

Jas Shah's Hot Take: Product Management isn't as Glamorous as People Think

Victoria Sakal's Hot Take: You're Either Paying the Research Tax or the Stupid Tax

Boluwaji Alepaye's Hot Take: Western Product Teaching Doesn't Work in Nigeria

Danielle Barnes & Christina Wodtke: How to Present Yourself (And Why You Should)

Mark Gray's Hot Take: We Shouldn't Be Prioritising By Effort

Jordan Dalladay's Hot Take: We Should Build Roadmaps Of Risks, Not Features

Chris Butler's Hot Take: Product Managers DON'T Need to be Technical

Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take: Founders Need Product Management Training

Chris Locke's Hot Take: Product Leaders Need to Adopt a VC Mindset

Ivana Todorovic: Upping Your Odds of BEATING the LinkedIn Algorithm

Jenny Wanger's Hot Take: Training Courses Are Useless If You Don't Engage Your Team Afterwards

Nick Mehta: Reinventing the Future of Customer Success with Human-First AI

Rina Alexin's Hot Take: Our Stakeholders Are Just Doing Their Jobs

Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World

Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent

Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers

May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport

David Pereira: Untrapping Product Teams and Getting Rid of Bullsh*t Management

Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management

Aakash Gupta: Accelerating Your Product Leadership Job Hunt

Aakash Gupta discusses the evolving landscape of the product leadership job market and how candidates can navigate a highly competitive environment. A central theme is the existence of a "dark web" of networking, where the majority of high-level roles are never publicly posted. To access these opportunities, candidates must build strategic relationships with boutique recruiters and investors who have early insight into hiring needs at portfolio companies. The discussion emphasizes the importance of career narrative. While many product leaders have non-linear careers across different industries, success in a niche requires reframing that history into a linear story that justifies why the candidate is the perfect fit for a specific role. This involves prioritizing what matters most in a new position, whether it is compensation, mission, or company stage, and ensuring the narrative aligns with those goals. Additionally, the conversation addresses the persistent bias toward candidates with Big Tech experience. Founders often default to recognizable names on a resume as a proxy for quality. However, candidates from lesser-known companies can overcome this by outworking the competition and taking a more strategic, data-driven approach to their search. The episode also touches on the rise of fractional product leadership as a viable model for experienced practitioners who want to maintain influence without a traditional full-time commitment.

John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy

Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles: Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations