What she said about the state of growth right now was something that took us into a different direction than the human side I focus on in the spotlight series. I am pulling it out into its own piece because I think it is one of the most clear-eyed assessments of the current moment I have encountered, and the product and growth community deserves to sit with it properly.

This is my synthesis of her words on the changing growth playbook and landscape.

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The playbook has a lifespan. This one is ending.

Elena said something on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast that has been quoted widely since: about sixty to seventy percent of what she learned over fifteen years in growth does not transfer to what she is doing at Lovable.

I asked her to go deeper on that. Her answer was structural, not emotional. Every growth playbook goes through a lifecycle: discovery, adoption, market education, mass adoption, and then localized variations as people optimize it. What she is describing is a playbook that has been in the optimization phase for a long time - and is now running out of road.

“We’ve been stuck on the same playbook of distribution for the last 15 years. There’s not really a new channel that has emerged. Ever since mobile came in as a surface. Ever since social became a big surface. What else did we have that was really new?”

PLG was an innovation, she said - but primarily for B2B, because consumer companies had always relied on the actual product for virality and growth. Marketing and sales were what B2B added to that equation. That was the big insight of the last decade. Now AI is clearing out the underlying assumption that made the thing work.

Feature differentiation is collapsing. That breaks everything downstream.

The growth playbook, in all its forms, has been anchored on a single premise: your product is differentiated at the feature level, and therefore you have something to market. You can make users so excited about that differentiation that they bring others. You can build a funnel around it. Supplementally, you can hire salespeople to articulate it and you can run ads against it.

AI is removing that anchor.

“The speed of development is really accelerating. Most native companies have over 80% of the code written by AI, which means the development process is accelerating so fast that any feature differentiation any competitor can have is being wiped out. Everybody, even non-technical people, are doing surface level optimizations. There’s no more barriers, there’s no more queue to get into engineering.”

The result: if you can build anything quickly, so can everyone else. If a user can build your solution from scratch themselves - which Lovable is directly enabling - the feature advantage disappears almost as soon as you create it.

What does that do to marketing? To sales? To all of the funnels and frameworks and A/B test roadmaps the growth community has built its entire body of knowledge around?

Elena’s answer: it breaks them. When you have nothing to market - because feature differentiation is noise now - your entire distribution playbook collapses with it.

The new moat is trust. Not features, not funnels. TRUST.

This is where the conversation shifted from diagnosis to direction.

If feature differentiation is dying, what wins? Elena’s answer is something the growth community has known in theory for years but rarely prioritized in practice: human connection.

Is that music to our ears or what?!

Her theory of growth at Lovable - and increasingly her theory for growth in general - is that the best way to win customers right now is not feature differentiation but showing up in front of customers as the builder of the product. Connecting with them. Making the team behind the software visible. Building in public - not as a marketing tactic but - as the primary trust-building mechanism.

She is explicit that this requires every person at the company to be a growth vehicle in some capacity. Not influencers. She rejects that framing. She said when people call her an influencer she finds it genuinely strange because that has never been the goal. The goal is to democratize knowledge, to connect with like-minded people, to be in the same boat working on the same problems together.

But the effect is the same: the team that is most visible, most connected, and most trusted by its customer community is the team that wins. And that team does not win by running a funnel. It wins by being real.

“The companies that will win are not the ones shipping features fastest. They are the ones building the deepest relationships with the people they are building for.”

It’s rewarding to see this theme surface across several key voices in our industry. Ramli John recently mentioned ‘Time to Trust’ as a key metric product teams should focus on in his spotlight. This is a new and beautiful measure of success.

The growth model still matters. You just have to know what yours actually is.

Elena is not saying abandon the craft. She is saying do it more honestly.

She described what she calls a growth model or growth accounting - the ability to answer clearly: what is actually working for us right now? Not what we are trying. Not what we are testing? But, what is actually working?

This can be word of mouth. It can be an efficient AdWords strategy. It can be an outbound sales motion where the SDR team is genuinely good at reaching the right accounts. The form does not matter. What matters is that you know what it is, that you can protect it, and that you understand its lifespan. “Every single growth loop or growth model component has its own lifespan. AdWords efficiency is not going to last forever. At some point there’s going to be too much competition or Google is going to raise prices. So how long do you have?”

She used the SurveyMonkey example to illustrate the long end: the main channel was user-generated content. Someone creates a survey, you take it as a respondent, a small percentage of you convert into survey creators. That loop fueled the business for ten years and got it from zero to sixty million dollars in revenue without significant marketing and sales spend.

And the short end: referral programs like Dropbox’s give storage to get storage - once ninety percent of growth - is now one percent. Those loops have a lifespan. You have to know where yours is in the cycle.

What she is most focused on at Lovable right now is not optimizing existing loops - though she does that - but laying down the foundation for loops that will be optimized a year or two from now. And she is emphatic: you cannot put number expectations on those new initiatives immediately. If a new motion did not produce ARR in seven days, killing it is not a decision. It is a spiral.

The board problem nobody is talking about.

I asked Elena about something I’m noticing more and more these days. Is there a disconnect between boards and the reality on the ground right now, or are we overthinking it?

She has seen it firsthand kill companies. The pattern: board members with experience in a particular playbook - frequently enterprise, frequently B2B sales motion - walk into a company and start pushing that playbook regardless of whether the company has the DNA, the readiness, or the customer base to execute it. She watched it happen at SurveyMonkey. She has watched it happen at company after company since.

But she said something more useful than just naming the problem. She said the relationship with a board is not one you receive. It is one you manage.

“A lot of the board relationship is to ‘manage up’ the board. It’s like even when you’re an IC, you’re ‘managing up’ your manager. You don’t just wait for them to manage you down.”

The practical version of this:

1. Be explicit about what is protected and what is being experimented with. Show the board where you expect to see numbers and where you are still finding product-market fit. AND…

2. Separate those categories clearly and visibly in every reporting cycle. Boards are often more receptive to that framing than product leaders expect - the problem is that most teams do not create the separation, so everything gets measured against the same standard, and experimentation gets killed before it has a chance to work.

She added that a lot of companies choose their board members based on the size of the check or the prestige of the firm, not on actual fit for their stage, their DNA, or their growth model. That choice compounds for years.

Related: What the product leader’s role is actually becoming.

The last thread I want to pull from our conversation is the one about product leadership itself.

Elena said the best product leaders she has worked with had a specific quality: predictability. Not in a rigid way. In a pattern way. You could understand how their mind worked, what they were going to say, how they were going to respond. That predictability created safety and learning for everyone around them.

But she also said something more urgent about the current moment: product leaders who have become pure coordinators - responding to Slack, showing up to meetings, giving opinions - are going to lose their relevance faster than they think.

The only protection against that is staying close to the craft.

“How are you not just becoming a middle manager that is getting disconnected from customers, disconnected from building, disconnected from where technology is going? Especially in the current world where things are changing so rapidly - to not be an IC as a product leader, to be on the forefront of it, to feel those pains, to understand what’s possible - that is where some of it is breaking down.”

She is not talking about micromanagement. She is talking about presence. She said some of her most impactful work at Lovable has been done in an IC capacity, not through a team. And she is excited about a future where you do not have to let go of your craft in order to increase your impact. AI is making that possible.

The leaders who are going to thrive are the ones who hold both - the organizational view and the craft - at the same time. The ones who let go of the craft to manage it from above are going to find the ground shifting beneath them faster than they expected.

What to take from this

I am not going to wrap this in a clean list, but here’s a sort of framework that requires you to do your own honest accounting that came out of this conversation:

• What is your actual growth model right now? Not what you are trying? But, what is working?

• Where is that model in its lifecycle - early, scaling, or beginning to plateau?

• What are you laying the foundation for that you are not yet allowed to put number expectations on?

• Is your board or leadership relationship one you are managing, or one you are waiting to receive?

• And as a product leader: are you still doing the work, or are you coordinating the work? Because those are not the same thing anymore, and the gap between them is growing.

The playbook is not dead. It is just different from what it was. And the most important thing you can build right now, in any of your growth motions, is trust with the actual humans you are trying to serve.

Everything else is temporary.

This piece is drawn from a longer conversation with Elena Verna for TPH Spotlight series. The full human piece - her origin story, the dance studio in Russia, and the imposter syndrome she turned into a superpower - is published separately here.

Find Elena on LinkedIn or on Elena’s Growth Scoop Substack.

We crossed paths briefly at Product at Heart in Hamburg a few years ago - one of those conference moments that happens fast and then somehow stays with you. I knew his work. He knew mine. We had never actually talked properly. So when I finally reached out a few weeks ago to do a proper intro and offer him a profile, it was an easy yes across the board.

I came prepared with a guide. He came with his notes and a slide deck he was mid-building for a workshop. That probably tells you everything you need to know about him.

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What followed was one of the most grounding conversations I have had in this series - not because it was full of hot takes or dramatic pivots, but because Chris has spent twenty years developing a very clear point of view on what good looks like in product organizations, and he shares it the way someone shares something they have actually earned: directly, specifically, without needing anyone to be impressed.

Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Independent Product Ops Consultant and Coach based in London. Founder of his own practice helping leaders build modern product operating models. Co-founder of the Product Ops Collective.

Career arc: Graphic designer → UX/UI designer → product design → product management and strategy at Thoughtworks → Product Operations Principal at Farfetch → Product Operations Lead at Bumble → independent consulting, speaking, and writing.

Companies: Thoughtworks, Sky, Sainsbury’s, Farfetch, Bumble, Reward Gateway, and more across 20 years spanning Europe and the US.

Originally from: West Yorkshire, England. Has the outgoing personality to prove it, per his partner, who said it immediately when he asked what Yorkshire gave him.

Based in: South London. Garden and a glass of wine on a Thursday evening when the weather cooperates.

Outside work: Hiking, learning to make music with synthesisers, street photography. Can talk about almost anything easily, and will, if you give him an opening.

Speaking: Over 10 years on international conference stages - Product at Heart, Product Ops Summits, Productized Lisbon, Product Leaders Vilnius, and many more.

Forthcoming: A book on product operations! A practical action guide connecting what ops people do to business value and impact. He has been developing the approach for a while. I can tell this one will be worth the wait.

A Clothes Shop in Yorkshire

Chris grew up in West Yorkshire, in the north of England, and when I asked what that gave him before any career existed, he had an immediate answer: building strong relationships.

But the story that opened something for me was from when he was fifteen. His father owned a clothes shop in a small Yorkshire town. Chris, feeling unconfident despite being good at making friends, asked to work in it. His father put him behind the counter, and didn’t come back until the day was done.

Suddenly Chris was selling jeans to blue-collar workers in their forties and fifties, reading people in real time, figuring out how to understand what they actually wanted and finding a way to get there together. He did not know it then, but he was learning the thing that would define his entire career: how to win others over - not through persuasion tactics, but through genuine understanding of what the person in front of you actually needs.

That experience eventually became a talk he gave called How to Woo. The word woo, he discovered when his Turkish partner asked what on earth it meant, stands for Winning Others Over as defined by the Clifton Strengths assessment. He is, in his words, okay with that. Fun fact - I had zero idea what that stood for until that moment either.

Before tech, he was a graphic designer - first at a traditional fashion company, then at a paint manufacturer, neither particularly inspiring, but the second introduced him to a book from 1928 that he still thinks about today. Die Neue Typographie by Jan Tschichold. A German typographer writing nearly a century ago about visual communication, structure, and how to draw attention to what matters. Chris does not read it as a design manual. He reads it as an operating philosophy, and he applies it to product ops.“Nothing we do is really new. Those concepts were built upon prior concepts in the past. And I’m quite comfortable with that now.”

He used to feel like creating something new was the point. He has made his peace with the idea that building on what already works, clearly and well, is enough.

How Product Found Him

Chris is disarmingly honest about his own limitations, and it has served him well throughout his career. He realized early in his design years that he was not going to be good enough for the London ad agency roles. He did not have the formal training. The raw creative talent those seats required was not his particular gift. So rather than fight it, he jumped sideways - from graphic design into UX design, at a moment when he did not even fully know what the word meant.

He grew that into product design, then product strategy through his time at Thoughtworks, and along the way had the realization that changed everything. “I realized that my skills, capabilities, and desire led to the enablement of other people. That’s how I went into product operations.”

He was not drawn to building the product. He was drawn to building the conditions in which great products get built. All the goosebumps from this lady right here. The clarity, the systems, the working groups, the frameworks that let good people do their best work without friction eating up all their energy. Once he understood that was his thing, the career clicked into place.

Thoughtworks to Farfetch to Bumble, carrying the same orientation through every context: how do we make this organization healthier, clearer, and faster, without me being the one who has to do everything? Then he went independent after Bumble, bet on himself with no immediate clients lined up, and has not looked back.

The Discipline: What Product Ops Actually Is

Chris has a definition of product operations that he has refined over twenty years and returns to consistently. I want to give it the space it deserves.

He is precise about why those other words fall short. Efficiency and alignment are means, not ends. They are things that enable good decisions - but the thing you are actually after is empowered product teams that can make the right calls quickly, because they have everything they need: the data, the tools, the strategic context, the clarity about what decisions are theirs to make. “The best product teams are empowered to make decisions themselves. They can do it very quickly because they’ve got everything on hand and they know the boundaries they can operate in.”

On why naming and formalizing the function matters, he reached for something from his Thoughtworks years that has stuck with me. Once you pin something up on the wall, you can throw tomatoes at it. Meaning: once it is named, it can be interrogated, communicated, pointed at, refined. It stops being something that happens in the shadows and becomes something the organization can actually have a conversation about.

He also makes a point that I think every product leader reading this needs to sit with. Someone in a scaling organization needs to be thinking seventy-five percent of the time about how that organization is structured, how it operates, how it communicates, and how it stays aligned. Right now, that seventy-five percent lands on the VP of Product or CPO who is also supposed to be setting vision, strategy, and direction. That is not sustainable. Product ops exists, in part, to take that weight off the people who should not be carrying it.

What One Person Can Actually Do

At Bumble, Chris was the sole product ops person supporting between ten and fifteen product teams. He mapped it out for me clearly, and it’s one of the most practically useful things I have heard anyone say about how ops work actually scales:

1. He started by mapping resources - not headcount, but the full picture. Physical time. Mental time and space. The capabilities of the people around him. Any budget available to make change happen.

2. And then he mapped incentives, because you can have all the resources in the world and nothing will move if there is no reason for people to care. He identified three that actually work:

   1. growth (learning new skills, working across the organization),

   2. recognition (standing up at the all hands, being seen),

   3. monetary reward (bonus, salary, promotion, etc.)

With one person, he calculated he could drive roughly one meaningful change initiative per year before the effort outpaced the return. So he stopped trying to do it alone.

He relied on operational working groups. Cross-functional, cross-seniority, given a clear mandate and the resources to act on it, with product ops coaching and guiding rather than directing. Some he stayed close to. Some he handed off entirely. Both worked, depending on the readiness of the people and the organization.

“You’re not directing the change. You’re cultivating it. So people care about organizational evolution rather than just being told what to do.”

This is product ops at its most effective and, honestly, its most satisfying - not the person doing the work, but the person building the conditions in which the right work gets done by the right people.

Why the Value Question Is Still Not Resolved

After the better part of a decade of product operations existing as a recognized function, the value question should be settled by now. Chris is clear-eyed about why it is not, and he breaks it into three parts:

1. The first is genesis. When product ops emerges from internal need, it often gets positioned as the team that picks up whatever nobody else wants. When it is brought in externally, teams fear it will standardize the things that should stay flexible. Neither starting point gives the function room to demonstrate what it actually does.

2. The second is language. Product ops people tend not to be the loudest people in the room. Product managers, the best ones, are constantly connecting their work to outcomes, making it visible, articulating value upward. Product ops people, by disposition, are often less comfortable doing that. And when the work is invisible by design - because it is working - that silence gets misread as absence.

   “When it’s been done really well, you don’t realise it exists. Which makes the second piece - putting your hand up and saying ‘by the way, I’m doing these things’ - even more important.”

3. The third is the sharpest version of this problem I have encountered:

   Business leaders care about five things. Making more money, reducing costs where possible, acquiring new customers, engaging existing customers, and increasing shareholder or investment value.

   Product ops has to speak that language. Not the language of frameworks and processes and tooling - the language of the room it is trying to influence. When a product ops person can connect what they are doing, even something as tactical as improving how Jira is structured, to one of those five outcomes, the conversation changes entirely. Until they can do that, the value question will keep coming up.

   This is also at the heart of the book he is writing - a practical action guide that connects what product ops people do to the business value and impact that actually matters to the people holding the budget.

On AI and the Generalist’s Return

Chris is not someone who performs urgency about AI. He is someone who gets quietly frustrated by the people selling urgency about AI, which is a more useful position.

He described a conference where the opening speaker declared that every organization must hire only people with AI capabilities - then closed by selling ten AI courses. He is actively trying not to produce that kind of content (thank you Chris). His actual view is grounded: if you are a highly capable person and the need arises to pick up an AI tool, you can learn it in a week. Because you have spent a career adapting. If you have hired people who cannot do that, the problem existed before AI arrived.

Where he sees AI genuinely helping: synthesis of ideas, opening paths to concepts and thinkers he would not have found on his own, having an instant sounding board for half-formed thinking. Where he sees it creating problems: over-reliance, reaching for the tool before doing the thinking, and an industry manufacturing fear not because fear is warranted but because fear sells.

The skill he thinks product and ops leaders are most dangerously undervaluing right now is generalism. The past several years have driven organizations toward hyper-specialism - understandable given the volume of available talent after waves of layoffs - but he sees that reversing. AI is good at deep specialism. It is not good at navigating genuinely ambiguous problems with creativity and judgment. That is the generalist’s territory. “Product development has always favored people who are generalists. People who can connect the dots, be creative and innovative. And I’m starting to see that uptick again.”

He hopes it is a correct take. I think it is.

Product Is a Way of Life

The most unusual thing Chris told me - and I mean that as a compliment - is something he did during his time at Farfetch. For three months, he tracked every hour of every day. Not what he did. How he felt doing it. He was mapping his energy, looking for patterns, trying to understand himself the same way he would try to understand a system he had been asked to improve.

What he found: he is significantly more energized on Thursday mornings than at any other time in the week. He now books workshops and talks accordingly. He knows he is a starter and an energiser, not a finisher of fine detail. He has built his independent practice around that self-knowledge rather than against it.

He thinks more people should do some version of this, and I agree with him. Not the full three-month mapping exercise necessarily, but the underlying question - when does your energy actually show up, what kind of work lights you up, where does the battery drain - is one that most working environments never create space to ask.

The most consistent factor he sees holding product organizations back, across every company size and stage he has worked with, is what he calls ultimate clarity. YES! Everyone in the product organization must share a common, continuously communicated understanding of the product’s vision, strategy, language, metrics, and decision-making boundaries. When that exists, teams move fast because they know what they are moving toward. When it does not, even very talented people spend enormous energy on the wrong things.

He has seen this in a six-person startup. He has seen it in an organization of eighty thousand. The problem is the same. The solution is the same. Clarity is not a leadership nice-to-have. It is the operating condition for everything else.

The People Who Changed Everything

Esra, his partner and fellow product consultant, is first. She hears all of this daily - every half-formed idea, every client challenge, every moment of doubt. He is matter-of-fact about what that means and clearly does not take it for granted. Having someone that close who actually understands the work at that level is rare.

Hugo Froes, who he has known since 2014 and who calls him his human GPT - a title Chris accepts cheerfully and returns in kind. Over a decade of keeping each other honest, checking each other’s thinking, and pushing back when needed. That kind of long-term intellectual partnership is something most people do not have and do not realise they are missing.

Dr. J Harrison from Thoughtworks gets credit for something foundational - the understanding that inclusivity drives diversity, which drives creativity, which drives customer value, which drives business impact. That chain is not abstract for Chris. It is the operating model he has built his entire practice around, and he traces it directly to that relationship.

What He Wishes You Would Ask

I always end with the same question: what do you wish someone would just ask you that nobody ever does? Chris had an answer ready, and I think it might be the most quietly important thing in this whole piece.

He has spent years tracking his own energy, understanding his personality, figuring out what kind of work lights him up and what depletes him. He is highly extroverted in the way that many people who are very good at rooms actually are - high social energy output, but with a battery that empties fast, and a real need for silence to recover. And he thinks we should all be talking about this more, in our teams and in our organizations, because the way a team is structured, when its standups happen, how it collaborates, all of it should account for the fact that different people are wired differently.

“Being more open about our personality types and how we operate would lead to way better collaboration. If you can bring your whole self to work without fear of reprisal - that’s when you know you’ve got a good culture.”

Twenty years of building that kind of culture for product organizations. The same belief, the same standard, applied to himself and to every team he has ever worked with.

I have been doing this series for a while now, and the moments I remember most are the ones where someone says something quietly true that most people are too busy or too guarded to say out loud. Chris said several of those things in one conversation. That is a rare thing, and I am glad I finally sent that LinkedIn message.

You can find Chris Compston on LinkedIn, at chriscompston.com, and on Substack.

If you are a product leader trying to build a healthier, clearer, more effective organization and want to work with someone who has actually done it - reach out to him. Tell him I sent you.

