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
As with most product professionals, I didn’t set out to become a product manager. In fact, when I went to undergrad, I didn't have any idea what a product manager was. To get to product, I took a meandering path through a wide array of careers and
Hi, I’m Cam — welcome to Beyond the Backlog! After years of building products, leading cross-functional teams, and learning the ins and outs of product management, I decided to start this blog as a place to share what I’ve learned — and what I’m still learning — about the craft