I just finished Julie Zhuo's "The Making of a Manager," and while it's technically a book about general management, I found myself dog-earing pages that speak directly to the challenges I face as a product leader early in my management journey. Zhuo's
Most product leaders I talk to are obsessed with how to build AI into their products. What features to ship. What models to use. How to differentiate. Those are the right questions — but they're incomplete. The question that gets far less attention: how is your organization actually using
I just finished "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and I can't stop thinking about J.C.R. Licklider. The book is a biography of Licklider and the history of the early computing revolution. "Lick" (as everyone called him) was a psychologist who
This is the third post in my series recapping takeaways from Reforge's AI Strategy course. Part 1 covered how AI accelerates PMF collapse; Part 2 introduced the AI Maker Matrix for user segmentation. This week, I'm diving into something that's been gnawing at me
I'm taking a break this week from my takeaways from the Reforge AI Strategy course to do my EOY breakdown of products I've loved. Every year I find myself quietly building a "favorites list" in my head—the products that actually changed how I
Last time, I kicked off this series on my takeaways from Reforge's AI Strategy course by exploring how AI accelerates PMF collapse. This week, I'm going deeper: who exactly are you building for, and why does getting that wrong doom so many AI products? The framework
I’m working my way through Reforge’s AI Strategy course and so far it‘s sparked a lot of great thoughts! In particular, it’s been a forcing function to pressure-test my own instincts about how to build AI products and modify my approach to product strategy for the
When product teams are empowered, discovery-to-delivery tightens—and customers feel it as quicker, better-fit solutions. If your product org feels slow, doesn't consistently deliver customer value, and decisions get bottlenecked on PMs, evaluate moving toward an empowered operating model. In a waterfall world, designers wait on specs, engineers
The pace of innovation in tech has never been faster. Every week, new AI tools emerge that reshape how we work. More than ever, it’s important to stay up to date on what’s happening to ensure you don’t fall behind. It’s one of the things I
I want to share a piece of advice that has been incredibly impactful for me, both personally and professionally. This isn't exclusive to product managers, but I find it especially helpful when working in product. The advice was this: you should compile your own personal board of directors.
If you didn’t catch my previous newsletter, I dove into cultivating strong, psychologically safe, empowered product teams as a product manager. That post is a precursor to this one, which focuses on cultivating psychological safety as a product leader. Psychological Safety Primes You for Success Cultivating psychological safety is
"[Psychological Safety is] a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." — Amy Edmondson A psychologically safe environment enables product teams to take risks together. Psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have on empowered product teams—it’s the unseen arena that provides fertile ground for building