I have been a guest on his podcast. I have watched him show up consistently for this community with the kind of dry British patience that makes you think nothing is bothering him right up until he says the quiet, precise thing that punctures the whole conversation. He is one of the most genuinely independent voices in product - not independent as in contrarian for the sport of it, but independent as in he has done the work long enough that he does not need to borrow anyone else’s framework to say what he thinks.

What I did not fully know until we sat down for this was where he started. Which is, I think, the most important part of any of these stories.

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Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Founder, One Knight Consulting - fractional product leadership, organizational assessments, team workshops, and 1:1 product leadership coaching for B2B companies.

Podcast: Creator, host, producer, editor and promoter of One Knight in Product - one of the most respected product podcasts in the product world, launched in 2020. Guests include Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, John Cutler, April Dunford, and hundreds more.

Writing: LinkedIn, and an occasional Substack newsletter.

Collaborator: Regular co-conspirator with Saeed Khan, including the State of B2B Product Management research report.

Based in: London, UK.

Originally from: Maidstone, Kent, UK.

Career arc: Call center → IT team → green screen development → web development → tech leadership → product leadership → 19 years at GfK (the German market research firm, founded 1934, later acquired by KKR) → scale-ups → One Knight Consulting.

Education: Started mathematics at the University of Liverpool. Dropped out after one year. Figured it out from there.

Where He Came From

Jason grew up in a village in the countryside near Maidstone, Kent that somehow felt a million miles from civilization. He had a fun fact to share: He had a famous neighbor up the road - Tom Baker - the 4th Doctor Who! He moved to Maidstone town proper when his dad, who was a plumber, went bankrupt. They lost their home and were put into emergency housing. Always bookish, and computerish!, he got his first computer at the age of 10. He was the first person in his extended family to go to university. Working class background, lots of people in manual trades, and then one of them gets into Liverpool to study mathematics.

He lasted a year.

Liverpool in the early nineties was, by his own account, full of distractions and everything that a small village with no social life had not prepared him for. He dropped out. And then, in his words, he felt like he had been busted back down to private. All that time getting in, and now he was back at the bottom.

He took a two-week job at the local call center to keep things moving.

He stayed there for two and a half years.

I want to sit with that for a second because I think it is easy to skip past it. He was not in a holding pattern. He was paying attention. And at that call center, something happened that he still talks about more than twenty-five years later - a man showed up. A former hotshot sales guy who had, by some combination of circumstances Jason does not know the details of, ended up working alongside a bunch of teenagers at an outbound call center in Maidstone. “He kind of almost hit rock bottom himself. And was just trying to do his best. But because he was at that bottom and didn’t really have any kind of ties or anything, he’d be one of the guys that would come to the pub. And I guess I got one nugget of wisdom.”

What the nugget was, Jason said, was simply this: “Just keep going. No matter how hard it gets, no matter what you think you’ve lost, just keep going anyway.” Not a framework. Just a man who had been through something, who was still going, who somehow made a twenty-year-old who had just dropped out of university feel like the situation could get better if you just kept moving.

He credits that gentleman - quietly, genuinely, in the way you credit someone who did not save your life but maybe reoriented it - with giving him the thing he needed at the time.

Jason turns fifty the day this piece goes live! He mentioned it the way you mention something you have complicated feelings about and have decided to hold lightly. I think that milestone was worth including, though I know chuckling reading this draft, knowing I’m including it.

How Product Found Him

After the call center, Jason moved into the IT team. From there into green screen terminal development - the actual old school stuff. Then into web development, which in the early 2000’s was, as he puts it, a complete wild west. No frameworks, no real standards, browsers that barely worked. When they worked, they worked…. differently (ah the pain some of you will never know!). He was building things nobody had built before inside a company that was figuring it out as it went.

That company was NOP, which was acquired by GfK in 2005 (a nearly 100-year-old organization). He stayed for nineteen years. He said, at one point, that he had assumed he was the gold watch brigade. Twenty-five years, a salute, and then retirement. When he talks about this, he notes this was not so much a ‘plan’ as opposed to an acceptance of the path ahead for him - respected in the org, with no need to move on until he needed to.

Then KKR acquired a majority stake in GfK, looking to digitally transform and productize the business - bring it into the next era. This brought in new tech leadership, some of whom were happily waving Lean Startup around. Jason started to wonder: all the stuff he’s been doing for the last however many years, might it be easier to do in a company that was built for it from the start?

He left. Went through three scale-ups of varying excitement levels, as he puts it. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, almost as a side project, almost as a hobby, he started a podcast.

The Podcast and What It Actually Cost

I asked Jason what made him want to build One Knight in Product the way he built it - from the beginning, inclusive, mixing thought leaders with complete unknowns, practitioners alongside the people everyone already knows.

He laughed. He said he would love to take credit for the intentional vision, but the honest version is simpler: at the start, he could only get whoever said yes. His first call out was on LinkedIn, asking if anyone fancied coming on his new podcast. The first fifteen or twenty guests were all wonderful people and mostly unknown. That was not a philosophy. That was a starting point.

The philosophy came later, and it is worth naming clearly: Jason genuinely believes that the people doing the work every day, the ones who have never written a book and never given a keynote, have things to say that matter just as much as the people everyone already quotes. That belief has stayed consistent across six years and hundreds of episodes.

“It’s really easy to chase the names. Because you think that the names are going to get you more listeners. And they do to a point. But I want to tell different stories. Stories that maybe the other podcasts won’t tell.”

He told me about releasing his second Marty Cagan episode to find that Lenny Rachitsky had released his own Marty Cagan episode within the hour. He described it with the kind of rueful precision that only comes from having actually sat with that moment. Some of his listeners went back and told him they actually preferred his interview. He appreciated it. It did not make the distribution math any easier.

What he is honest about, and I found this refreshing, is that the podcast has cost him money. He did some sponsorships - felt like he was unwillingly reading messages, captive, almost - and then just stopped. He does not have Lenny’s reach. He is not trying to. What he has built instead is a network - and he is clear that this network is the actual return on six years of work. Rich Mironov, Saeed Khan, April Dunford, Janna Bastow, Martin Eriksson, Dan Olsen. People he now counts as peers, collaborators, and friends, relationships that opened doors, opportunities that came back around because he had been showing up for a long time before anyone needed anything from him.

As a shout, Rich Mironov’s work was what inspired Jason to get into consulting in the first place. He found himself lucky enough at one point in time after success at one of his scale-up roles to see if he could create impact more broadly. He felt as if his journey, network, and experience could help more than just one company at a time. There were so many patterns he saw and wanted to both drive change, and share more broadly how to get past problems product teams were facing. So, he put out a note on LinkedIn, talked to a lot of people, landed his first fractional spot after helping many of those people move past their problems, and the rest is history.

With respect to the podcast, he said it was never the job. What he created with his consulting business helps him stay close to the work - go into companies, sit with the actual problems, be close enough to the ground that when he does an episode or posts something, it is because he saw that thing happen somewhere and wants other people to know what he learned. Not because it is a buzzy topic that might get him newsletter subscribers.

“When I post stuff, it’s because I’ve seen that thing happen somewhere and I want other people to know either what I saw or how we fixed it. I don’t want to sit there and just proclaim things about stuff I haven’t touched in years.”

On AI, and Where He Actually Stands

Jason has been one of the clearer voices in this space on AI - not anti-AI, not breathlessly pro-AI, just unusually specific about what the tools actually do and do not do. In fact, he’s been working on AI products for 10+ years - precursors to LLMs at Black Swan, and AI voice & facial recognition analytics at GfK. This lens helps humans apply a more realistic view because it’s sense built over time, not absorption of the moment.

His core position has not moved much: LLMs are genuinely useful for things where you already have the expertise to evaluate the output. He uses them constantly. NotebookLM for synthesizing interview transcripts and stakeholder research. Code generation for side projects. A spitballing partner for working through ideas before committing to them. He built the State of B2B Product Management report with Saeed Khan using AI to dig into data, find interesting patterns, and surface things worth investigating - but always with a human steering the direction.

Where he gets sharp is the other side. When people use AI to generate outputs in areas where they have no expertise to evaluate the result, then they are not more productive. They are producing something that looks right and might not be. And nobody is checking.

He is particularly pointed about what he calls the AI product manager - the idea that slapping AI onto a role title makes someone more capable of doing the work. His view: if you work on a product that uses AI, you are a product manager who works on an AI product. That is not a different job. It is just the job. Start with the problem. If AI is the right solution, use it. If something else is, use that instead.

He also made a point about vibe coding that I want to preserve because it cuts through a lot of noise. He has been using AI code tools for two or three years on side projects. He said it is absolutely better than doing it all manually. He also said the concept that someone is going to vibe-code the new Salesforce is, in his words, ridiculous - and that he has not yet seen a single genuinely successful product that came out of someone claiming to be doing this. He is waiting to be proven wrong. He is also not holding his breath.

Built, Not Born.

Jason has become one of the most recognized voices in product. He also hates being the center of attention.

He talked about being an introvert who taught himself to perform extroversion - to make eye contact, to work a room, to come home from a social event completely depleted and need a full day to recover. He described the version of himself from twenty years ago: headphones on in the corner, screen angled so nobody could see it, a CD used as a rearview mirror to see who was approaching behind him so he could pull the headphones out before they got too close.

That is still him, he said. It is just that he has learned some mechanisms. The outward confidence that reads as natural is something he built deliberately over a long time. I found that genuinely interesting because it reframes the entire way he shows up in public - the podcast, the talks, the community events in London. All of it is something he chose to learn, not something that came easily.

He also told me he hates being the center of attention. He said it with a straight face on a Zoom call for a piece that will go out to hundreds of people. I believed him completely.

The People Who Changed Everything

When I asked who he wanted to thank, Jason resisted the obvious answer for a moment and then gave the honest one: everyone who ever believed in him, at every level, in every context. The colleague who said something encouraging. The listener who came up after a talk. The people who, in small and unremarkable ways, made him feel like what he was doing was worth continuing.

He named a few people specifically. Rich Mironov, whose writing on B2B product he had been consuming long before they knew each other, and who was generous when Jason was figuring out what his consulting practice could actually look like. Saeed Khan, a regular collaborator and genuine friend. Gibson Biddle, who took some early calls that Jason still thinks about - though when they ran into each other at a conference a couple of years later, he recalls that Gibson had no idea who he was. April Dunford, who has been helpful in the kind of ways that people with more reach can be, when they choose to be.

He was quick to say that the network the podcast helped him build is the biggest professional asset he has. Not the reach. Not the download numbers. The network. The doors that opened because he had been showing up consistently for years before anyone needed anything from him.

What He Hopes You Take With You

I asked Jason what he hopes people feel when they walk away from something he has built - a podcast episode, a talk, a workshop, a conversation.

He said he wants them to leave with one thing they are going to try on Monday. Not a nice feeling. Not a vague inspiration. One concrete thing. He had just told a client that morning that he was coming to do a talk for their team, and his goal was exactly that - one action per person, something specific, something that might actually make their work a little bit better.

“I don’t want them to walk away thinking that was a nice talk and that was it. I want them to walk away thinking, I’m going to try this one thing on Monday.”

That is, I think, the whole thesis of what Jason does. He is not the person who makes you feel good about product management from a distance. He is the person who stays close enough to the actual work to have something useful to say about it. After six years of doing the podcast and several more of consulting, that commitment has not softened. If anything it has been clarified.

He dropped out. He climbed back. He stayed for nineteen years at one company and learned more than people typically do with that tenure in one spot. He started a podcast as a hobby. He built a practice. He has a cat and dreams of getting a dog one day if his wife lets him, loves his two kids - both of whom remind him of himself in different ways, and has a community that keeps growing because he keeps showing up for it.

Just keep going. That was what the man at the call center told him. It still seems to be working.

You can find Jason at oneknightinproduct.com, on LinkedIn, and wherever you get your podcasts. His newsletter is at oneknightinproduct.substack.com. If you are a B2B product leader that wants a good conversation about how product management actually works, follow him and reach out!

Happy 50th Birthday, Jason!

Gerisha Nadaraju is one of those people to me.

I have known Gerisha for a while now through the product ops community. I was a guest on her first podcast years ago when she was out here building community before most people even knew product ops was a thing worth building community around. We kicked this conversation off with a health check on each other to see of the other was feeling the pull in so many directions in our space. Yes. It set the tone for the whole conversation - she’s real, thoughtful, and not interested in performing a version of herself that is tidier than the truth.

She is currently the Senior Director of Product Operations at Bentley Systems, a large infrastructure engineering software company. She is also the founder and host of the Product Ops Podcast and co-founder of The Other Half Podcast for women in tech.

Education and Professional Highlights

Current role: Senior Director of Product Operations, Bentley Systems

Founder and Host: Product Ops Podcast (POP)

Co-Founder: The Other Half Podcast - for women in tech

Originally from: Durban, South Africa - the city most people skip over between Johannesburg and Cape Town, and which Gerisha will tell you has a story worth knowing

Education: Oxford University, MBA (social impact and entrepreneurship). Qualified Chartered Accountant, South Africa

Career arc: Accounting and investment banking in South Africa, Oxford MBA, fintech ops at TrueLayer, product ops at Dojo, Senior Director of Product Ops at Bentley Systems.

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Where She Came From

Gerisha grew up in Durban during apartheid. She says it matter-of-factly, the way someone does when a fact is simply true and the weight of it needs no dramatizing. She is third or fourth generation South African, of Indian heritage, and for the first years of her life she lived in an Indian-only area and attended an Indian-only school. Because that was where she could go.

Then apartheid ended. Her family moved to a more affluent area. She enrolled in a mixed primary school around age eight or nine and had her first experience of being in a classroom with people of different races and backgrounds.

And then, on an academic scholarship, she found herself at one of Durban’s most elite private girls’ high schools which was a 150-year-old institution that was an entirely different world from where she had started.

She vulnerably shared that she cried every day of her first year there.

“I think what it taught me is being able to adapt to different environments. Being somebody who is maybe ‘other’ or different, and then coming into something where you don’t quite fit in - and then adapting. I found myself thriving there eventually.”

That word, adapting, kept coming back throughout our conversation. It is not a passive skill for Gerisha. It is something she actively learned to do, repeatedly, from a very young age, in circumstances that gave her no choice but to figure it out. And when you hear the rest of her story, you understand exactly how that shapes a person who is now one of the most respected voices in an emerging field that itself requires constant adaptation.

The Person Who Shaped Her

Before I asked, I already had a feeling I knew who she was going to name. The answer was her dad. Her father was a high school dropout who became an electrician, then became entrepreneurial, then started his own electrical company at the age of fifty. To do it, he sold his car. Downgraded to a van with no air conditioning, no power steering. And took out a second mortgage on a house that had already been paid off.

He held onto optimism when other people would have held onto the certainty of what they had. His company was, by any measure, a success. He built something real from an idea he backed with everything he had.

He passed away four years ago from cancer.

“Seeing him do that at a later stage in life has made me more comfortable being entrepreneurial, taking risks, and thinking about what it would be like to pursue my own ideas. He would always choose to look on the bright side. Like, what if it actually works out?”

I hear that question differently when I know where it came from.

How Product Found Her

Gerisha did not set out for product. She set out for investment banking and McKinsey. She studied finance and accounting at university, interviewed at JPMorgan, and was on the path that looked like the right one from where she was standing. Then someone suggested she become a Chartered Accountant first - a well-regarded route in South Africa - and she decided to keep the door open rather than close it prematurely.

So she qualified as a CA. She worked for large corporates in investment banking. She did the thing. And then she reached a point where she was not fulfilled. She wanted to make an impact. She applied to Oxford on something of a leap, got in, came to the UK, and discovered fintech at exactly the moment fintech was discovering itself.

She joined TrueLayer as the tenth employee. They were the first open banking startup in the UK, building the infrastructure other fintechs would eventually run on. She came in as the first operations hire, had no idea what open banking was at the time, and spent her early days figuring it out as fast as she could. “I realized I could just get things done. Somebody gives you a problem you’ve never seen before and you’ve just got to figure out how to do it.”

That quality - the ability to move through ambiguity without waiting for a map - is something I hear from almost everyone who ends up excelling in product operations. It is not the same as being unstructured. It is the opposite. It is what allows you to build the structure when none exists.

The pivot to product ops happened organically. TrueLayer was scaling and the product teams needed operational support. The CEO gave Gerisha and two colleagues a brief that was essentially: go figure out what is going on over there and help them move faster. The team they formed was called Catalyst.

What they built - streamlining processes, establishing systems of record, supporting user testing, improving ways of working - was product operations. But many of us know that the naming came later. The deliberate positioning of it as its own function, distinct from admin work and worthy of a dedicated team and a mandate, came from Gerisha pitching it, shaping it, and advocating for it until it stuck. “I ended up in this quite randomly. But when it came to actually saying this is product operations as a team and I would like to hire for it - I shaped that.”

Product Is a Way of Life

I asked Gerisha whether the way she thinks about problems at work has ever shown up in her personal life in surprising ways. She talked about experimentation and iteration, and then she got specific.

She used to be a perfectionist. Classic analysis paralysis - cycling through planning and refining and never quite launching. Product changed that. The practice of shipping imperfect things, getting real feedback, and iterating from there became a philosophy she applied to her creative work, her podcasts, her life.

“Done is better than perfect. You have to start in order to even have something. It can’t live in your head forever.”

The Product Ops Podcast is a living example of this. The name was a placeholder. She meant to change it. She never did, because it did not matter as much as just starting. She booked her first guest before she was ready. She shipped. And now she is four seasons in, and the show has become one of the most respected resources in the product ops community.

When I asked whether she has ever found herself doing user research on the people she loves, she laughed and got honest. Like many of us, her five and a half years of therapy came into it. She has learned, through that work, to look past the surface of what people say toward what they actually mean - to find the root cause beneath the stated problem. “What is the reason why you said that? What’s actually going on underneath? I think maybe that is a little bit of product management - really trying to understand and validate the problems that people are putting forward.”

On AI — And the Honest Answer

One of the things we absolutely agree on is that no two product organizations are the same. Not in structure, not in maturity, not in how they make decisions or what they actually value. Two companies can be in the same industry, serving similar customers, and have product teams that operate in completely different ways. It is just the reality of how organizations evolve.

So when I asked Gerisha about AI - not just her personal experience with it, but her take on how companies across different stages and industries are actually navigating this moment - her answer was one of the most grounded I have heard.

Not every company is moving at the same speed. Not every team is shipping AI-powered workflows or running internal hackathons on Lovable. Most organizations - across most industries - are somewhere on a very wide spectrum, and the gap between the teams leaning in hard and the teams still figuring out where to start is real and significant.

The question she keeps coming back to is not how do we get everyone to move faster. It is something more nuanced than that.“How do we connect the bright spots with the people who aren’t moving the needle on it yet? How do we start finding some level of consistency?”

That is a different kind of problem than adoption. It is a change management problem, a culture problem, and honestly a leadership problem, and it is one that most of the AI conversation in our space completely ignores. The discourse tends to reward the people already moving fast and leaves everyone else feeling quietly behind. But the real opportunity, especially in large and complex organizations, is in the bridge work. Finding what is working. Understanding why. And creating the conditions for it to spread intentionally rather than unevenly.

Her principle for all of it: garbage in, garbage out. AI amplifies whatever you bring to it. The teams making real progress are not just using better tools - they are bringing sharper thinking, clearer problems, and more intentional inputs. That is where the actual work lives, and that does not change regardless of how fast or slow your organization is moving.“That’s where you need some people to help you get there. The analytics you want, what you want to track, how you’re actually going to bring this to life. That’s where the gaps show up.”

What Product Managers Should Actually Be Measuring

Wherever she’s worked, Gerisha has been focused on getting her PMs to care about adoption, not just shipping. The product being out the door is not a success. Success is whether users are engaging with it, coming back to it, getting value from it over time.

Short term metrics matter like growth, revenue and ARR. But the longer term signals like retention, sustained usage patterns, evidence that what you built is actually working - those are what separate teams that ship from teams that build.

She made a related observation that I found important: Across the industry, she is seeing product managers get caught up in delivering AI features specifically - responding to executive pressure to show AI output - without fully measuring the outcomes of those features. Feature factory, just with a new label. The antidote is the same as it has always been: be rigorous about what you are trying to change, not just what you are trying to build.

What the Space Needs Right Now

When I asked about undervalued skills, Gerisha said something I have not heard framed quite this way before.

Taste and judgment.

Not frameworks. Not tools. Not certifications. Your own unique perspective on what is good. “There is so much information out there. AI is going to give you this output. But the real skill is knowing what is good. What should we go with? That comes from your own judgment - a deeply human and personal skill.”

PREACH.

In a world where anyone can generate a product strategy deck in twelve minutes, the thing that will not be replaceable is your ability to look at the output and know whether it is actually right. Whether it reflects something true about your users, your market, your moment. That comes from experience, curiosity, taste. It cannot be prompted.

Invest in your own point of view. That is the skill that ages well.

The Person Who Changed Everything

Gerisha’s answer here was immediate and specific. Her name is Heather James, and she used to work for the Product-Led Alliance.

In early 2021, Heather reached out to Gerisha - cold, off the back of a Medium article Gerisha had written about moving from business operations to product operations - and asked if she would speak at the very first Product Operations Summit. The first one ever.

At that point, Gerisha had her head down inside her company, not plugged into the community, not thinking about what she might have to offer more broadly. Heather saw something in that article and decided to bring it to a bigger room.

What followed was an outpouring of LinkedIn messages, connections, and conversations that eventually became the Product Ops Podcast. One opportunity, offered by one person who paid attention, snowballed into speaking engagements, community building, and a platform that has since reached thousands of people across the industry. “It also kind of solidified me in this product operations niche and being comfortable sharing. And Heather was just such a wonderful person. She was such an advocate.”

Just takes one person to see you. And one person willing to be seen.

What She Wants to Leave Behind

She has a Post-it on her wall that reminds her: use your own experience and expertise to create engaging content that inspires, connects, or empowers other people.

“If it resonates with somebody in a way that practically helps them, or inspires them, or leaves them feeling a bit more connected to the subject matter - that is my biggest goal.”

She has heard from listeners who told her they got the job in product ops because they listened to the podcast before their interview. That is the impact she is building toward. Quietly, consistently, season after season and validated - we all see it.

It is not loud. But it lasts.

Before We Go: Two Things Worth Taking With You

I asked Gerisha what she would tell herself at the beginning, back in South Africa, back in accounting, before any of this was visible.

1. Know your why.

Have a personal north star that lives outside of any company you happen to be working for. Their mission matters. But so does yours. Knowing what drives you, what you are building toward, what you actually care about- that is what keeps you grounded through reorgs and uncertainty and the particular dizziness that comes with being in product.

2. Remember your individual agency.

Even inside a structure you did not design, you still have choices. You can decide how you work. You can choose how you show up. You can still act on your values even when the environment feels like it is not asking for them.

“I’ve sometimes forgotten that in companies. But it’s always true.”

Gerisha Nadaraju is the Senior Director of Product Operations at Bentley Systems. She is the founder and host of the Product Ops Podcast and co-founder of The Other Half Podcast for women in tech. You can find her on LinkedIn and listen to Product Ops Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If you have ever wanted to understand what product operations actually looks like in practice, start there.

And to Gerisha: thank you for this. Thank you for how much you give to this community, and for being so honest about where you are right now. The people who keep showing up while they are in the middle of figuring things out are the ones worth learning from.

I have been talking to, and writing about product people for a while now, and this series exists because I believe the humans behind the work matter as much as the work itself - even more than the work. When someone agrees to sit down with you and what comes out of the conversation is bigger than what you came for, you have to just thank the Universe.

Elena Verna is the Head of Growth at Lovable, one of the fastest-growing companies in the history of the industry. She has led growth at SurveyMonkey, Miro, Amplitude, and Dropbox. She has advised and coached more teams than she could probably count.

She is one of, if not the, most referenced voice in growth anywhere in the world.

Elena got here from Russia with a hundred dollars she did not have, a statistics degree she stumbled into, and a dream that had nothing to do with any of this.

The rest of the words after the 7 above will matter to every product heart. Here is Elena’s story.

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Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Head of Growth at Lovable - AI-powered app builder that hit $200M ARR in under one year with fewer than 100 people. Currently sitting at $400M ARR, adding $100M a month for the past several months.

Before that: Growth leadership at SurveyMonkey (nearly 8 years), Miro (through hypergrowth during COVID), Amplitude, Dropbox. Advisor and consultant to dozens of high-growth companies.

Teaching: Partner at Reforge. Created courses on Growth Leadership, Experimentation and Testing, Monetization and Pricing, and Product-Led Growth.

Writing: Substack - Elena’s Growth Scoop. Tens of thousands of subscribers. The Confessions post is why this interview exists.

Originally from: Russia. Came to the US in 2001, in high school, speaking no English.

Education: Statistics, UC Berkeley - via community college, one application to Stanford she could not afford to repeat, and finishing an entire year of coursework in one semester to not lose a job offer.

Early “dream”: Dance instructor at the competitive studio where she trained for years as a child. Not kidding. Not a detour.

Where She Came From

Elena grew up in Russia in the 1990s, which meant growing up in the middle of a country breaking apart. The shift from communism to something else - democracy in name, chaos in practice - was not abstract for her family. She watched her mother’s savings collapse in real time during the inflation spike that wiped out entire generations of accumulated wealth. Money that had been enough to buy an apartment became enough to buy a washing machine became enough to buy a loaf of bread, all within weeks.

What that does to your sense of what is possible is hard to overstate. It does not make you ambitious. It makes you careful. It makes the world of possibilities feel very small.

Her dream, before any of this career existed, was to be a dance instructor at the competitive studio where she trained after school. They had competitions across cities. The training was vigorous. She loved it. That was the plan. Not tech. Not growth. Dance.

Then she came to America at high school age, speaking no English. And suddenly the only subject that still made sense to her was math - not because she loved it, but because it was the one thing that did not require language. In Russia she had been falling behind in math. In America, where the curriculum was two years behind what she had already studied, she was suddenly ahead. The one constant in a world where everything else had been scrambled.

“It became the constant that I understood. As opposed to everything else that kind of fell apart around my life and around what I knew and what I was good at.”

She applied to one college. Stanford. The application cost a hundred dollars, which she did not have, and she was rejected. She went to community college, transferred to UC Berkeley, and finished a full year of coursework in a single semester because a job offer at Safeway - her mother had gotten her an internship there - was contingent on her starting in January. She did it. She got the diploma in May, started the job in January, and did not look back.

There was no plan that led logically to the next thing. There was just Elena, showing up, grinding through, and grabbing every opportunity that appeared in front of her because the world she came from had taught her that opportunities are not guaranteed and waiting is not a strategy.

She said something in our conversation that I have been thinking about ever since: the theme of her life has been I will figure it out. Not “I have a plan”. Not “I know someone”.

And she has, every single time.

How Product Found Her

Safeway was her first job. It was her mother’s idea. She ended up working on a personalized coupon algorithm, applying statistics to actual customer behavior, and thought for a moment: this is interesting. This is real world application of everything I have been learning.

And then she spent two years watching that project not move. The timeline to test the model in real life was eighteen to twenty-four months. She sat in the meetings. She listened to people tell her this was fine. She sat in her cubicle thinking she was wasting the most important years of her learning life.

So she went on Craigslist - this was 2007, 2008 - and started applying to other jobs. This is the actual origin story of one of the most influential growth careers of the past fifteen years. A bored statistician on Craigslist.

What followed was a journey she describes as entirely exploratory, not planned. SurveyMonkey, where she would spend nearly eight years and where everything clicked. Miro through COVID hypergrowth. Amplitude. Dropbox. And then, after Dropbox, she was genuinely considering stepping back. Maybe advising. Maybe slowing down. She had earned it.

Then someone connected her to the CEO of Lovable.

Five months of contracting. Then full time. Now eight months in, and she says every month feels like a completely different company. The velocity is unlike anything she has experienced.

None of this was the plan. There never was a plan.

The Thing Nobody Talks About

Elena shared something in our conversation that I think is the most important part of this piece, and I want to give it the space it deserves. Every single product person will feel this.

She has had imposter syndrome her entire career. Not quietly, not occasionally. Intensely, for years, rooted in the deep sense that she did not come from this world, did not belong in it, and would be found out eventually. She always over-prepared. She always wanted to feel certain before she raised her hand. She worked twice as hard to get to a knowledge space that other people seemed to occupy more easily, more confidently.

What changed it - slowly, over many years - was watching the people around her. Watching how often some were wrong. Watching how little it seemed to cost them. Watching confident people overpromise and underdeliver and then move on without apparent consequence, while she was still triple-checking her own work before she would say a word.

She said the realization came gradually, maybe fifteen years ago, maybe ten: nobody actually knows what they are doing. Everyone is figuring it out. The bar she had been trying to hit was not the real bar. It was a performance. And she had been comparing her internal experience to everyone else’s external one.

But here is the part she said that stopped me. She does not frame the imposter syndrome as something to have overcome. She frames it as one of her biggest superpowers. Because it kept her humble. Because it kept her learning. Because it kept her from performing confidence she had not yet earned, which meant that when she did speak, she had something real to say.

“I’ve never been confident on anything around my career. But I do think that the imposter syndrome that I had has been one of my biggest superpowers. It’s kept me humble and really leaning into where I can grow.”

She also said something about passive language that I want to share because I do not think it gets discussed enough. She talked about Adam Grant’s writing on how women use passive language to navigate environments where assertiveness reads as aggression. She said she still abides by it, consciously, because she has tested both approaches and knows how much more she can get done when she delivers things in a way that brings people along rather than triggers their defenses. That is not a weakness. That is precision.

What Made Her Write It

A few days before we spoke, Elena published something on Substack that rippled through our community in a way I had not seen in a long time. She wrote that a lot of what she had spent the past decade learning was losing leverage. That growth, marketing, product management had felt like crafts. That you built intuition over years. That you earned judgment by grinding through it all.

And then she watched a twenty-two-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in fourteen minutes. And there was no mourning period. You just move on, because everything is moving too fast.

I told her that post was part of why I reached out. She told me what it felt like to publish it.

She said every single post is dreadful to publish. The moment she clicks that button is the most anxiety-inducing moment of her week, every week. She is putting something out to be judged without being able to provide additional context. It does not get easier.

But she published it anyway because she thought: nobody is saying this. Nobody is saying out loud that they are scared, that they are behind, that this is hard. And the professional world rewards confidence, not the more human things - the adjustment, the processing, the acceptance of what is actually happening.

The response was enormous. Thousands of likes, hundreds of shares and comments, people saying: finally, someone said it.

She was not surprised by that. She was surprised by how few people at her level had been willing to say it first.

Being Humbled, and Continuing to Learn

She shared a little story about her son. He was watching a World War I documentary and asked her if she was alive then. She told me this the same way I tell it about my own kids - with that combination of laughter and horror that only parents of a certain age understand. Being asked if we’re from the 1900’s is a special kind of humble pie slice.

And then she said something that I think quietly ties together the whole arc of what she shared in our conversation. She talked about giving herself space to learn. About blocking time to just go explore something new - Firecrawl, in her recent example, because she kept hearing everyone talk about it and finally just went and tried it and understood it. About how that exploration is slow and sometimes produces nothing and you have to go back to the old way anyway. About how nobody has time for that, and she protects it anyway.

Because the thing that made her great at this craft in the first place - that grinding willingness to figure it out, that refusal to pretend she knows something she does not, that pattern of show up and absorb everything available - that is still what she is doing. Even at Lovable. Even now. Especially now.

That is the Elena Verna thesis, condensed. The work is real. The hype is not. Stay close to what is actually true.

The People Who Changed Everything

Elena named a few people who I want to acknowledge here because the way she talked about them was different from how people usually answer this question.

Brent, her first great manager at SurveyMonkey, who pushed her toward what excellent looks like and showed her how to get there.

Selina, the CTO and Head of Product at SurveyMonkey, who Elena described as someone she still reverse-engineers. Still great friends with her. Still learning from the years they worked together.

Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, who was still small enough when Elena joined - employee twelve - that he could develop a real relationship with someone at every level of the org. She carried what he gave her for years after he was gone.

She also said some of the people she considers her most important mentors reported to her. Eric, from her analytics team, is one. She still respects how he thinks more than almost anyone. She went out of her way to say that mentors do not have to come from above. Some of the most important ones are just people who are really, really good at something, and you are paying enough attention to learn from them.

That framing tells you so much about how she built the career she built.

What She Values and What She Won’t Sell

I asked Elena about her non-negotiable values and she answered with something I have not heard in any of these conversations before.

She said: “I will never sell myself more than what I am capable of doing.”

She told me about her first few months at Lovable, when she was asked to run marketing alongside growth. She has been a CMO. She has done real marketing across every discipline. She knows the work. And she went to the CEO and said: “You need to hire a head of marketing. It is not me. I know that there are better people for this position.”

Most people would not do that. Most people, given the opportunity to run something big at a company moving that fast, would take it. She did not. Because she is not interested in taking on things she cannot do at the level they deserve. She wants to be where she is actually excellent, and she will protect that standard even when the opportunity is right in front of her.

“The biggest impact I can make in this industry is not on the value I generate for one company. It’s on the learnings I can propagate. That is how I measure impact - not by how much money the company has earned, but by how many lives I can make a little bit better.”

And another one: “Always be learning.”

She evaluates her job and her position based on whether she is still growing personally inside it. If the answer is no, she pays attention to that. She has always paid attention to that.

What She Wishes Someone Would Ask

I always end with the same question. What do you wish someone would just ask you that nobody ever does?

Elena thought about it and then she flipped it on me (panic hit for a second). She said what she wishes people would stop asking is: “What do I need to do to get to where you are? How do I become you?”

There were lucky breaks. There were right-place-right-time moments. There were introductions that mattered and mentors who showed up at the right time. She is not pretending otherwise. But every single one of those moments required her to have already been doing the work. To have already been prepared. To have already been the person who would know what to do with an opportunity when it arrived.

What she wishes people would ask instead: “Given my superpowers, what is my potential? How do I craft a path to where I actually want to go?”

That question requires self-knowledge. It requires honesty about what you are actually good at versus what you wish you were good at. It requires the kind of work that does not look like work - the quiet, patient, grinding process of learning who you are and what you can do and then going and doing it.

This is what she has been doing since the dance studio thoughts in Russia. Since the cubicle at Safeway. Since the community college. Since the hundred dollars she did not have.

She figured it out.

Every single time.

You can find Elena Verna on LinkedIn and at elenaverna.com. Her Substack is Elena’s Growth Scoop, and if you have not yet read the Confessions of a Millennial in Tech post, go read it.

Elena - thank you. I am still not entirely calm about you saying yes. This conversation was everything.

No one has looked at the mountain of customer and market data in a while, but they’re looking at specifically this point in time. This isn’t the exception anymore. It’s the norm.

We are in an era that is genuinely exciting and genuinely disorienting at the same time, and the problem isn’t technology. The problem is what the pace of that technology is doing to our decision-making. The problem is our brains.

What was the inspiration for this post? AI you say? Sorta. I bit the bullet and got my 13-year-old kid a phone. And it’s wild how when I started talking with my friends this past weekend about the impact of technology on the brains of our kids (and the contract I made my kid sign so I could help manage the cognitive changes and load with some force), it came back to what it’s doing to every one of us, in tech or not.

What a cognitive bias actually is

I fell in love with understanding this a few years ago, at Pendo, when we started looking at how it impacts product teams. A cognitive bias isn’t a character flaw. Rather, it’s a shortcut your brain takes because it was never designed to process the volume of information the modern world throws at it. The errors aren’t random - they’re actually predictable, which is both the bad news and the good news. Your brain builds a “subjective reality” from what it can access, and it acts on that reality even when the full picture looks different. If you’ve not yet read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (and are up for a nice long but worthwhile read) you’ll get this quickly.

In product, those shortcuts have always existed. But right now, in an environment where everyone is watching what the next AI release will do to their job, their roadmap, and their relevance, those shortcuts are working overtime.

Luckily my LinkedIn Feed (and likely yours) serves up the best posts that showcase the ones that are doing the most damage in product development today. These culprits are recency, bandwagon, and confirmation biases.

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Recency Bias: The Last Thing You Heard Is Running Your Roadmap

Recency bias is exactly what it sounds like. Your brain gives disproportionate weight to what just happened, and what someone just saw, at the expense of what’s been true for a longer stretch of time.

You see it in meetings when all the decisions get made in the last fifteen minutes based on whatever was said most recently. You see it in prioritization when the feature that just got the most Slack reactions ends up in the next sprint. You see it in strategy when one bad quarter or one viral competitor feature triggers a full rethink that wasn’t supported by the underlying data.

Neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Imperial College London published research in 2024 showing that recency bias in working memory is not just a behavioral tendency. It’s actually embedded in how neural circuits function. The same mechanism that causes us to over-weigh recent information also pulls our judgment towards “the average of previous observations,” which means we’re often not making bold decisions at all. We’re regressing to the mean and calling it a pivot.

(Come on, you know you saw the scene in your head too.)

When the most recent customer complaint, competitor launch, or leadership comment overrides months of evidence, you stop building toward a goal and start reacting to a feed.

The AI moment has amplified this tenfold. Every week brings a new model, a new capability, a new think piece about what it all means. If your team is letting the most recent piece of that inform their direction, they’re not building a roadmap. They’re building a mood board.

Bandwagon Effect: AI Is Everywhere So We Must Need It Too

The bandwagon effect - the tendency to adopt something because others appear to be adopting it - is operating at a scale we haven’t seen since the mobile-first era (some of you reading this have zero idea what I’m referring to, and I’m now at peace with that).

The data tells an interesting story around this effect. FactSet tracking shows that a record 331 S&P 500 companies mentioned AI on their Q4 2025 earnings calls - 68% of all calls that quarter - with that number growing every quarter for the past two years. But a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed thousands of CEOs and senior executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia and found that the majority reported little meaningful impact from AI on their actual operations. Productivity gains measured at the macro level have been modest - one MIT analysis put the productivity increase over the next decade at around 0.5% - pretty modest.

The gap between what companies are saying and what they are actually seeing is enormous. And that gap exists largely because teams are adopting AI tools to signal progress, not because they’ve tied those tools to a specific outcome they’re trying to move.

There is a deeper layer to this that I am seeing in conversations with founders and product leaders. Boards and investors are creating an impossible tension right now. They are holding companies to the same expectations around growth and retention they always have while simultaneously pressuring them to be at the forefront of AI in their portfolio. What that pressure actually demands is something most have not yet embraced, or perhaps understood: a deliberate separation between smart, focused investments in core product and genuine runway for innovation. McKinsey’s research on 20 AI-leading companies across industries found that the ones delivering real results - an average 20% EBITDA uplift and $3 of incremental EBITDA for every $1 invested - concentrated their efforts on just one to three business domains and reinvented those with AI, rather than spreading bets across the board. They made substantial, stage-gated investments and stayed focused. Protecting the core while making real room for the experiments might actually move something. That is not a radical idea. It is just one most boards are not yet having.

Goals set expectations and they drive the work. This is a massive change management moment for all of us. The downstream effects of this tension is something everyone should take seriously. Product operations teams in this moment can be more essential than before. When you implement tooling or redesign a workflow because “everyone is doing it,” you’ve decoupled your process from your actual problem. Some of you I’ve spoken with have completely abandoned guardrails and process because of the chaos. You’ve made it much harder to evaluate whether anything you’re doing is working, because the North Star is “keeping up” rather than “improving a metric that matters.”

Confirmation Bias: The Feature Factory Runs on This

Confirmation bias - the tendency to seek and interpret information in ways that confirm what you already believe - has always been the most common cognitive bias on product teams. Some researchers call it the “patron bias” behind feature factories, and that framing is right.

When a team has already committed to an AI roadmap, the research they run will tend to surface the evidence that supports it. When leadership has already decided that a certain metric now matters, the data presented in reviews will tend to emphasize that metric. When a PM believes a feature will land, the user testing will tend to be designed in ways that confirm, rather than challenge, that belief.

None of this is intentional. That’s the whole point. Confirmation bias operates quietly, below the level of deliberate reasoning, and it’s exceptionally difficult to catch in yourself.

In the current moment, when teams are under enormous pressure to show that their AI investments are paying off, confirmation bias is especially dangerous. An Upwork Research Institute study found that 77% of employees using AI said the tools had actually decreased their productivity and increased their workload. But when leaders are expecting a positive story, the data that surfaces in presentations often tells a different one.

Summing up the World Before vs. the World Now -

Then:

Now:

And now, the Burnout

Here’s where it gets intense for the people doing this work.

An eight-month study conducted by researchers at UC Berkeley and published in the Harvard Business Review in early 2026 followed 200 employees at a US-based tech company before and after AI tools were introduced. What they found wasn’t that AI freed people up. It was that AI allowed people to do more, and so they did - longer hours, broader scope, faster pace, often without being asked. Workload crept up quietly, and then became the new baseline.

The researchers described the cumulative effect as “fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from.” Their conclusion: “Without intention, AI makes it easier to do more - but harder to stop.”

This is what cognitive bias looks like at the systemic level. Teams driven by recency bias chase every new capability. Teams driven by the bandwagon effect purchase tools before they’ve defined the problem. Teams driven by confirmation bias design processes that validate the urgency rather than question it. And individuals, caught in all of it, expand to fill the space AI creates - and then keep going.

The burnout isn’t from the technology. It’s from the unexamined assumptions that live under the usage, adoption, and implementation of it.

This is a Performance Problem

Before we get into what to do, it’s worth sitting with why it’s worth doing.

McKinsey, of course, has spent years studying the business impact of cognitive bias across industries, and the numbers are real. This one is a bit of a read, but it’s a good one. In an analysis of two investment funds that implemented structured debiasing practices, performance improvements of 150 to 200 basis points per year were documented - in one case generating over £200 million for unit holders. Their broader research estimated that even high-performing organizations could be leaving 100 to 300 basis points of value on the table annually due to unchecked bias in decision-making.

The biases they reported on were not the same as the ones mentioned in this piece which are relevant to what I’m seeing today in our space (and on our feeds). The article is worth a read to understand the impact of bias overall on performance and company outcomes. Investment funds are a clean case because every decision has a measurable outcome. Product decisions are messier, but the mechanism is the same: predictable patterns of biased thinking produce predictably suboptimal results. And unlike market volatility or competitive pressure, bias is something you can actually design around.

The work of managing cognitive bias isn’t a side project for when things slow down. It’s the infrastructure underneath every other thing you’re trying to build.

What to Do About It (For Yourself and Your Team)

None of this means you should slow down. It means you should be more intentional about what you’re speeding toward. I love Dave Masters’ take on this as it’s about intention.

A few things that actually work for teams:

1. To combat recency bias, separate the signal from the noise on a schedule. Recency bias absolutely thrives in reactive environments. One of the simplest interventions is designating a regular cadence - weekly, biweekly - where your team reviews a broader window of data before making decisions. Not just last week. Not just this sprint. The trend over three to six months.

2. Another is to create meeting structures that interrupt recency bias. Following on the above, consider making the first agenda item in any roadmap or prioritization meeting a review of existing evidence, not new input. When the first thing the group processes is the history of a topic, not the most recent thing that happened, you structurally reduce the weight of recency.

3. To combat bandwagon, name the “why” before the “what.” Before any AI tool evaluation or capability addition gets prioritized, require your team to write one sentence connecting it to a specific business outcome with a number attached. If you can’t write that sentence, you’re likely looking at bandwagon adoption, not strategic adoption.

4. To combat confirmation bias, build research processes that try to disprove, not confirm. Confirmation bias loses its hold when the explicit goal of a research session is to find out what’s wrong with your hypothesis, not what’s right with it. Ask your team: what would have to be true for us to be wrong about this?

5. Overall we should look for ways to protect decision quality, not just output. The Berkeley researchers specifically recommend what they call “decision pauses” before high-stakes choices - structured moments to slow down before committing. If your team is moving at a pace where decisions feel automatic, that’s the signal to pause, not accelerate.

And for everyone, this still holds true. AI or not -

1. Notice when your conviction about something increased because of a demo you saw last week. There’s a difference between being excited about something shiny (which is totally fine) vs. chasing something shiny because someone else is doing it and you feel left behind.

2. Notice when urgency feels like it’s coming from the environment rather than from your own strategic assessment.

3. Notice when the last most important thing is no longer the most important, even though it was grounded in data and had a clear line to achieving a business outcome. Those shifts are not as simple as reordering priorities - they’re about learning how to accept change will have ripple effects. I’ve always told my teams the dynamics, prioritization culture, and resources at one organization are not the same as another. So the thing you are chasing is a thing that will likely need to be done differently than in that other company, and will almost always impact existing agreed upon outcomes.

Pausing to notice is the practice.

The Longer View

The irony of this moment is that the teams who will build the most durable products are probably not the ones moving fastest. They’re the ones who are clearest about what they’re actually trying to accomplish and why, and setting up mechanisms to measure success before moving on. They’re the ones who have built the discipline to keep that clarity even when the hype cycle is deafening.

Cognitive biases don’t go away. They’re part of how your brain works, and that won’t change regardless of how sophisticated the tools around you get. What changes is whether you’ve built the awareness (the noticing) and the systems to catch them before they make decisions for you.

Your roadmap deserves better than your most recent Slack thread. Your team deserves better than keeping up. And you deserve to be building toward something that still makes sense when the current hype cycle has passed.

Just like that contract I made for my kid, find ways to focus on keeping the noise out.

What I want you to know before we get into any of this is that Ramli is one of the people in our space who has been building with integrity for a long time, quietly and consistently, without needing the moment to be about him. In addition to the book above, he wrote another, Eureka, both of which tens of thousands of product teams actually use. He taught for years. He has mentored more people than he probably remembers. And right now, at a moment when every product leader I talk to is exhausted and slightly terrified, he is building something that genuinely helps.

This one is for the people who are doing the real work while seeing the people alongside them who are as well, and wondering if anyone notices. Someone does.

Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Founder, Delight Path - consulting and peer community for product leaders navigating the AI era.

Before that: Content Director at Appcues. Managing Director at ProductLed. Growth consultant to Mixpanel, Zapier, Vidyard, and more.

Books: Product-Led Onboarding (40,000+ copies sold worldwide) and EUREKA: The Product Onboarding Playbook for B2B Companies.

Originally from: The Philippines. Moved to Toronto at age 10. Has called it home for exactly 30 years.

Education: Bachelor of Mathematics, University of Waterloo. MBA, Richard Ivey School of Business.

Career arc: Developer → data analyst → Pepsi → co-founder (failed startup) → freelance consultant → teacher → author → ProductLed → Appcues → Delight Path.

Community: Founder of the Product Leaders Lab - a peer community for VPs, Heads, and Directors of Product who are done pretending they have it all figured out.

I am proudly a member.

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Where He Came From

Ramli grew up in the Philippines, moved to Toronto at ten years old, and has been there for thirty years since. He said that number - thirty years exactly - with the quiet satisfaction of someone who found his place and knows it.

As a kid, he was a nerd. He said it himself, without hesitation or apology. Video games, Rubik’s cubes, puzzles. Not the kid getting picked first in gym class, but the kid with his people, solving things for fun. He went to the University of Waterloo to study math with ambitions of becoming Einstein, collided with the reality of how hard physics actually is, and landed with a degree in mathematics and computer science that turned out to serve him far better than any physics Nobel would have.

I want to stay on the teacher story for a moment - it’s a thread here.

Ramli’s best teacher in high school started every class by asking students what they wanted to be when they grew up. And then, for the entire semester, he connected every lesson to those answers. Not loosely. Specifically. You want to be a police officer? Here is exactly how force and mass and acceleration show up in your career. It stopped feeling like numbers on a blackboard and started feeling like something worth paying attention to.

That teacher is the reason Ramli briefly wanted to be a physicist. He is also the reason Ramli became a teacher. And if you look at everything Ramli has built since - books, courses, community, consulting - you will see that same instinct running through all of it. Make it real. Connect the lesson to the person. Earn trust before you ask someone to change.

That is not a framework. That is a value system that started in a high school classroom.

How Product Found Him

Ramli did not set out to work in product. He set out to build things, and product is what happened when he started paying attention to who those things were for.

After university he was coding, analyzing data, working in systems at Pepsi. Then he and a friend decided to start something. They built a platform for parents to create digital scrapbooks of their kids. Two guys in their twenties. Neither of them parents. No domain expertise, no distribution channel, a monthly meetup group, and a genuinely good idea that landed on the wrong founders for the job.

It failed.

I love that he told this story the way he did - not as a wound, but as the lesson that cracked everything open. Because the failure handed him the insight that has defined his entire career since: “It’s always been easy to build something. What makes it hard is figuring out who it’s for and how you reach them. That has not changed. If anything, AI has amplified the problem.”

He is right about that. In a world where you can prototype an app in an afternoon and launch something before the week is out, the people who understand distribution, empathy, and the difference between a stated problem and a real one are going to be the ones who build things that last. Ramli has been teaching this for years. It is more relevant now than it has ever been.

From the startup he moved into consulting, then teaching at RED Academy, CXL, and Centennial College, then writing, then the ProductLed world with Wes Bush, then Appcues, and now Delight Path, which he launched in late 2024. Every chapter has been a variation on the same theme: get close to the people, find the real problem underneath the stated one, and help them get to value faster.

The PM Mindset Outside of Work

This is the section I look forward to most in every conversation, and Ramli delivered.

I asked him whether the way he thinks at work ever bleeds into the rest of his life, and he went straight to first principles thinking. He described applying it not just to product problems but to parenting, to decisions, to anything that feels tangled. Strip it back. What are we actually trying to do? Why does this matter? How do we break it into smaller pieces?

He said he teaches his kids the same way. Take away everything. Start from what you know to be true. Then build from there. It is the same instinct his math degree gave him, the same thing coding gave him, and it travels into every part of his life now without him having to think about it.

But the moment that really landed for me was something quieter. He told me about a situation with a former colleague who felt hurt by something he had said. He heard about it, and he had two options. A Slack message - fast, easy, done - or a video call, which required coordinating schedules and sitting with the discomfort a little longer.

He chose the video call.“Even though it required coordinating and getting everyone together, I really feel like seeing the human behind the conversation matters. That’s important to me. Not just sending a text.”

Today, AI is compressing timelines and communication and everything in between, so choosing to slow down and do the human thing on purpose is itself a form of product thinking. It is understanding that trust is built in the spaces where you choose presence over convenience. And that the outcome you are optimizing for is the relationship, not just the resolution.

That is the product mindset outside of work. And that is the whole thesis.

The Craft: What Most Companies Still Get Wrong

Ramli has worked with hundreds of teams on onboarding and product-led growth. If you ask him what the single most common failure mode is, he does not hesitate.

Teams jump to the how before they understand the why. They see a competitor launch a new feature or a product tour and immediately want to do the same. They hear about a chatbot and add it to the backlog. They have a CEO who has just spent an afternoon in Lovable and suddenly the whole roadmap is in question. And none of it is grounded in an actual understanding of what the user is struggling with - not just functionally, but emotionally, socially, the whole picture. “One second. Let’s figure out the why. Why are we doing this? What is at the core of it? And then get to it.”

He said AI has amplified this problem significantly, not created it. When building was hard, there was a natural forcing function - you could only pursue so many wrong ideas at once. Now you can pursue all of them simultaneously, in a week, with a small team, and still call it a roadmap. The discipline of stopping before the build to understand the person has never mattered more, and it has also never been harder to protect.

This is why he has spent so much time thinking about teaching as a design discipline. When he was in the classroom, he was doing the same thing he does in product: figuring out who this person is, what they actually care about, what success looks like for them specifically, and then building the experience around that understanding. The lesson is not the content. The lesson is the connection.

On AI, the Space Right Now, and What Is Actually Hard

Ramli is not performing optimism about AI. He is not performing alarm either. He is doing the harder thing, which is sitting honestly inside the contradiction - it is genuinely useful and genuinely overwhelming, and both of those things are true at the same time.

Where it is actually helping

AI has become a real thinking partner for him. It helps him pressure-test ideas, challenge assumptions, brainstorm options he would not have reached alone. The administrative compression has been significant - he mentioned Granola, which we both use and love, as the kind of tool that gives back cognitive space by handling things that used to drain it. And the ability to prototype real, clickable experiences without a design team has changed what is possible in early-stage conversations with clients.

Where the real problem lives

The pressure, the saturation. That is where it gets hard.

Every morning on LinkedIn there is a new announcement that you are already behind. If you are not 5x more productive than last year, you might not have a job next year. If you are not using Claude Code, Cursor, co-pilot, agents, and whatever launched this morning, you are falling behind people who are. He called it an AI education race - everyone acquiring as much knowledge as possible just to feel current. I empathize with him here as the exhaustion is real because acquisition is not the same as absorption. “There’s a difference. And I think that’s where the exhaustion lives.”

This is exactly why he built the Product Leaders Lab Community. He kept hearing the same thing from product leaders across companies, levels, and industries: I feel behind. I feel like I am always trying to catch up. And what he found, by actually sitting with these people and putting them in rooms together, was that the hype is not the reality. Most people are in the same place. Most people are figuring it out as they go.

The algorithm is selecting, the same way instagram does. More on Product Leaders Lab below.

What he would tell product leaders right now

He said something that I want to put in front of every leader who has been feeling the weight of this moment.

“The human side is what differentiates.”

Not the tools. Not the speed. The judgment, the empathy, the ability to get to the root of what someone actually needs - these are the things AI does not do and cannot do, and they are going to matter more as the build-everything-instantly era unfolds, not less. The people investing in those things now are the ones who will be standing when the dust settles.

What Product Managers Should Be Measuring

When I asked Ramli about metrics, he started where I hoped he would - not with a number, but with a question. Before you can measure anything, everyone on the team has to agree on what value actually means for your users. What are they trying to do? What is their real motivation? Once you have that, the metrics fall into place naturally. Without it, you are measuring the wrong things confidently.

Time to value matters. But the instinct to minimize it, to sprint users to the aha moment as fast as possible, misses something that has become more important in the AI era, not less. He introduced a frame I had not heard this clearly articulated before:

Time. To. Trust.

Retention is the north star it has always been. But trust is what retention is built on now, and the question is not just are they coming back - it is do they believe enough in what you are building to stake their time on it again. That belief is built in the onboarding, and built in every experience before they ever reach the moment you call success. Check out his latest conversation on How to Ship AI products without losing customer trust here.

The People Who Changed Everything

He shared some of the members of his personal board of directors with me.

His high school physics teacher - whose name he did not share but whose approach stayed with him for decades - is the reason he wanted to study physics and the reason he eventually became a teacher himself. The man connected every lesson to what his students actually cared about. He made them feel heard. That is not a teaching technique. That is a philosophy, and Ramli has been living it ever since.

Mark Thomas is the person Ramli turns to when he needs a sounding board that will give him honest thoughts rather than comfortable ones. The people who will tell you how something actually is, without softening it into uselessness, are rare and worth holding onto.

Gia Laudi has played that same role in the Delight Path journey specifically - helping Ramli think through the next steps with the same direct honesty. He described both of them as people who were willing to be vulnerable first, which made it safe for him to be vulnerable back. That reciprocal honesty is what helped him find his footing in a hard season of building something new.

I want to sit on something Ramli said here that I think deserves more than a line. When I asked who had helped him most in the Delight Path chapter, he talked about people willing to be honest - and then he said the vulnerability piece, just the act of sharing something real, had been the thing that helped most. A lot of people in our space are afraid to let others in. Ramli has figured out that it is actually the move.

Why He Built It, and Why Now

The moment Ramli knew Delight Path was real was at a summit he hosted last year - the AI Product Leader Summit - where he started getting messages from people saying thank you for doing this and that they’re glad someone is finally sharing what is actually happening rather than what we read online.

He described watching people light up when they connected with each other in that room, recognizing something in someone else’s story, feeling less alone in what they were going through. That, he said, is what gives him energy. Not the keynote. Not the recognition. The moment someone in the room realizes they are not the only one. “I get a ton of energy when I connect people with each other. Seeing them light up and connect with others - that gets me excited. If I didn’t do this, something important would be missing.”

The Product Leaders Lab is the formalization of that instinct. A peer community, application-only, small cohorts, built specifically for the people who are leading product organizations through the most complicated moment any of us have ever navigated. Not a course. Not a framework. A room full of people who actually understand what the seat feels like right now.

*The cohort is open through April 23rd. If any of that sounds like what you have been looking for, go to delightpath.com and find out more. Tell him I sent you. 🙌

What He Hopes People Actually Feel

I asked Ramli what he hopes people feel when they walk away from something he has built. He talked about the confetti video - if you have ever gotten on a call with him (or if you’ve made it this far in the read), you (now) know the one. It plays before the meeting starts, and most people are already smiling before they say hello. He said that is intentional. He wants people to come in open, to feel like they can be themselves.

And beyond that, he said something that felt like the thesis of this entire piece, and honestly of the whole reason I keep writing this series:

The nerd from Toronto who wanted to be Einstein, failed at a startup, spent years teaching people in classrooms and conference rooms and Zoom calls how to get closer to the humans they are building for - he has been doing the same thing the whole time. Making people feel less alone. Making the lesson feel real. Earning trust before asking for anything in return.

That is a product philosophy. It is also just a good way to be a person.

You can find Ramli John on LinkedIn and at delightpath.com.

The Product Leaders Lab cohort is open through April 23rd, 2026. Go check it out.

And Ramli - thank you for this, for all of it, and for the confetti every single time.

Tara has that energy. Direct, deeply human, and very clear about what she thinks. She does not dress things up. She does not waste your time with qualifications. She has lived fifteen years inside some of the hardest product leadership seats available and she has come out the other side with a perspective that is both sharper and more generous for everything she went through to get it.

I am going to give you some of that perspective unfiltered, because it deserves to land the way she said it.

Education and Professional Highlights

Co-Founder: GoldHue - a fractional product executive duo helping tech CEOs make product clear, fast, and impactful. Tara and Mackenzie Hughes embed into leadership teams to solve the operational problems slowing companies down.

Career arc: Email marketing → New York advertising agencies → College Board → Weight Watchers → General Assembly → Electric AI → Instructure → GoldHue.

Based in: Ramsey, Bergen County, New Jersey.

Originally from: Ringwood, NJ - in the mountains near the New York state border (not the Newark people picture when they hear New Jersey).

Education: Liberal arts degree, self-described. Figured most of the important things out on her own.

Also: Certified executive coach. Coaches product leaders individually alongside the GoldHue consulting work.

Where She Came From

Tara grew up in Ringwood, New Jersey, the firstborn child of two entrepreneurs who were rarely home because they were busy building things. Her father came from Israel, got into Columbia, and ended up at Brooklyn Polytechnic because the one person he knew in America was already there. He had no idea what he was choosing between. Her mother studied film at City College, decided maybe real estate made more sense when the kids arrived, and built a thriving career over forty-plus years. Both of them were out the door early and back late.

What that produced in Tara was not resentment. It produced a self-starter. Someone who figured out colleges on her own, navigated her career on her own, and built a set of values around doing exactly what she said she was going to do - because nobody was going to chase her down and make sure she followed through. She had to be her own accountability system from the beginning.

She also grew up in a bilingual household where Friday nights meant Shabbat dinner at her grandmother’s house before anything else. Her grandmother would put a knife in the hands of whoever walked through the door - friend, family, it did not matter - and set them to work on vegetables. At the time, Tara wanted to be anywhere else. Now she talks about it the way you talk about something that quietly shaped you more than you realized while it was happening.

Her grandmother was born in Jerusalem in the 1930s, one of nine children, grew up poor, met an American cameraman on a film set during volatile times, and got on a plane to a country she had never seen. Tara describes her as someone born ahead of her time - a problem solver, a connector, someone who understood intuitively that you have to meet people where they are, not where you wish they were.

“She would have been a CEO running a major business. No question. She was the neck that turned everything.”

That instinct - solve the problem, meet people where they are, be the one who holds things together without making a performance of it - is visible in everything Tara has done since.

How Product Found Her

Tara graduated from college with a liberal arts degree at a moment when everyone around her seemed to be heading for banking, law school, or medicine. She put all the pressure on herself - her parents were not the source of it - and spent time applying to jobs across industries without a clear direction, mostly because the career services at her university were, in her words, absolute dog shit.

She landed at an email marketing company through a contact, learned a lot, got bored at the eighteen-month mark the way she has gotten bored at the eighteen-month mark at every job since, and navigated her way into New York advertising agencies. She was good at it. She was client-facing, which meant she was at the beck and call of whoever needed something at six-thirty on a Tuesday night. And she looked up at the women in leadership above her and thought: they are never around, they are always traveling, and she wasn’t sure that path was for her.

So she made a lateral move - not a step up, a step sideways - into another group at College Board, where a digital services group was building internal products. She stayed long enough to watch the organization begin to understand what product actually meant, including a trip to one of Marty Cagan’s courses that started shifting how leadership thought about the work. And then she looked around and realized she was in a great job for someone fifty years old, not someone in their late twenties who was still hungry to learn at speed.

She left for Weight Watchers during their digital transformation and has not looked back since.

What the advertising years gave her - and this is the part she thinks most product leaders who came up through traditional paths miss - was a visceral understanding of what it feels like to be on the customer-facing side of things. To be at someone’s beck and call. To understand what the GTM team is actually experiencing when they turn to the product team and say, why is this so hard?

She is not wrong. And she has spent fifteen years trying to close that gap for the people she leads and advises.

The Craft: What Product Leadership Actually Requires

Tara has a hot take she has clearly thought through carefully, and she does not soften it.

What she means is this: the leaders who plateau are the ones who stay too long in the customer experience story without developing commercial fluency. The ones who thrive understand that product leadership, regardless of whether you are in a B2C consumer app, a B2B SaaS company, or a nonprofit, ultimately comes down to driving business impact through the products you build. Revenue. Retention. Margin. That is what the room cares about, and if you cannot speak that language clearly and confidently, you will struggle to be taken seriously at the table that makes the decisions.

She is not saying stop caring about users. She is saying that user empathy is a means to an end, not the end itself, and that the product community has sometimes made those two things feel like they are in competition when they are actually the same conversation framed differently.

The piece that she thinks is still a genuine gap in how the industry trains people: nobody is teaching designers and engineers commercial sense. And as roles compress and teams get smaller and expectations grow, that gap is going to start costing people.

She also had something sharp to say about metrics that I want you to sit with. “It is unfortunately the product leader’s job to squirrel out the one or two things that are actually most important right now - because your CEO is going to say yes to everything. And if everything is equally important at the same time, you will fail.”

On this I viscerally agreed. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Her framework is simple. Figure out where the biggest problem is - is it churn, is it growth, is it expansion? - and then make sure the majority of your team’s work is pointing at that thing. Then cascade it down so that everyone understands not just what they are building but why it matters to the business right now. Not in the abstract. Right now.

On AI, the Evolving Space, and What Is Actually Happening

Tara works directly with product leaders and founders navigating the current moment, which means she has a very specific and unfiltered view of what is actually going on inside companies right now. And what she is seeing is a lot of fear wearing different costumes.

The leaders who are thriving, she says, are the ones who have accepted something uncomfortable: there is no playbook. There is no crystal ball. The annual operating plan has always been, to some degree, a fiction, and it is more of a fiction now than it has ever been, because the market itself is moving faster than anyone can model. The leaders who are struggling are the ones holding on to the way things were, or paralyzed trying to figure out which way to move next.

On boards and investors, she is blunt. They are behind. They are still pushing CEOs and executives to meet expectations that were built for a different world, and the tension that creates - where the person running the company has to manage up and explain that the old playbooks no longer apply while simultaneously managing down and trying to bring the whole organization into a new way of operating - is one of the most exhausting dynamics she sees right now.

On AI specifically, she sees it in two buckets. Where it has genuinely helped: anything that compresses the communication overhead of product work. The decks, the spreadsheets, the status updates, the sources of truth that used to take so much time to assemble and maintain. When that time comes back, people can use it for actual thinking.

Where it is making things harder: what she calls “AI slop”. The removal of critical thinking dressed up as productivity. Teams generating ten-page documents that say a lot without actually saying anything, that have no clear point of view, no sharp hypothesis, no evidence that someone sat with the problem long enough to understand it. “The people who know how to critically think and formulate a strong point of view can leverage AI to scale themselves. The people who don’t have those basics and are slapping AI on top - it’s creating a whole lot of nothingness.”

Her advice to anyone feeling overwhelmed by the pace: stop thinking about the tools. Come back to what you are actually trying to solve for your customer and where you can add the most value. The companies doing well right now are the ones asking the right questions first and treating AI as a secondary consideration, not the headline.

The Work-Life Blend

I always want to know whether the way someone thinks at work bleeds into the rest of their life, and with Tara the answer is so clearly yes that it barely needs asking.

She described the moment she realized she was genuinely happy - not sold-herself-on-it happy, not intellectually-convinced happy, but actually content - as the first time in her life she had felt that way. Every job before GoldHue, she said, she had been able to sell herself on. She is good at selling. But when she looked back honestly, she had not really cared that deeply. She had been performing investment in work that was not truly hers.

Now she is the one getting a text at seven in the morning from a client who needs a gut check before a difficult meeting, and her reaction is not exhaustion. It is satisfaction. “I was their only safe space. And if I can be that for people in this terrible environment - I mean, I’ve been on the other side. I couldn’t have done the job without my coach. So if I can be that for someone else, I mean, that really fills me up.”

She also coaches individuals alongside the GoldHue work, and the moments she describes as most meaningful are not the strategy deliverables. They are the moments when someone who was not comfortable speaking up in a room finally does. When someone who had been trying to leave for two years finally finds the courage. When someone understands, for the first time, what they specifically bring to an organization that nobody else does.

That is the product mindset outside of work: understanding what someone actually needs, not what they say they need, and building the conditions for them to get there. She has been doing it her whole life. She just has better language for it now.

The People Who Changed Everything

Tara does not have a long list here. She has a specific one.

Her grandmother gets the first mention, and we have already spent time there. But it is worth saying again: the woman who put a knife in the hands of every kid who walked through the door on a Friday night and taught them that problems are solvable and people are meetable wherever they are - she is the through-line in how Tara leads.

Nikki Goldman, her executive coach at Electric, gets the second. And Tara was thoughtful about why. It was not that Nikki solved something for her in the moment. It was that she planted seeds in conversations that Tara did not fully understand until two and a half years later, when she finally made the leap to build GoldHue. Some coaching works in real time. Some of it works on a delay, and you only recognize it later when you reach for something and realize it was already there. That is the kind Tara is most grateful for.

And then there is her CTO, Yotam Hadass, from Electric, who spoke about with the kind of warmth you only have for someone who trusted you before you had fully earned it. With respect to their professional relationship, she describes them as yin and yang - very very needed in a Prod/Eng partnership. And she speaks of him with the highest level of respect on a personal level - supporting each other through some of life’s hardest moments, while standing together on the battlefield of this space we’re in. He is also the one who pushed Mackenzie’s name across the table when Tara was interviewing for a product ops role, with a background that looked nothing like what the job description said. Tara took that meeting. She has never questioned it.

What She Would Tell You Right Now

I asked Tara what she wished people would just ask her that nobody ever does. She paused, and then said something that I think is the most honest thing I have heard in any of these conversations.

“What do you really need today? Not what are you doing. Not what are you working on. Like, what do you actually need?”

She said even her mother looks at her and sees someone who has it together - kids getting to their places, work running, things humming - and assumes the answer is nothing. And meanwhile Tara is tired, carrying things, showing up fully for everyone around her the way she always has. The self-starter who figured everything out on her own, who built a career and a family and a company and a coaching practice, who sends her clients the kind of quick response at seven in the morning that she wished someone had sent her.

Sometimes the person holding everything together is the one who most needs someone to ask.

This wild ride of an interview was a glimpse of Tara Goldman - someone I will now, actually know. And I am very glad she came on this series.

You can find Tara on LinkedIn and learn more about GoldHue at goldhue.co. If you are a tech CEO or product leader trying to get clear, fast, and be impactful - reach out. Tell her I sent you.

We reconnected recently and I’m so glad we did, because Dave is exactly the kind of person this series exists for. We talked the way you talk with someone who genuinely loves the craft and has been in it long enough to have real things to say about where it’s been and where it’s going, and that conversation led to this one.

Dave spent over two decades shaping digital products, most recently as a Senior Director of Product at Realtor.com, where he led teams building experiences across the full home buying and selling lifecycle. He’s mentored product managers, built through digital transformation, and has the kind of quiet intellectual credibility that comes from doing the work for a long time rather than just talking about it.

He’s now consulting, building his own things, and moving at a pace he hasn’t experienced in years, in the best possible way.

This one is for the practitioners.

Education and Professional Highlights

Most recently: Senior Director of Product, Realtor.com - 20+ years across consumer products, internal tooling, marketplace businesses, and customer-facing platforms.

Based in: Greater New York City Area

Originally from: Phoenix, Arizona

Education: Non-traditional - moved out on his own before finishing high school, started working at 17, community college part time. No four-year degree. Twenty-plus years of results instead.

Career arc: Account management, customer retention, business systems analyst, internal tooling, consumer product, Senior Director at Realtor.com, and now consulting independently.

Where He Came From

Dave grew up in Arizona skateboarding and playing in bands, and I want to stay here for a minute because I think it’s actually the whole thing, not just a fun detail.

Skateboarders see the world differently - a bench isn’t a bench, it’s an obstacle, an opportunity, a thing to figure out. Dave’s son skates now too, and Dave described them walking around together and his son pointing at a ledge the way another kid might point at a candy store. That instinct, to look at the built environment and ask what else it could be, isn’t just a skate park habit. It’s a design instinct, and it’s a product instinct.

And then there’s the DIY ethic that comes from years in independent music. You do things yourself because you believe in them, not because someone gave you permission or a budget, and the second a major label gets involved, he said, layers multiply and things start to fall apart. You can see why someone who grew up in that world would spend a career allergic to bureaucracy and addicted to the feeling of actually shipping things.“DIY community is just ingrained in me from a pretty young age.”

Both of those things - the skater’s reframe and the indie musician’s self-reliance - show up constantly in how Dave approaches product. He’s not the person waiting for someone to tell him what’s possible. He’s the person already building the prototype.

The Person Who Shaped Him

Dave isn’t someone who points to a single mentor and says, this person made me - he’s more honest than that. When I asked about someone who shaped his way of thinking before his career existed, he went quiet for a second, and then he talked about his mom.

His mom held so much together for her children following divorce, and in general as a rock for him. Dave remembers now, as an adult, understanding what she actually sacrificed during those years - she’d have two dollars to her name and split it three ways between her kids without a second thought. She wasn’t eating lunch. They were.

“I think that shaped me in more ways than I recognized at the time.”

Selflessness, resilience under real adversity, showing up for the people who depend on you even when there isn’t much left to give - you can see all of that in how Dave talks about the teams he’s led and the leaders he’s most admired over the years.

How Product Found Him

Dave’s path into product is the kind of story that gets harder to have as the years go by. He was seventeen, out on his own, paying bills, and doing community college part time when he could. A friend who worked at a tech company at the start of the dot-com era needed referrals to earn a bonus before Christmas and pulled Dave in, and he came in through account management and customer retention before something clicked.

They needed someone to help shepherd an order-to-cash system they were building, to stand between the people building it and the people using it and make sure both sides were understood by the other. Dave stepped in, his title became Business Systems Analyst, and he didn’t know it at the time, but that was product.

From internal tooling he moved toward customer support systems, then consumer-facing products, and eventually into leadership at one of the largest real estate platforms in the country. None of it was planned, and all of it was earned by showing up curious and staying close to the problem.

He made a point worth underlining: universities are now teaching product management, and that’s good. But the frameworks a curriculum can teach you don’t replace what happens when you sit in front of a real person and watch them struggle with something they shouldn’t be struggling with. That education doesn’t live in a textbook.

“Until you actually sit in front of somebody and ask if they’re willing to pay for it, it’s a very different thing.”

He also referenced a piece by Daniel Schmidt he’s returned to for over a decade - The Product Management Triangle - a framework that maps the three core vertices of product work: technology, users, and business. His point was that no two PMs are built the same, and understanding where your team’s strengths and gaps live across that triangle is what tells you where you need to flex, where you need to hire, and where you’re likely to struggle. It’s a dense read, he warned, but one of those pieces that rewards the people who care about the craft seriously enough to sit with it.

Product Is a Way of Life

I asked Dave whether the way he thinks at work ever bleeds into the rest of his life, and he had a very specific answer that happened recently.

His twin brother works in construction with no tech background, but texted him recently: I keep hearing about this AI thing and I think there are ways it could help me, I just don’t know where to start.

Dave got on a call with him, listened, and asked the kind of questions you ask when you’re trying to find the real problem underneath the stated one. His brother talked about communication issues, tracking issues, coordination problems, and by the end of that day Dave had built three working prototypes - one for each core pain point - using Claude. Not polished, not production-ready, but real enough to get feedback fast. “I was basically doing one-on-one product building for my brother. He’s not saying he wants a dashboard. He’s saying this is the problem. Okay - let’s figure out how we’re going to solve that.”

That is the product mindset in its purest form: listen for the actual problem, strip out the feature request, and move toward a solution fast enough to learn something real.

He also talked about how he organizes his day and his life the same way he organizes a roadmap - elevate to the highest level first, ask what you’re actually trying to do and which direction you’re going, then break down the tasks that ladder into that. It sounds simple and it’s not easy to live.“That is for everything. That’s how I kind of operate day to day.”

On AI - The Honest Framework

Dave is doing some of his most interesting thinking right now on how teams should relate to AI during product development, particularly around expectations and pace.

He described a maturity model he has been working on for a while - one that we fully align on - a framework that maps product zones to the right level of speed and deliberateness. On one end, net new greenfield work: move fast, no regrets, just learning and iteration. On the other end, the core product touching the features your most loyal customers depend on: slow, intentional, deliberate.

“When we say we’re going to touch feature X and feature X is a critical part of the core product - slow. Intentional. Don’t expect the same pace that we were able to spin up a prototype for something brand new.”

This matters because one of the new problems AI has created is a leadership expectation mismatch - executives see what’s possible in a sandbox and project that velocity onto the real product with real users and real stakes. Resetting that expectation is now part of the product leader’s job.

He was equally clear about where AI has genuinely helped. Storytelling, show versus tell, the ability to take an idea and make it visible to another human being - that’s never been faster, which means alignment happens faster.

He also noticed something quietly important about himself: he was moving so fast, thinking fast, building fast, that the slow thinking wasn’t happening - the deliberate strategy work, the stepping back. So he asked Claude to help him figure out how to pace himself better. He was using AI not just as a builder but as a thinking partner for his own cognition, and that is the version of this technology worth believing in.

On the noise problem: every day there’s a new tool, a new paradigm, a new announcement telling you the future arrived this morning, and nobody can keep up with it sustainably. Trying to is its own kind of trap.“It’s less about the adoption curve and more about the right tool for the right job.”

What Product Managers Should Actually Be Measuring

When I asked Dave about metrics, his answer was almost deceptively simple: the core metrics shouldn’t change.

You’re anchoring toward a problem you want to solve, and the question is whether you’re solving it and whether the evidence you’re collecting actually tells you that. Operational metrics - how fast you’re shipping, how many features you’re releasing - are signals, not answers.

“Problem. Proof that we’re on the right path to solving that problem in the most effective way. That mindset shouldn’t change.”

What concerns him is the moment that mindset starts to blur, when teams start measuring AI feature delivery rather than the outcomes those features are driving, when shipping becomes the metric instead of the thing that happens because of what you shipped. We’ve seen this before. It’s just wearing a new outfit.

What the Space Needs Right Now

Dave’s answer was direct: if you’re not already using AI to help draft, think, and prototype, you’re behind. That is the floor, not the ceiling.

The ceiling is something more interesting - staying curious enough to keep growing, humble enough to recognize when someone else’s idea is better, and grounded enough to know what problem you’re actually trying to solve.

He told a story about a thirteen-year-old at a camping trip who built a YouTube replica for indie animation because that’s what he was passionate about - no CS background, no systems knowledge, just tools, curiosity, and a problem he cared about.“My ten-year-old could build something now. That’s really telling.”

His advice is not to panic about that but to use it as a signal. The next generation isn’t waiting for permission to build, and the question is whether you’re investing in the parts of your craft that can’t be automated: judgment, taste, empathy, and the ability to stay close to the real problem underneath the stated one.

“Stay curious. Stay close to the problem. And realize that your idea is not always going to be the best one, even though you may think it is.”

The People Who Changed Everything

Dave is not someone who pretends his success was solo. Let’s get right into it.

His friend Mark Lacy was a salesperson with the best attitude Dave had ever encountered, someone who stayed himself regardless of how stiff the corporate environment got and helped Dave believe in himself early, which matters more than most people give it credit for.

Todd Callow is a general manager type, not a product person, and Dave credits him with something product mentors alone couldn’t give: a clear view into what executives actually care about, and a model for what it looks like to lead people with genuine transparency and care. Dave described him as the most human people leader he’s ever had, and he said if he could make the people on his team feel the way he felt working for Todd, he’d know he was doing it right. I think Todd is my favorite on this list.

Tracey Mahnken ran the business systems analyst group in Dave’s early days and would print out big documents, take out a red pen, and cover them in questions - this was pre-Google Docs. She was teaching him to think in systems, not individual interfaces or isolated components, but the entire chain of cause and effect, and Dave said she’d laugh if she knew he still thought about that red pen.

Josh Seiden came in as a consultant and gave Dave one of those humbling moments that quietly reshapes how you think. Dave walked in with a long laundry list of things to build, and Josh looked at it and said, simply, that’s way too much, let’s cut it down. Sometimes the most important thing someone can do for you is give you permission to do less.

David Bland coached Dave one on one and worked with his team on experiment-driven product thinking, and also featured Dave as a case study in his book Testing Business Ideas, which tells you something about the quality of thinking Dave brings to this work.

And then there is Melissa Perri. Dave was in her first Product Institute cohort and she was a mentor during that time. Between Melissa, Josh, and David, those three are most responsible for how he thinks about product today - the discipline of it, the principles underneath it, the craft that doesn’t change regardless of what tools or trends surround it.

Finally, there was Joe DeTuno, the VP of product who said something to Dave at exactly the right moment. Dave had just joined a team that included MBA graduates from UCLA and was feeling the weight of not having a degree, so he went to Joe. Joe looked at him and said: “those people have real business chops, but you have what we need to move work and drive outcomes through the organization in a different way.”

That is not a small thing to be told.

What He Would Tell Himself at the Beginning

Stay curious, stay close to the problem, be passionate about the work, but don’t hold your ideas so tightly that you break when they don’t win, because they won’t always win, and that is fine.

“There’s no better satisfaction than delivering real value to someone. It doesn’t matter if it’s your idea. At the end of the day, if you stay married to the fact that you’re actually helping somebody - that’s way better.”

Best idea wins, and the best idea is the one that solves the actual problem for the actual human sitting in front of you. I love this one. That is the craft. That has always been the craft. And no matter how fast everything moves around it, that doesn’t change.

You can find Dave Masters on LinkedIn. If you’re thinking about a consulting engagement, a conversation about experimentation and product strategy, or just want to connect with someone who’s been doing this work with genuine integrity for a long time - reach out. Tell him I sent you.

And Dave, thank you. This was exactly the conversation I needed this week.

I first connected with Mackenzie Hughes the way most of us find each other in this world - through LinkedIn, through shared corners of the product and prodops universe, through the kind of conversation that starts professional and quickly becomes something more honest than that. When we sat down to do this interview, I was already pumped before we even started. She gives me a ton of hope for what’s to come in our space if we learn to balance human and the chaos ahead of us. Mackenzie has a way of making you feel like anything is possible - not through empty hype, but through the clarity she brings to everything she touches. She is one of those people who makes you feel seen and energized at the same time, and that is not a small thing.

She is the co-founder of GoldHue, a fractional product executive duo for Tech CEOs navigating tough markets. Before that, she spent years building out product operations at places like Electric and Instructure, earning a reputation as someone who thinks about the whole system, not just the parts in front of her. What makes Mackenzie different is not just the work. It is how she thinks about the work, and what happens when that thinking spills over into the rest of her life.

Because with Mackenzie, it always does.

Education and Professional Highlights

Co-Founder: GoldHue - a fractional product executive duo for Tech CEOs. They embed into leadership teams to solve the operational problems slowing the company down, so they can focus on winning the market.

Originally from: Long Island, New York (woot), where she spent the first 17 years of her life before heading to college and eventually moving through North Carolina, Massachusetts, California, and now Jersey City, New Jersey.

Education: SUNY Purchase - Psychology, with as many art classes as she could fit in.

Roles: Political campaign organizer, startup sales lead, customer success manager, product operations manager, and now co-founder.

Where She Came From

Mackenzie vulnerably shared that she did not know she was neurodiverse until a couple of years ago. Looking back at her childhood on Long Island, though, things start to make a lot of sense. She describes herself as the youngest of three kids in a close family, the funny one, the performer. She was the kid who kept everyone laughing while quietly figuring out how to navigate a world that did not always make her feel like she fit neatly into it.

School was hard. She daydreamed. She struggled in ways that went undiagnosed and unexplained, which meant she carried more than she needed to for a long time. But she also built something in that time - a close group of friends she has known since she was three years old. People she still talks to today, a collective memory that stretches back to pre-K and holds strong.

“Most people don’t have that.”

She knows it. That kind of continuity shapes you.

When she got to college, things shifted. She figured out how she actually learns - a theme I keep hearing from the people I have written about so far. She exceeded. She took psychology classes and fell in love with understanding why people do what they do. The therapy track was going fine until someone explained that it would require a PhD. Mackenzie looked at that road and thought, there has to be another way to help people on a bigger scale.

She started doing something that would turn out to be a preview of her whole career: she started working on campaigns. Not because someone told her it was the path. Because it felt like impact. Because it felt like it mattered. She got shipped to Colorado to work on the Obama campaign in 2012, running somewhere between 80 and 100 hours a week when Colorado was a swing state, and she describes it with the kind of nostalgic joy that only comes from surviving something that was completely, magnificently chaotic.

“It was nonstop. And I was running campaigns all over the country.”

Afterwards, she leaned into campaigns for Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. But she burned out. She tried PR for a minute, hated it, and then got a call from a friend about a tiny startup building something like a LinkedIn for workforce development programs. They were heading to an incubator in San Francisco and she asked herself if she really wanted to do this.

She said yes. Of course she said yes.

How Product Found Her

As we all know, San Francisco in 2014 and 2015 was its own kind of madness. Just picture Silicon Valley when you read this. Everybody had a startup. Money was flowing. The energy was electric and slightly delusional in the best way. Mackenzie dove in, worked her way through a few small startups, and eventually landed at WorkMarket, where she would stay for five or more years and where the real story begins.

She started in support. Moved to customer success. Got really good at it. And then got really frustrated by it.

“I couldn’t do enough for my customers. And I started getting interested in product.”

This moment is worth sitting with, because it is the same moment so many of the best product people I know describe. It is not that they woke up wanting to be a PM. It is that they kept running into walls on behalf of the people they served, and they needed to get to the other side of those walls. That restlessness is not a liability. It is the whole prerequisite.

She began setting up what would eventually be recognized as product operations - without knowing the name for it yet, without a job title that matched, without a playbook. She got certified in product management through General Assembly and found mentors. She started building the function from the inside out, which is something I know a lot of you feel as you read this.

And then there was a role at Electric, and the title finally caught up to what she had already been doing, and that was that.

Product Is a Way of Life

This is the part I most wanted to get to with Mackenzie, and she did not disappoint.

I asked her whether the way she thinks about problems at work has ever shown up in her personal life in ways that surprised her. She did not hesitate for a second.

“All day. Product is essentially thinking about the ROI of things and constantly making trade-offs in your head.”

She talked about how decisiveness has become a core part of who she is, something people in her life notice immediately. Her partner, her friends - they will all tell you that Mackenzie moves. She does not agonize over small decisions because she has internalized something most people spend years trying to learn: most decisions can be undone, redone, iterated on. The skill is knowing which decisions actually require deep work and which ones just need you to choose a lane and go.

“That is product, right? Prioritizing. Knowing what is important and what is not. Knowing when to move and when to slow down.”

I asked whether she has ever caught herself doing user research on the people she loves - she laughed and got immediately honest.

“So much so that it is a struggle for me.”

She described herself as someone who is constantly trying to understand why people behave the way they do. She thinks about it like a Myers-Briggs split: she is deeply thinking over feeling, and she knows it. She is always watching, always asking, always trying to understand the mechanics behind a decision.

But there is more to it than intellectual curiosity. Mackenzie is a Queer Woman and neurodivergent, and she is candid about the fact that this combination helps shape how she moves through the world. She did not grow up with a default path laid out for her, so she has had to ask questions that many people never think to ask. Why do people make the choices they make? What assumptions are baked into the paths we are supposed to want? What else is possible?

The hypervigilance she grew up with - that alertness, that constant scanning of the room - turned out to be an asset when she learned to direct it intentionally. In operations work, it looks like thinking through every downstream consequence of a major process change, leaving no stone unturned before rolling something out to a team. For smaller things, she lets go. She knows the difference between a canceled flight and a delayed one. She knows which gate needs her attention.

That distinction, by the way, is not just a metaphor. It is a craft.

What the Space Needs Right Now

Mackenzie has been thinking hard about this, and I want to give you her take in full because it is worth sitting with.

On the soft side, she posted something not long before we talked that captures it perfectly: We never had control of anything. Control was always an illusion. The skill that will separate the people in product who thrive from the people who panic is the ability to sit with discomfort, to stop reaching for certainty in a space that is designed to keep moving. That mastery, she said, is what she would tell every product and operations professional to invest in right now.

On the hard product skills side, she was equally clear - and this is where I want you to pay attention, because she is naming the gaps she sees across the teams she works with every day.

First: commercials.

Every product person needs to know four things about their product:

1. how much revenue it generates

2. how much it contributes to retention

3. what engagement looks like

4. whether there is a margin story

That is the heat map. Green, yellow, red. She uses an analogy I love: you do not run an airport by walking up and down checking every gate. You go to the board. You find the canceled and delayed flights, and you go fix those. If you cannot look at your product portfolio and immediately know where the problems are, you are not operating, you are reacting.

This matters more now than it ever has. As headcount shrinks and expectations rise, the product people who survive and lead are the ones who can walk into any room and speak the language of the business without needing a translator. That is not a soft skill. That is table stakes.

Second: the nature of software itself is changing.

Not enough people are thinking about it honestly. Mackenzie believes software needs to get more opinionated. The era of presenting users with a wall of options and calling it flexibility is coming to an end. People do not operate that way. What is coming, she thinks, is software that meets you where you are, that fits into your day rather than asking you to fit into it. Served-up prompts. Context-aware experiences. Products that know what you need before you have to navigate five menus to ask for it. If you are building B2B SaaS right now and your product requires a 45-minute onboarding call to explain, it is time to ask harder questions about what you are actually shipping.

Third: storytelling.

Be still my heart. Always. It never goes away. She has watched people who struggled to communicate transform when they are finally able to visualize what is in their heads. The idea does not change. The ability to make someone else see it clearly - that is the whole game. And here is the thing about storytelling that does not get said enough: it is not a presentation skill. It is a thinking skill. If you cannot tell the story clearly, you probably do not have the strategy clearly yet either.

On AI specifically, she was blunt. The problem right now is that teams are spinning up tools in isolation, without thinking about the ecosystem. Compliance issues, security gaps, fragmentation - these are the operational headaches nobody is accounting for. The consumption-based pricing models that most AI tools have adopted are not working for enterprise environments where usage is unpredictable and procurement cycles are slow. A little bit of research there for anyone looking at policy and procurement as we evolve - this pricing model does not work for everyone, and vendors are going to have to reckon with that.

Where does AI help her? Like many of us, Mackenzie is building things she could not have built before. She is creating custom project management systems for clients without having to contort herself around someone else’s software. She described tools like Lovable the way people describe something that has genuinely changed their workflow - not as a trend to perform enthusiasm about, but as a real answer to a real problem she had. She also noted that Lovable solves the storytelling problem for the people who need to visualize but have not been able to - and that is not nothing.

The People Who Changed Everything

Mackenzie wanted to recognize two people specifically, though I could tell she had more in mind.

The first is her former boss at Electric, Tara Goldman, who is now her business partner at GoldHue and her best friend. The moment she shared was about a raise - she asked for a significant one, and Tara came back with more than she had asked for, then told her: good job advocating for yourself. It sounds small. It is not small. Someone did something similar for me once, and it changed how I saw myself at work. It is the kind of thing that teaches you that asking for what you are worth is not a negotiation tactic. It is just honesty. And the leaders who respond to it that way are the ones worth following.

The second is her partner, Allison.

Allison believes in Mackenzie at a level that Mackenzie still seems a little amazed by. Her eyes lit up when she tried to tell me more. They met eleven years ago, and Mackenzie talked about her the way you talk about someone who has stayed steady through every version of you. It is my belief that the person you choose to walk this planet with is going to make or break almost everything, and Mackenzie was fully aligned.

What She Wants As Her Mark

I asked Mackenzie what she wants people to feel when they have worked with her, learned from her, or read something she has written. She sat with it for a second.

“I would love for people to feel like anything is possible. Being really excited. I want to leave people with that ounce of joy and excitement.”

In this world right now, where the news is relentless and the uncertainty is real and the pace of change does not slow down for anyone, she wants to be a small pocket of hope. A reason to feel something good.

She is the reason I felt compelled to write more of these spotlights of the humans behind Product in the face of AI.

Mackenzie Hughes is the co-founder of GoldHue. You can find her on LinkedIn and follow along with what she and Tara are building. Go introduce yourself. Tell her I sent you.

That pull is real. And it is worth following.

But here is what nobody tells you before you make the move: the skills that made you a strong PM will only get you so far. The transition from product manager to product growth manager is less of a lateral step and more of a rewiring of how you operate. It’s more about what you optimize for, how fast you move, how you hold your own opinions, and how much you are willing to let the data humiliate you in public while telling others it’s all good.

The dirty secret the role rarely advertises is this: That rewiring actually has less to do with you than it does with the leadership around you.

What Actually Changes?

A traditional PM is thinking about vision, roadmap, and the accumulation of customer value over quarters, or some time frame deemed acceptable by your leadership because of AI and the competition. You are the connective tissue between strategy and delivery. Your success looks like a product that holds together over time versus one that looks iterative and scrappy and malleable day-to-day.

A growth PM operates on a different clock entirely.

You own a specific part of the user journey like PQL, activation, retention or expansion, and your job is to move a behavior. Not ship features. Move a behavior. You are running experiments, reading signals, wack-a-moling ideas, and looking for the loop that nobody has found yet. The fundamentals of what PLG demands from this role are genuinely different from core product management. It requires a different cadence, different success metrics, and a different kind of relationship and buy-in to being wrong.

The mindset shift that trips most PMs up is this - you have to fall in love with the question more than the answer. A PM builds conviction around a beautiful solution. A growth PM builds conviction around a hypothesis and then genuinely tries to break it. Like, really pressure test it. Not everyone can understand and make peace with the difference.

The other shift is speed. Good growth PMs are impatient by design. They prefer iterating fast over placing long, methodical bets based on big strategy focus. If you are someone who needs a full discovery cycle before you feel confident moving, the growth function will feel uncomfortable... so either get comfy or reconsider going for it.

The Part Nobody Prepares You For

I see this across my customers day-in-and-day out. A lot of PMs make this transition with a lot of personal motivation and genuine tactical skill to do the role and still struggle. Not because they are not capable.

BUT, because the management system around them is not ready for what the role actually requires for them to be successful.

Growth product management is one of the most cross-functional, data-dependent, psychologically demanding roles in a product-led organization. It surfaces uncomfortable truths on a regular basis. It asks for speed in environments that are often slow or change averse. It requires trust from engineering, marketing, CS, and data teams simultaneously. And it produces a lot of visible failure, on purpose, as part of how it works.

None of that functions without grown-up leadership backing it.

The companies where this transition goes well, the ones where PMs actually become effective growth managers, share a few things in their management layer that have nothing to do with the individual making the move.

What Leadership Has to Do

1. Leadership’s first job is to give the growth PM one clear, stable outcome to own. Not a list of priorities. Not a shifting north star. Not conflicting asks to go broad, then focus, then see what works because, yay - experiments! They need to set decide on part of the journey, one metric - PQL, activation, expansion - with enough runway to actually learn something. I learned this from a former colleague obsessed with growth, Nichole, who drilled into me the importance of “The One Thing”.

   This sounds simple. It is not. It requires leaders to resist the urge to add scope every time a new problem surfaces, and to resist the pressure to change direction every time an experiment underperforms. The instability that kills growth PMs is almost always a leadership behavior, not a skill gap.

2. The second thing mature leadership does is invest in the conditions before they demand the results. That means data infrastructure the team can actually trust. It means giving growth access to the right cross-functional partners as real owners, not borrowed resources who disappear when their own roadmaps get busy, or their priorities are more important for OKRs. It means saying yes to experiments that might make the product look awkward for a moment, in service of learning something real. When you look at the companies and operators executing PLG at the highest level, their management teams made those investments early and consistently and not after growth stalled.

3. The third thing - and this is the one most leadership teams skip - is modeling the behavior they are asking for. If you want a growth PM who is disciplined about hypotheses, who shares hard findings without softening them, who changes direction when the data says to, then you as a leader have to operate that way yourself. Nothing trains a growth PM out of their best instincts faster than watching a leadership team override evidence with opinions and face no consequences for it.

The Emotional Weight of the Role

There is something that does not get talked about enough in the PM-to-growth-PM conversation. The role carries a particular kind of exposure.

You are accountable for a metric that is visible to everyone. Your experiments are logged. Your tests fail in plain sight. You are regularly in rooms surfacing findings that challenge your cross-functional partner’s cherished assumption - about a feature, a flow, a customer segment, a belief the company has held for years.

In a healthy culture, that exposure is energizing. In an unhealthy one, it is exhausting in a way that quietly grinds people down.

The growth PMs who thrive are not the ones with the thickest skin. I see them as the ones working inside a system where telling the unvarnished truth is rewarded rather than managed. These are companies where a failed experiment is seen as a learning, not a liability. The best ones are where a leader can sit in a review and say “I was wrong about that” without the room going quiet. Woo… I love saying that, and love remembering the leaders who said that to my team with confidence.

If you are a PM thinking about making this move, this is a question worth asking before you say yes to the role. It’s more than, “do I have the skills?” You probably do, or you will build them - it’s damn fun. The other question is “does the leadership here actually support what this role requires?”

If you are a leader reading this, that question is yours to answer first. The growth PM transition is less of a hiring or mobility problem and sometimes more of a leadership readiness problem - and the context for what PLG really demands from an organization makes that clearer than most job demands and descriptions ever will. I remember an organization where we brought in a growth person who exited in ~6 months. Their why: “You all did this because it’s the hot thing to grow in SaaS today. Not because you’re ready.” I saw that same person recently sharing their insights on a podcast and thought to myself … damn… how right they were and how mature they were to realize it so early.

The shift from PM to growth PM is one of the most energizing moves you can make in product. It brings you closer to the user, closer to the business, makes things feel more exciting and flexible, and drives metrics you’re able to see earlier than feature attribution.

But it needs a home. Build it one it can thrive in.

Underneath all of this noise in our space, one question keeps coming up in conversations with PMs, leaders, and teams I work with. With everything changing this quickly, what actually holds a product org together? What makes it work in the real world, and not just on a board slide?

The answer is not flashy and it’s not going to win any hype. But it keeps showing up in the data, in the stories, and in the companies that are quietly thriving.

Product operations is still the cornerstone. Not despite AI and the tool explosion, but because of it. And when I say product operations, I mean ‘good product operations’.

The data keeps pointing in the same direction

McKinsey looked at more than 400 companies and found that those with mature product operating models - the ones with the systems, practices, and foundations product ops usually owns - see 60% higher shareholder returns and 16% higher operating margins than those in the bottom half. They also report 38% higher customer engagement and 37% higher brand awareness.

So clearly, when the operating model is strong, everything else tends to perform better. This is evident in companies where the strategy lands well, everyone is aligned, teams know what they need to execute on and how long it will take to do it, and customers ultimately feel the difference.

The funny thing is almost every post and report I read still shows the same tension. Most organizations now have “something” called product ops, but role clarity is consistently the number one challenge. When it’s not done well, we’re just creating a presence without definition and that is not going to serve any of us well.

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We’ve changed because of AI, but we really haven’t changed.

In my conversations with customers, especially PMs and product leaders, one pattern is obvious. AI is no longer just a feature or a bullet point. It’s shaping how we build, how we ship, and how we make decisions. Like every decision from business outcomes to tooling to staff. Expectations on PMs keep stacking at the same time: be AI‑literate and AI-forward, be more data‑driven, move faster, stay lean, and still be accountable for outcomes, not output (but also be accountable for output because people don’t get product management).

The fundamentals haven’t magically disappeared from our discipline. Products still need to ship. Teams still need to collaborate. Someone still has to make sure data gets to the right people at the right time, that we’re not reinventing the wheel every sprint, and that product, engineering, sales, and success stay connected instead of drifting into their own worlds.

That “someone” is product ops.

As complexity increases, AI adds new layers, and tools multiply, the need for strong operational foundations doesn’t go away. For the smart ones it’s non‑negotiable. Product ops as a thing we need to do isn’t getting automated out of existence. It’s getting pulled closer to the center so teams can navigate all of this change without burning out or losing sight of what matters. That is the success of the PM, designer, and engineer, and the outcomes their pods are accountable for.

The work you feel more than you see

I’ve built product ops from scratch in a few flavors now. I’ve had fully staffed teams, shared ownership, and messy hybrids, done it myself (pain. pain. pain.), and the thing I’ve learned is this: the best product ops work is often invisible. When it’s working, no one calls it “product ops.” PMs and engineers just have what they need to plan and move efficiently. The data is there for execs and leaders. The process feels natural. Communication flows seamlessly across teams. The thing ships and delivers value.

That invisibility is a blessing and a curse. I’ve called it “the curse of competence” for years. It’s when you’re really good and people stop noticing the effort behind the ease.

Productboard’s data reflects what many of us already know: 93% of product ops teams drive cross-functional alignment, 90% manage processes and workflows, and 81% own tools and platforms. None of that is glamorous. All of it is essential.

On the ground, product ops is the team making sure customer feedback doesn’t die. Often it does in Slack threads, buried emails, and random JIRA tickets. They’re working with Sales and CS to design the systems that help teams stop arguing and start deciding, and maintain a single source of truth so product, engineering, sales, marketing, and success are actually looking at the same picture and the same customer pain.

What’s good lately is I see more and more they’re the ones helping teams adopt AI in a way that’s useful and ethical. They’re helping to put guardrails around experimentation so we don’t give up our credibility for the sake of speed.

Product‑led growth runs on (really) good ops

Product‑led growth sounds exciting on paper to everyone. Your product drives acquisition, retention, and expansion. Wooh! Sales, marketing, and success get to lean into higher‑value work because the product is doing more heavy lifting.

Yet, here’s the part we gloss over: that is an enormous operational challenge. If users can discover, sign up, onboard, and get to value without talking to a human, every part of that journey has to be designed, instrumented, and maintained. There is no “we’ll fix it live on the next call” safety net.

Product ops is what makes that possible in modern product teams. They centralize and standardize feedback loops so you know what’s working and what’s breaking as you scale. They make sure product data actually flows to the teams using it for planning and reporting. They create the consistency that lets you grow without everything fraying at the edges. This is not project management in disguise. This is building an operating system the whole company runs on, and as a former colleague of mine once said, “they are the peripheral vision for the PM.”

The AI paradox

AI will absolutely help us and it already does. Clearly, it can process massive volumes of feedback, generate drafts, and highlight patterns we might miss. But it also raises the stakes for those of us who are transforming to AI forward. Data quality issues become critical when you’re feeding multiple models. Integrations get messier as you add AI onto an existing stack. And of course, governance and compliance get harder when algorithms are doing work humans used to own.

The real challenge isn’t “Can we use this tool?” It’s “Does this make our system better, or are we just adding more noise?”

This is where strong product ops shines. They’re the ones who zoom out and ask:

• Is this solving a real problem, or are we chasing this month’s hype?

• How will we measure whether it’s actually helping?

• What processes and responsibilities need to change to support it?

• Who is accountable when something goes sideways?

My own experience keeps confirming something: adoption is almost never blocked by technology. It’s blocked by trust, skills, habits, and change fatigue. Those are people and process problems. Product ops is often the function that builds the systems and support that make new ways of working stick instead of becoming “that thing we tried for a quarter.”

Measuring what actually matters

There’s one question I hear all the time: “What does success look like for product ops?”

I’ve led and seen teams who anchor on hard numbers like time saved for PMs and GTM teams, reduced support tickets, increased adoption (shared with PM), or faster time‑to‑market. There are also those who lean into softer indicators like PM satisfaction, stakeholder alignment, and overall team health. The truth is, both matter for lots of reasons, and they all lead to a better experience for the customer.

The strongest product ops teams blend the two types of measurements. They track whether PMs are spending more time with customers and on strategy instead of constantly firefighting. They also look at whether customer feedback is showing up in roadmaps at the right time and influencing sentiment and renewal. They definitely pay attention to whether cross‑functional partners feel more aligned and less frustrated, or as I like to say more ‘ready’.

When product ops is working, you feel it ripple out. Sales and SEs get sharper on the product. Success teams get better, earlier, meaningful enablement. Engineering sees clearer priorities and a stronger line of sight from their work to business outcomes. And when the system is strong enough, leadership gets a cleaner window into what’s actually happening on the ground and stops bothering several people with the same questions.

I will say that none of this works without measurement. The PLA data shows that only seven percent of practitioners report high levels of automation, 19% of centralized teams have dedicated cross‑department liaisons, and 21% of product ops teams aren’t formally measuring their effectiveness at all. That last number stings, and it’s fixable.

Why this matters right now

I wish I could say every company fully understands the value of product ops. We know that isn’t true as some of that noise on LinkedIn shows me that all the time. Also, budgets get cut, teams get re-orged, and leaders change.

But I would point you to those who are actually thriving at this moment. It’s not the companies shouting the loudest about AI features or adding the most tools. It’s the ones with strong foundations and the operating models that let them move quickly, take smart risks, and adapt without spinning their people into the ground.

Product operations is that foundation when it’s got buy in from the top. It’s the steady heartbeat behind the product‑led story and the connective tissue that turns partners of the product team into one unit. When it’s done well, it drives the operational excellence that lets that unit scale.

I want to be clear that this isn’t about glorifying process, and I think most of us know those words have been negatively associated with product ops too many times. It’s about acknowledging that in a world of constant change, the ability to operate well is the difference between growing and slowly, painfully grinding to a halt.

What this means for you

If you lead product, treat product ops as a strategic multiplier, not a nice‑to‑have or a dumping ground for “stuff no one else wants.” Done well, it accelerates the entire org.

If you’re a PM, lean into the partnership. Product ops isn’t there to make your life more annoying and create bureaucracy. They’re there to give you back time and headspace so you can stay closer to customers and the problems that actually matter. That’s your job, so use what you can to do it well.

If you’re in product ops, keep fighting for clarity and keep talking about your impact. One of the best pieces of advice I got from a manager was this: sharing progress backed by outcomes is not bragging. A lot of us in the product world prefer to be the quiet doers. The work you’re doing is too important to stay quiet about.

And if you’re building a product‑led organization, please don’t convince yourself you can “add ops later.” The product might be the engine of growth, but operations is what keeps that engine running as you scale. The cost of fixing foundations later is almost always higher than investing in them early.

At the end of the day, product management has always been about connecting dots between customer needs, business goals and technical realities. Across those three, there are many friction points and sensitivities. We rarely own the people, but we’re responsible for bringing them together to build something meaningful.

Product operations does the same thing, just at a different altitude. It connects the systems, processes, and people that make great product management possible at scale.

In a world full of AI tools, frameworks, and constant change, that connective work is more valuable than ever. It’s too easy to get disconnected today with all the noise. While it’s not the hype role, the data highlights its value.

Now that it’s been here long enough, we can spot the difference in the outcomes or lack of them.

These are some thoughts from the past year and just what’s built up over time in my product heart. When I signed up for this adventure, I (like many of you) had no idea what AI would be capable of. So taking on a leadership role where there’s natural company change on top of managing external changes was a wild decision, but not one I would change.

Industry-wide, between October 2024 and October 2025, we’ve seen Gpt 4-0 upgraded to Gpt-5, with reasoning, accuracy, and more complex thinking abilities take the helm. The number of AI native companies rise from 30k to 33k+, with funding that went from $108B to $118B. And of course, the introduction of hundreds of LLMs sent us into a spiral. Building today is not what it used to be. BUT, this is the fun bit, if you embrace it.

If I can summarize the last year in this seat, I’d say I feel both immense pride, and a feeling of hope for the next generation of product people. Pride from what I’ve been able to learn and accomplish, and hope that there are enough of us who have been at this long enough that we try to help keep the humanity in tech through the core of product management: meaningful engagement through all of this change.

Empathy is not a buzzword

My life in product management has taught me to do three things well: listen to feedback, admit when something’s broken, and, when necessary, rebrand failure as a “strategic learning opportunity.” (Picture me doing air quotes.)

Empathy for us in product is really just being human in the face of change. This is especially true when the change means tough conversations and bigger ripples than you’d hoped for. Your team is not just looking for guidance on shipping features. They want reassurance that they’ll survive the next org change, or the next tool that promises to automate them away. Sometimes a hard decision lands, and what people remember isn’t just the message. It’s how you delivered it.​

Trust Is Real Currency

There’s no shortcut to building trust with your fellow leaders and your organization at large. The awkward icebreakers during company zoom meetings don’t count. You have to show up enough, share the tough stuff, and celebrate the wins without taking all the credit. It’s about having enough humility to admit what you don’t know - which, in an AI-soaked world, can be plenty - and inviting your team to be curious right alongside you.

I’ve found vulnerability is what furthers this trust across all types of teams - from your peers in leadership to those you manage. Yes, there are moments where it’s not safe to be vulnerable - I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But as with any good product heart, our gut builds that sense up over time, and more often than not I’ve seen ​it’s ok to let down a bit to understand each other enough to make space for trust which ultimately leads to that outcome you all wanted.

Stay Customer Centric, Even When It Gets Scary

Some days, the only thing keeping me and my team grounded is a really good story from a customer - maybe even a hard or weird one. The more the world shifts, the more precious direct feedback becomes. Nothing replaces that 1:1 and feedback with your customers. Even if the NPS verbatim says ‘please stop sending me surveys’, it’s real. And I know you’ve been waiting for someone to actually write in that little box after they clicked that detractor number. Sorry, most of us won’t ever see the verbatim ratio higher than non. ;)

My customers are learning right alongside me and my team, and there’s not been one who has not been willing to ​have a detailed conversation that feels cathartic at the same time for all of us. We’re sharing what our organizations are facing, we’re evolving the discipline of product management, and we’re being held accountable for more today than before. Understanding your customers needs, not just experience in product, but what they need to do to succeed today with their companies, is imperative.

Evolve Key Roles Wisely, embrace AI, and Share Across the Community

Over the past 5 years, we’ve seen a hard shift for PMs to move from feature delivery and specialist roles to truly owning business outcomes, such as profitability and customer impact, with increased expectations for cross-functional breadth and “full-stack” capabilities.​ Daily work has become far more data-driven and AI-augmented, with product managers leaning more on advanced competitive intelligence, workflow automation, and a mandate to drive both product-led growth and cost/resource efficiency.​

For Product Operations, we’ve absolutely moved from being seen as a tactical support function to more of a core strategic enabler, now focused on cross-functional alignment, business impact, and scaling workflows. This is especially true with AI-powered automation and standardization.​ I’m seeing significant adoption in mature orgs for this role. The interesting bit now is the core challenge of clarifying responsibilities as some product ops roles expanded to directly influence not only processes but also revenue and satisfaction metrics.​

This is where successful product teams cross over - that tight partnership and alignment with the PM and POps partner.

And yes, AI is automating everything that isn’t nailed down, and product jobs are evolving right beneath our feet. The trick isn’t to ignore it or panic - it’s to treat AI like your espresso machine: use it to work smarter, but don’t let it take over your personality. Coach your team to experiment with new tools, but anchor decisions in human judgment. When you don’t know something, say so, and turn the moment into a shared learning. Upskill together, admit when you’re stumped, and keep a glint of curiosity alive, even when things get awkwardly robotic and feels not like humans.

I always coach my teams to ensure our house is clean. That’s no easy task to do in product. But focus on that partnership, minimize tooling that fits your needs (not a tool that drives needs), and over-communicate as you work on evolving roles and your orgs overall. ​

You Are A Student in Product, Always

I don’t know if I can say this any simpler to leaders and those rising in the ranks in product today: learning never stops.

If you are not making space to learn not only from peers, but even more from your team as a leader, you’ll be behind. If you’re not making space to continuously learn new skills (which are now basic to the next generation of product teams) as an IC or relatively new manager, you’ll be behind. Plain and simple. Don’t get into this space if you don’t have the capacity to learn.

Feelings, Change, Mental Impact, and Home

Woo.. it’s 2025. Change isn’t just fast for all of us - it’s emotionally complex. Our teams aren’t islands and they’re feeling the weight of everything happening around us, from global headlines to local realities. The truth is, nobody’s immune to uncertainty or fatigue, and ignoring it doesn’t make your OKRs any more achievable. The call to action is to lead with a full sense of humanity. Normalize conversations about the mental load. Remind your team (and yourself) that “business as usual” no longer exists, but support does.

Prioritize mental health and acknowledge that the world’s shifts impact us all, inside and outside the product and tech bubble.​

One other very real thing is to remember that impact at work is great. Innovation, business results, dazzling launch videos - these all make for fun LinkedIn posts. But preserving stability at home, nurturing the people who matter most, and making it to dinner is the foundation for showing up fully, creatively, and empathetically at work. That’s the stability driving every product win, every risk worth taking, and every lesson worth passing down.

We’re moving fast, stumbling frequently, sometimes panicking, but always caring. That’s why we got into this product space to begin with. If the playbook changes tomorrow, so be it, but lead with humanity. Hold space for the tough stuff, and remember there’s no input as valuable as being present in that work-life blend with your teams, but especially with your loved ones.

But here’s the truth: those few lines on a roadmap? They’re the tip of an iceberg made of sticky notes, Slack threads, and so much emotional labor. Building a great roadmap is less about drawing lines and more about surviving the journey to get there…together.

The Myth of the Magical Roadmap

Some folks think a roadmap is a magical artifact, conjured up in a single brainstorming session with a whiteboard and a box of donuts. Well, it’s not. (Though I know first hand donuts do help. Shout out to you, Krispy Kreme.)

Behind every roadmap is a small army of product managers, designers, developers and lately, product ops folks, all wrestling with questions like, “What do our users really need?” and “How do we balance ambition with reality?” or “What’s possible vs. what’s preferable?” and, my personal favorite, “Did anyone actually bring in the results from that survey?”

Product Managers: Balancing & Trust-Building

Us PMs know the drill. We’re part visionary, part therapist, part referee. We’re the umbrella catching the (not so fun) stuff our leader needed to pass to us so we can have enough context to help our team see the why. We’re gathering customer feedback (sometimes from people who are very passionate, or angry, or have a lot of money, or all three of those), weighing business goals, and trying to make sense of a thousand competing priorities. We’re saying “no” far more often than “yes,” and sometimes we’re saying “maybe” just to buy ourselves time to figure it out.

And then there’s the storytelling - because a roadmap isn’t a plan; it’s a communication vehicle - sharing promises that may be broken based on market shifts, our business needs, and evolving customer pain. We’re not just building features. We’re trying to build trust while asking for forgiveness if things need to shift. No pressure, right?

Product Ops: The Quiet Powerhouse in Roadmapping

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have a special shoutout on what Product Ops teams are doing to support efforts for building roadmaps with their PM teams today. These individuals are rising as the unsung heroes who keep the whole machine running. They’re the ones turning chaos into clarity, making sure everyone’s working from the same playbook, and quietly saving the day when things get messy (which, let’s be honest, is most days).

Product ops folks are the glue - connecting dots, smoothing processes, being the PMs peripheral vision, and helping to make things clearer so Product Teams can focus on translating those “big ideas” into something that can actually be built.

They’re also the first to notice when the roadmap starts looking more like a wish list than a plan, or like the NYC subway map if dependencies start becoming a hot mess.

Where You Come in - You Awesome Partners to Product - and What it Really Takes

To double down, those few clean lines are not the result of a couple of product folks huddled around a whiteboard. Nope. They’re the outcome of marathon strategy and planning sessions that last longer than your favorite Netflix binge (and with far more plot twists handed to them by leadership - guilty as charged).

The feedback we use to build our roadmap comes from everywhere, and this is where you come in: you’re the voice of the customer. You know what resonates, what gets ignored, and what can help turn a “meh” feature into a must-have for the customers you’re speaking with every day. Your insights help us see beyond our own walls and into the hearts (and inboxes, and LinkedIn feeds) of the people we’re building for. If there are processes and systems set up to help the Product team get things out of your head and into their spreadsheets, follow them. If there aren’t any, call that out as an area for improvement and ask how you can help if you’re operating lean.

Then there’s prioritization. Imagine Survivor, but instead of torches, we’ve got Miro boards. And instead of being voted off the island, features get sent to the backlog. Your perspective on what will actually move the needle in the market? That’s gold. When assist by adding to DATA - not by bringing opinions - on trends, customer pain points, and competitor moves, you help us make smarter bets.

And alignment? Oh, alignment… my favorite word in this game we play. This is where your listening and communication superpowers shine. When you’re in the loop early, you can help shape the story, run your part well in the launch, and make sure we’re all singing from the same song sheet (even if we’re a little off-key). The big ask here is to be present when Product is finally getting time to enable you on what’s coming. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Product never said that” only to want to send that Gong recording out ;-)

Of course, humor always helps, a lot. Especially in a remote world. Memes, jokes, and the occasional “should I have gone to art school instead?” moment keep us grounded. When you bring your energy, your creativity, and your empathy to the process, it makes the whole thing a little more human and a lot more fun for us.

Why It’s Worth It (For All of Us)

Settling on those lines on the roadmap are hard. They’re the result of days and weeks of thought, debate, and, most importantly, collaboration across every corner of the business.

Every feature, every milestone, every “coming soon” is a little victory for the whole team. When GTM partners are in the mix from the start, the roadmap isn’t just a plan - it’s a shared story. It’s a love letter to our customers, written by a team that cares enough to do the hard work, ask the tough questions, and laugh together when things get rough.

Building great products isn’t easy. But when we build them together - Product, GTM, marketing, everyone - it’s not just easier. It’s better, especially for our customers.

So, next time you see a beautiful, simple, roadmap, know that your empathy and your voice matters. Jump in, share what you’re seeing. Follow the systems likely set up by Product Ops to capture all these valuable inputs. Be fully present and ask questions when Product shares the plan. And, don’t take it personal if all of your ideas don’t make it. Just help the Product team make something you’re all proud of.

Fast-forward a few months later to after I spoke at a product conference. In the sponsor hall there was Zeda’s booth, with Prashant smiling while chatting up attendees. I walked over and instantly we connected on product management and the space we both love to serve. Since then we’ve chatted about all the things - the opportunities we are lucky to have, the challenges we face, the thrill of winning and learning when we don’t, our favorite leaders and influencers in our space, life’s lessons, the culture we share and how to continue supporting the PM community from many angles.

It’s time for us to all get to know the human behind Zeda.io.

I didn’t intend on that rhyming :)

Education & Professional Highlights

Prashant’s LinkedIn

Prashant’s Company, Zeda.io - a B2B SaaS platform that centralizes user feedback, close loops, and manage roadmaps to keep you and your customer on the same page.

Born and Raised: Prashant is originally from Amritsar, India 🇮🇳 where he spent most of his early life. He ended up being the first in his family to move out of his city to pursue higher education and a career. Throughout his life, he’s lived in different parts of India and also moved around to Indonesia 🇮🇩 and Singapore 🇸🇬, seizing incredible professional opportunities at each step.

Today he lives in San Francisco, where he has chosen to settle down and grow both his career, and his company’s brand and future.

Education: National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar

Prashant shared that he actually didn’t have a great experience during his higher education years, and wishes he had had a mentor to guide him through the process. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re in the space of product, but this stuck with me because for us, mentorship is everything.

He also calls out that there’s a difference between the American and Indian educational systems. In America, students have many choices. In contrast, for Prashant, educational opportunities were largely determined by grades and ranks. He shared that he just needed to go with the flow, but felt limited in his options. So, driven by his passion for chemistry, Prashant chose chemical engineering as his major. Soon after, he realized that the field did not offer ample career opportunities, which made him reassess his career path. I think it’s safe to say lots of people are in the same mindset today wondering whether there will be enough opportunities given the times we’re in with such technological advances.

It’s all about mindset

One of the beliefs we share in common is that in the Japanese philosophy of ikigai. Put simply, this is finding the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at, and what you can get paid to do. If you have not yet read the book, I highly recommend it.

It should come as no surprise that Prashant believes his degree did little to help him build his actual career. He recommends the following in your higher education years:

“Focus on finding the intersection between your passions/interests and potential career opportunities. Identifying where these circles overlap in the Venn diagram of your professional future is essential. Doubling down on this subset allows you to balance pursuing work that you're passionate about while also considering financial stability. It's not just about working solely for passion or solely for money; rather, it's about finding that sweet spot where both aspects align.”

So what do we tell those who want to get into product?

Before I share Prashant’s advice, I want to say (once again) that product management is not for the faint of heart. I hold steady to the words above and those who have found it to be something they enjoy, while working on a product the world needs, and getting paid to do it, find the most success. If dealing with uncertainty along with the many perspectives of customers, investors, and stakeholders is not your thing, reassess :) Patience, focus, and empathy must be in your dna.

When asked about what helps people get into product he believes the best thing you can do is actually build something, and be curious throughout the process. Another piece of advice is to broaden your perspective while doing this. Learn about marketing, or even learn to code to help you understand what it takes to tactically build and actually launch a product.

Core Values

I think by now for those of you who have read my spotlights you know this is my favorite part. Here’s where we get to learn what drives the humans behind the product and experiences in our world. Prashant shares his three core values and how he’s leaned on them to build his company: Do the right thing, be humble and positive, and continuous improvement.

Do the right thing: "Integrity is very important to me.” During Zeda’s early fundraising phase, he shared he received an offer from an investor and verbally committed. The next day he received a better offer but upheld his initial agreement out of principle. He just felt it was the right thing to do then. This decision not only helped him maintain trust with his investors but also resulted in increased investment in subsequent rounds. He believes that upholding his word has always been essential to building lasting relationships and credibility.

Be humble and positive: Prashant believes that maintaining humility and a positive outlook has been key to all his interactions and relationships. This mindset has fostered strong connections, which is evident in the numerous individuals who expressed interest in investing in his project. He also thinks that staying in touch with past colleagues and team members from Zeda.io has been mutually beneficial, reflecting the enduring positivity surrounding our venture.

Continuous improvement: He believes in prioritizing both personal and professional development. Even though he’s got a hectic schedule (peep his social to see all the recent events he’s hosted in SF!) he dedicates time to enhancing his skills and staying updated with industry advancements through reading on a daily basis. He calls out that because he comes from a non-tech and non-business background that he’s actively worked on broadening his skills in coding, marketing, design, sales, and overall business management.

Getting into Practice: Product Management Roles

A first step into our world

Prashant's first step into product was at Paytm, which was both daunting and rewarding, marking a pivotal point in his career. Despite lacking prior experience, diving into product management was exhilarating. He spearheaded projects like Paytm QR codes and the wallet, which gained massive popularity nationwide. He also enjoyed collaborating closely with various professionals and learning leadership and teamwork in the midst of authority dynamics. Engaging in all facets of product development, from coding to marketing, was enriching (I’m sure you’ve learned he loves this by now).

After that, transitioning to Tokopedia in Indonesia was a huge leap, marked by language barriers and cultural adjustments. Professionally, it propelled him into strategic leadership roles, navigating a multibillion-dollar company and managing teams for the first time, fostering humbling growth experiences.

He did have his fair share of failure, as we all do! At Paytm he launched products that failed and crashed unexpectedly. At Tokopedia he shared that he needed to own the fact that his product incurred financial losses as well. Throughout all of this, he still remained positive:

“Mistakes were made just like in most startups: over-hiring, launching products with no demand, hiring and firing employees, and more. However, I firmly believe that making such mistakes is all part of the journey.”

And now owning he’s got his own company that SERVES PMs!

He notes that since establishing Zeda.io it has been a whirlwind but it’s the proudest achievement in his career. The journey of transforming an idea into a tangible product that has paying customers proves so much can be done when you focus on a problem that people are faced with.

Culture is something important to him as he continues to build his business. He shared that some of the earliest or first employees are still dedicatedly working with Zeda.io today. He also keeps close contact with many former Zeda alumni. In his view, the people and the team of Zeda.io are its most valuable assets. From the initial idea, raising funding, and launching products to acquiring paying customers, the entire journey of success has been made possible by the dedicated individuals of Zeda.io.

He learns something new every day as his CEO duties requires not just being and adaptable, but being in a constant state of learning. On the flip side, he’s expected to know everything. Doesn’t this sound familiar, product people?! Wearing multiple hats while navigating uncertainties has been humbling yet educational for him and he continues to be humble while figuring things out along the way.

The Impact of Others Along the Journey

Prashant’s co-founder, Vaibhav, is the human he wants to say thank you to the most today. Working alongside Vaibhav has been a truly enriching experience for him. He finds that he complements him well, filling in the gaps where Prashant may lack, leading to a highly effective partnership. Despite many differences in thoughts and opinions, they have managed to maintain a respectful and constructive relationship, which Prashant finds truly remarkable. Their different approaches and styles end up contributing significantly to their shared success.

He also recalls a challenging individual early in his PM days who was notoriously difficult to work with. The individual was especially tough on PMs and created an unhealthy space for them to work in while being expected to deliver on business results. This is the first piece I’ve written where someone is willing to share a not-so-great encounter in the journey. I will say in addition to us all knowing we each have that individual along our path, what we want to take away here is what Prashant learned: he backed his decisions with data and was resilient throughout his time in seat, contributing to who he is today.

Let’s Get Into Prashant’s Product Heart!

I’ve enjoyed getting to know Prashant over the last year but 100% wanted you all to get to know him as well. Here are his answers to the questions for all my spotlight guests:

1. What advice would you give to Product Managers today?

His response was immediate and insightful: “Don’t be a vanilla product manager." His reasoning behind this statement is clear: in today's age of information overload, many product managers tend to blindly follow popular product influencers, their frameworks, and solutions without critically evaluating them.

He believes this blind adoption leads to a lack of innovation and creativity. Prashant refers to the famous saying, "A fool didn’t know it was impossible, so he did it," noting the value of daring to challenge the status quo and think outside the box. He believes if product managers continue to rely solely on online content without prioritizing innovation, all products will eventually become the same. With this, he believes, there will be a lack of “Art”. 

2. What advice would you give to Product Operations people today?

Prashant advises Product Operations professionals to anticipate AI integration into their field, driven by platforms like Zeda.io and Zapier. Merely focusing on operations risks redundancy. Instead, embracing AI can optimize processes, automate tasks, and add value. They should evolve into facilitators, connecting stakeholders in product development. By expanding their role beyond operations proper, they can excel in an AI-driven landscape.

3. What grounds you as a product person? 

Prashant note that it’s the ever-changing nature of product management that keeps him grounded, noting stark differences in product development across diverse markets like India, Japan, and the US. This diversity underscores the constant need for learning, as nuances vary based on team dynamics, industry, and cultural demographics, reminding him of the breadth of the field and the ongoing journey of exploration.

He emphasizes the inherent interdependency in the role of a product manager, where success relies on collaboration with various teams like marketing, engineering, executive, and sales. Despite meticulous efforts, Prashant acknowledges the unpredictability of product success, highlighting the humbling reality that even with everything done right, failure remains a possibility. He reminds us, “You can do everything right, and the product might still fail!”

4. What do you remind yourself of in the hardest days in this space?

Prashant reminds himself of the impact his work can have on others. He finds motivation in the fact that every effort he puts is directed towards solving real problems and improving people's lives. He believes there’s a human angle in product management, understanding that his actions have the potential to ease someone's frustrations and enhance their experience. Knowing that he is contributing to making a tangible difference in individuals' lives is a powerful source of inspiration during challenging times.

5. Imagine someone waving a wand and allowed you to sit with YOU, at the beginning of your professional journey. What would you say to yourself?

If Prashant could advise his younger self, he would stress two key points. Firstly, prioritize being data-driven from the outset to enhance effectiveness as a product manager. Secondly, he would encourage diving deeper into AI, recognizing its substantial potential despite initial skepticism. He shares here that he himself was a part of the ‘AI is a fad’ crowd, now recognizing its immense impact and potential for all of us.

6. What do you feel people coming up in our space should spend time learning about or doing?

Prashant advocates for user engagement as the cornerstone of effective product management, contrasting it with the glamorized perception often depicted on Youtube (we’ve all see the perfect ‘day in the life of a PM videos!). He stresses the importance of understanding and addressing customers' real needs, asserting that true value in product management stems from solving genuine problems and ensuring user satisfaction. By prioritizing meaningful interaction with customers over mundane tasks, product managers can drive success and stakeholder satisfaction.

Lastly, he shares a few of his favorite resources that have helped him along his path:

• Inspired by Marty Cagan

• Transformed by Marty Cagan

• The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary, Alex MacCaw, Misha Talavera

• Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

• Course: How to Start a Startup by Y Combinator

• Newsletter: Lenny’s Newsletter

You can find Prashant on LinkedIn, or Twitter so please follow him and check out all the great stuff he’s doing over at Zeda.io!

Product management is an ever-evolving discipline that will no doubt continue to see many forms, ways of working, types of roles, you name it. Throughout all the changes we’ve seen, few things remain constant: one is the job of solving problems through building great solutions, and another is the job of finding ways to align while scaling delivery of those great solutions.

Both of those jobs have been held by Product Managers, and we know now that the latter is increasingly focused on by a dedicated Product Ops Manager.

While these roles may differ in focus and responsibilities, there is a huge parallel between their approaches to iterating on work and driving better products to market. Both product ops and product management thrive on a foundation of data-driven decision-making, continuous feedback loops, and a steadfast commitment to staying aligned with the needs of their teams and customers.

At the heart of both disciplines lies the importance of staying focused on data and feedback. Product ops professionals meticulously analyze data and insights from various sources, ranging from user feedback to performance metrics, to identify areas for improvement for operational processes and systems that allow product teams to do their best work. And we all know, product managers rely on user feedback, market research, and product analytics to inform their decision-making process and drive product enhancements and drive innovation. Data helps both roles ensure that their iterative efforts are grounded in hard evidence, leading to more informed and impactful outcomes.

Another parallel is how both roles monitor shifts in their environments. Product ops teams need to stay on top of what’s happening within their organizations, such as changes in team dynamics, organizational goals, or technological advancements. All of these thing may impact operational workflows and strategies. Similarly, product managers have to stay up-to-speed on external shifts in market trends, competitor activities, and customer preferences to anticipate evolving needs and capitalize on possible emerging opportunities. They both need to be acutely aware of these environmental factors to adapt their approaches and iterate on their work effectively to stay ahead of the curve, or sometimes even just on pace.

Alignment and transparent communication, in my opinion, are two of the things that sets great product teams apart from good ones. It’s critical that product ops and product management teams stay aligned to drive towards the same top level business goals and push impactful experiences out the door. When there’s a break in communication, enablement, process, or reporting it’s important for both of these roles to refocus on their shared business goals and align on fixing what is broken. Another way of saying, iterate based on the current state of things for the health of the unit. The same holds true for product teams who do not have product ops. Solid operational principles and agreements paired with building great product experiences will help take teams from simply handing product over post-production to actually driving business outcomes.

The only thing constant is change. So embracing this shared iterative mindset will be critical to driving long-term success, and delivering impactful experiences and products to both internal and external customers.

When I joined my last company, I looked at my employee number and realized for the first time in my career, I actually knew my employee number. I was taught to stay safe with the bigger, stable companies - the ones that provide for you as you grow in life - one that has a name and has been around a while. I didn’t know until I was leaving the large organization I was with before my first small adventure that you can outgrow a company, no matter how big it gets.

Before I go any further, I want readers to know that I don’t NOT like the bigger companies. They provide many learnings, opportunities, at times more stability, and open lots of doors. I wouldn’t be here without the ones I was a part of. My goal is to help those who are nervous to leave their comfort zone, and to help them see that taking risks in their careers may bring them bigger rewards than they thought were possible, sometimes at an accelerated pace via the smaller companies.

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The ‘dive deep’ things when you consider the leap…

When I made the decision to go smaller, I was the sole earner in my home with two young kids. Leaving a large company where risk with respect to company stability is generally less due to its maturity was the biggest hurdle to overcome. When thinking this through, you must do is your due diligence on the company and work on understanding what great startups and scale-ups look like. Proper research on funding rounds and investors, cash runway, upcoming company milestones, and founder track record are critical for you to do during the interview process.

If you’re like me and value a culture where you are a human building alongside other humans, you will also do your Glassdoor research, make some inside connections, and reach out to employees at various levels on LinkedIn who have been at the company for a meaningful period of time. As you progress in your process, talk to as many people as you can get access to. Think about your values. Do they align with the company’s values? The ones you can see on their site? Do their employees exhibit these values when you speak with them? Another tip someone mentioned is ask the difficult questions about transparency, autonomy, decision making, and yes, DE&I, and what it takes to get promoted or get a shot at the big opportunities.

Taking with you what you know

You may likely question whether you will be able to build for a whole new set of customers in a different market. This is not just because you’re going to a smaller company - it’s just what we think about as product people. Most of the time when you switch companies as a product person, you’ll end up needing to learn a new set of personas, needs and pain, market dynamics, and gain general domain knowledge in that space. You may or may not be in SaaS. You may or may not be building external products. Your imposter syndrome may or may not be elevated as you question all of this…

What you will bring with you is the product mind and skillset. Those two things are transferrable and will help you quickly get over all the time you’ll spend becoming a domain expert once you start. Part of the thrill of something new is learning something new while bringing to it something you love and are good at. They’re hiring you for a reason and they know you don’t know all the answers yet. Building great products, standing up product operations (or operations for the product team in general), and helping your customers get to their goals are not specific to any one industry or persona.

The People Things…

Product people are at the center of any company. If you are a product person and don’t feel that, then question whether you’re at the right place. Great companies today embrace our function to drive business outcomes and achieve bigger goals that go beyond product usage and delivering software. They understand the user experience with the product will make or break relationships and deals.

That experience I’m talking about goes beyond features you put in the actual product. Customers can feel when there’s disconnect inside an organization. The better you are able to build relationships with your partners across the business, the more likely you’ll be able to deliver a more solid overall experience that customers want to come back to because you’ll be on the same page, working towards that experience together.

If you’re solely focused on new features, you’re looking at one slice of the pie. Partnering with your CS team will allow you to understand pain points that impact churn and NRR when you consider what your product currently delivers. Conversely, if you’re only focused on enhancing current capabilities, you may be missing out on opportunities to gain new market share. Partnering with your Sales and PMM teams will allow you to understand where you can experiment with new capabilities, and bring both new and old customers along for the journey.

But all of that is difficult to do unless you put yourself out there and build solid relationships with the people and teams generating and keeping revenue. The earlier you do this in a smaller company, the better it is for you and your customers. When you’re in this sort of environment, it’s less likely that you’ll have process and/or systems in place to access all the data you need to make better product decisions. In meeting lots of people who love the thrill of smaller companies, I learned the mentality is shared - roll up your sleeves, and win together.

The access to customers

One thing I love hearing from my customers is ‘Sorry I was late due to a customer call’. Same. Access to customers for smaller, earlier companies is almost limitless, as long as you have defined your space well. People want to talk and share how you can solve problems for them. Do not deny them (and you) the chance.

Perhaps this is because there’s less red tape and processes as compared to companies that are larger. Maybe it’s because Sales and CS want you to talk to every customer as the product expert. Your investors may have access to a whole network you can tap into as you build something incredible. Or maybe people just really like your product and want to help you win. Whatever the reason, bask in the glory and the feeling that you are able to gain so much qualitative insight from customers.

If you’re an introverted PM, this is a wonderful way for you to spread your wings and get closer to problems and solving them. If you’re an extrovert, make sure you’re setting boundaries in your schedule so you can take your learnings back to your team with time to ideate and build. Customer time is precious, but it means nothing if you’re not learing and driving action from it.

The pace - buckle up

It’s no secret that you’ll likely put in longer hours (at least from time to time) at startups and scale-ups. The pace is something you’ll need to get comfortable with early on, but the best way to manage this is to learn how to establish your boundaries to keep your mental health in check.

One positive thing about the pace is that you’re moving faster, so hopefully you’re failing faster and learning more frequently about what’s working and what is not. This helps your overall team get product out the door faster and experiment in a more repeatable manner. Beware: the right environment needs to exist to allow for that last piece - experimentation is only successful when there is a healthy environment and stakeholders to support it. The earlier you can help influence and build a culture of healthy feedback and experimentation, the better the experience for the team (and your customers).

The opportunities after the opportunity

The last thing I will mention is that in a smaller company environment, there are often opportunities to fill gaps, or make something better. Raise your hand, because you’re more likely to get a yes if you want to do something to affect change in a smaller company than one where process is necessary to add something to your list. This probably goes without saying, but this shows that you are willing to go above and beyond to help move something forward, which does not go unnoticed by others in the company. This, combined with cross-functional collaboration, lots of customer time, and continuous learning while embracing the pace will give you more experience than you likely signed up for. Enjoy the ride.

Helpful links if you’re thinking about the move:

HBR - 3 Things to Consider Before Working at a Startup

Forbes - Want To Join A Startup? Consider Asking These 10 Questions First

Lenny: How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea

Jenny’s take on product ops is one that’s being embraced by quite a few organizations. Her view of the role is similar to mine - we need to operate like a PM to build it out, iterate, and ensure our work stays aligned to company vision and product team strategy. 

Jenny recently mentioned to me she is doing her first cohort class on Maven - The Product Ops Impact Accelerator  (starts on November 1, 2023 and runs for 7 weeks) -  and it’s meant for anyone who wants to go beyond the basics and ensure their role drives strategic value. For readers of my newsletter, you can take advantage of $200 off if you sign up by October 16, 2023 with the code EARLYHEART. 

I think it’s fitting to giver her some space to share her perspective as she works on being a strong voice in our community. So, let’s welcome Jenny to the party at the product heart and learn a bit from her on the product ops strategy stack. You’ll see some common names (lots of Chris’ in this article :)), and their perspective that’s led to a bit of her thinking…

The product ops strategy stack

Chris Compston was part of a new product ops team that quickly identified some low-hanging fruit. There were 15 product teams and 18 product requirement document templates. Cleaning that up would be a great first win.

His team consolidated everyone to one template. I connected with him about this experience. He reflected:

“We were satisfying everyone while pleasing no one. It was a huge challenge and the effort and time it took was probably triple what we predicted. The teams did not suddenly become more efficient (what a surprise!) and certainly were no more effective than previously. Customers would have noticed no change in the value they were looking for, the business felt no change on the bottom line.”

They were hoping for fireworks and instead it fizzled. He realized that they weren't strategic partners to their product team, but had just been reacting with small-scale tactical changes. The team shifted their approach when identifying the next opportunity. Their first step was asking better questions, like how to streamline documentation, improve collaboration, and get more value into the customers' hands.

These questions and the solutions that emerged from them began to shift product culture. As he described it, they "forced strong discussion that moved us from a ‘throw it over the wall’ waterfall mentality, to truly collaborative product teams focused on customer outcomes and aligned to the business." In other words, the product ops team became strategic partners to their leadership team. 

Become a value multiplier

Christine Itwaru shared on Lenny's Podcast how product ops can add strategic value to the organization:

“You need to be able to articulate the value to somebody who's heading up, essentially, businesses and saying, ‘Here's what this role is going to drive for you at the end of the day.’ The very mature product ops orgs end up having people that are strategic advisors to a product leader. Once you can show that this is what you'll also get as a result of me and this other person or me and this team doing [product ops], it ends up being an easier conversation.”

Back to Chris. He’s since become a product operations consultant and now approaches all his work with strategic partnership as the goal.

“My approach to any engagement is to communicate early the value this type of partnership can bring. That being the value to the customer and the business. What difference are you going to make to the organization, its customers and how can you impact the business on the bottom line?”

I recently wrote about how to tell if you're a strategic partner. Now it’s time to talk about how to become one. The fastest way to get there is to build out a product ops strategy stack. Defining the five components of the stack for your organization and continuing to adjust and align them over time sets the foundation for a strong product ops function.

Build your product ops strategy stack

The elements of a strong product ops foundation are the same as in product management – I always refer to Ravi Metha’s product strategy stack when looking at these elements. They lay out five elements of product strategy to help explain the difference between mission, strategy, roadmaps, and goals. 

Ravi explains the connection between the five layers well:

“Importantly, each layer of the stack builds on the previous layer…. We cannot have a company strategy without knowing our company's mission. We cannot have product goals without knowing our product strategy. Given this relationship between the layers, Product Strategy serves a critical role—it is the connective tissue between the objectives of the company and the product delivery work of the product team.”

By clearly defining your stack, you’re making the boundaries of what you will and will not do explicit. Looking back to the example above, having a framework to say "no" and focus in on value-add work instead would can help tremendously.

Below I break down the five layers of the product strategy stack with a product ops specific interpretation. While at the abstract level the stack remains the same as product strategy, each element can be interpreted specifically for product ops. 

Vision or mission

What is the product culture you're trying to build? Work with product leadership to clearly define what great product management work should look like at your company. Look at your company strategy and figure out what product habits are most important to make that succeed. Perhaps you need a more execution-focused team, or a team that is absolutely amazing at discovery. Maybe you want a lot of consistency across every team, or are comfortable with each PM doing things their own way. Just don’t set out to be great at everything – a strong product ops mission should prioritize certain cultural elements over others.

Department strategy

What is the overall product strategy you’re supporting? Product ops strategy should be focused on prioritizing the capabilities that the product strategy needs in order to succeed. Make the product strategy explicit to drive alignment with the product ops strategy you develop. An example: if the product strategy focuses on optimization of current user flows, then the product ops strategy should include making sure that data quality and experimentation infrastructure are able to support that kind of work. 

Product ops strategy

As the heart of the product ops strategy stack, the core strategy itself is the largest and most difficult element to build out. It’s the layer most likely to change as the pieces around it shift, and most likely to force the other layers to adjust as it evolves. 

How will you turn your vision into a reality? Every strategy is a hypothesis about how the mission will be accomplished. Your product ops strategy should map out a high-level path that explains how and why you will take a particular approach to achieving that mission. Cycle back and forth between the organization strategy and the product ops strategy, because it is likely that as one becomes more clear, it will force the other to shift and vice-versa. 

How does the product ops function fit into the overall division of labor? There is no single right way to structure how your product ops team gets work done. For example, some product ops teams use a "staff augmentation" model, where the ops person embeds on the team to help supercharge individual PMs. Others will try to build more shared processes and tools to increase consistency. One quick way to start defining your organization strategy is to define your product ops operating model. This can be a shorthand way to explain how the company plans to deliver product ops value. 

Roadmap

What user problems do you need to solve to achieve that strategy? A roadmap focuses on the user problems that are standing between you and your vision. The strategy you've defined helps you set which problems you're going to tackle first. Each problem you successfully solve then (in)validates your strategy, helping you know whether to stay the course or pivot.

Goals

How will you know that your strategy is working to achieve your vision? Your goals help you measure whether you're making progress on your mission. They should confirm that the roadmap is advancing the strategy, and that the strategy is advancing the mission. A good guideline for product ops goals is that they should be focused on whether the product management organization is becoming more effective. If your goals are all around launching tools and getting adoption of tools and processes, you may need to lift your head up to look a little broader.

The most important part is to get started

Crafting your first product ops strategy stack is an investment in having a more focused future.  Chris and the Product Ops team realized, through this experience, that having a clearer documentation strategy would've been hugely beneficial. You will be able to focus more on what matters if you set up your strategy in advance as well.

Another reason to build it out sooner rather than later is that it should be a tool through which you learn and experiment. You may discover one part of your strategy that doesn't contribute as much to your goals as you thought it would. The sooner you learn this, the sooner you can adjust.

This kind of adjusting is what Chris Butler, Group Product Manager at Google, calls aligning the product spine.

“I've often said that ‘strategy is now’. There isn't a difference between tactical and strategic decision making in my mind. You ideally need to apply the high-level strategies to every decision. This is a key part of the product spine. There is a very important aspect that the strategy should be applied fractally down the levels of abstraction from very high level to middle level (like roadmaps, OKRs, etc.) and lowest level (backlog). If you can't chain these things together, there is a break that will cause problems in the execution of the strategy.”

As you go through this exercise, walk up and down the stack to ensure there's alignment between each component. Every layer should connect to the other layers in a logical, cohesive fashion. If something doesn’t flow quite right, that’s a sign that the alignment is off and you will need to make adjustments. Eventually, the whole stack will click together, with each element supporting the others. 

The best strategies come via collaboration

The majority of my failures setting strategy have been in cases where I tried to do it alone. This has led to a lack of buy-in, nearsighted focus, illogical jumps in reasoning, and a general shortage of good ideas. The more I've collaborated on strategic exercises in the past, the better my results have been.

Don't try to do this alone. Collaborate with your product leadership, colleagues, and users. The more people you involve in your process, the better the outcomes will be. If you want an outside perspective on how to build out your stack, this will be a core component of the upcoming Product Ops Impact Accelerator and I'd love for you to join us to build out a great stack for 2024. 

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Hope you enjoyed Jenny’s perspective and guest post. If you like this article, you’ll really enjoy her newsletter as well – she shares a practical product ops specific article every other week. Subscribe here.

I learned Leah was going to be speaking at a conference in Edinburgh called Turing Fest that I was also on the agenda for as a speaker. I had been following her to learn all things PLG for a while, like many of you likely are, and immediately gasped and showed my husband who I’d be meeting in person. His words: “Be chill. Nerd out. I know you’ll be awkward.” He knows how this goes. I sent her a message on LinkedIn asking for her take on something and she replied in …. under 5 minutes? I needed to kill the awkward before I saw her live.

Day one of the conference, she tapped me on the shoulder as she passed by to get to the keynote, and I of course, awkward-girl waved. I’ll spare the details of the rest of the time in Edinburgh (aside from a shameless selfie when you hit the bottom of this article), but Leah gave me her ear, her advice, her perspective, and most importantly her time. No matter how old we get, the experience we have in times like these with people we look up to helps us see the stuff real idols are made of.

For those of you who don’t know who Leah is, she’s become one of the most sought after minds in the world of product-led growth. This strategy has disrupted traditional growth models over the last 5 years in digital and tech, and continues to be a focus for many companies as we move towards more experience driven, customer centric models that fuel efficient growth.

Allow me to nerd out as we dive into what’s made this no-nonsense, class act who she is today.

Education & Professional Highlights

Leah’s LinkedIn

Leah’s Website

Born and Raised: Switzerland🇨🇭. Leah lived in Vienna, Austria 🇦🇹 for 2 years, which she recalls was a sobering experience due to the abrupt change of scenery from her sheltered life in the Swiss countryside. She was thrown into (for lack of a better term) adulting, faced with responsibilities she didn’t have before in a city where she had no connections.

Education: “My relationship with academia is torn” were the words she used when asked about her higher education. Nonetheless, she focused energy on the following:

• Informatics (comparable to computer science) at a school in Switzerland, where they shortened theoretical study by a year in order to apply practice through an internship.

• Human Interaction Design studies from a University of Applied Sciences.

We’ll focus on her professional experience at :

• DeinDeal (Head of Product)

• Smallpdf (Product Lead)

• Jua (Head of Product & Growth)

• *NEW* Solopreneur at www.LeahTharin.com

• Founder and Seller of a Boardgame Cafe

Academia - what really stuck.

A question I ask guests for this series is how much of their college degree was put to good use. For Leah, she felt like a lot of it was pretty useless, noting that she can’t actively recall most of what she learned because it wasn’t attached to an actual problem in life she was able to practice with. Leah believes one of the best realizations was that she should focus more on how to work rather than what to work on.

For those in college or early in your career, Leah recommends the following:

“Learn how to learn and predict your performance. We expect young people to know what they want to do for the next 30 years in their careers when they definitely have no clue about it. You can mitigate this somewhat if you learn how to learn properly.”

I sense a little bit of a theme here with some product hearts, as my last spotlight on Josh McLaughlin also cites ‘learning how to learn’ as a critical skill!

Leah felt her time in school was heavily skewed towards achieving high grades instead of conflict solving - something she believes we all need to focus on as we grow in our careers.

Overall, she feels there are other ways to learn and become disciplined in your craft and career. Talking to people including your idols, and engaging with their world is one way. Leah notes that the way we learn is driven so much by what we enjoy, so finding passion is not just about the topic that interests you. Her example here is, of course, product-led growth. Some may look to her and feel as if she’s fascinated about the framework itself. Truth be told, she’s actually fascinated with the complex mechanics behind it and human behavior that drives decision making. This, she feels, lives in many disciplines. She notes that she wishes someone sat her down when she was younger and asked her a complex, yet simple question: “So Leah, what’s really driving your passion?”

Leah’s Two Core Values

Alright, we’re about to get a little real here. This, my friends, is one of the reasons I personally want to share more about the people behind the LinkedIn and social media posts. It’s easy to feel as if they have it all figured out. But it’s taken so much for them to get there between introspection, iteration, and execution.

Leah shared her core values are intellectual honesty and a growth mindset. The reason these are so important to her is because she believes she failed so spectacularly at them most of her professional life.

While discussing values, she also shares that her father is a pretty big influence on her life. He’s someone who operates with such honesty and openness with the world around him, is an extremely tough worker, never likes conflict, and never boasts about his achievements. He’s also selfless and lives for those around him.

For Leah, she went through some tough spots in her private and professional life where she vulnerably shares she bent the truth so she wouldn’t appear weak and therefore not deserving of affection. This, she felt was a complicated interplay between a not-so-perfect time in school as a child, and the good values she took from her dad. It influenced her far into her career and one day, she decided to face it head on and deal with it.

While she progressed professionally, and worked through her inner conflict, she still found it difficult to say the words “I don’t know”, feeling as if she couldn’t bear the thought of someone thinking she was clueless. I believe many of us know this feeling all too well, especially those in high visibility product seats. She, like many of us, felt as if she had to be an expert in everything. I think that’s a little thing called imposter syndrome. People either didn’t offer help because she hid it all so well, or they were maybe able to see through the charade.

She sums this part of our convo up by saying:

“This is a big problem in business. Your job usually is about enabling others, and being intellectually honest about what works and what doesn’t is part of it.”

She believes she made her own learning journey more difficult by not sharing at times that she simply did not know. It’s important for us to work on this early in our careers. Asking for assistance does not signal weakness - it actually creates trust and builds bridges, which increases empathy across an organization, and for the duration of your career.

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Entering the Workforce as Technology Boomed

In 1999, Leah joined a bustling tech landscape as a UX Researcher - a field where there was little to limited information available to learn from at the time as it was so new (ProdOps people, sound familiar?). They were actually called Webdesigners at her job, and they did everything from design, site programming, analysis, and marketing of the site/product.

Leah remembered when her love for understanding complex user interfaces surfaced. Two critical events happened: Google was something new she bookmarked and it subsequently led her to delete her Altavista homepage (yes, I too did a double take when she said Altavista). And, this sort of important guy, Jakob Nielsen, came onto the scene talking about information architecture. It made her realize how everything is probably broken on web interfaces, and she wanted to understand and do more.

DeinDeal, Head of Product

In 2011, she landed her first Head of Product role at DeinDeal, who were going up against Groupon. Between working on upskilling herself and the trials and tribulations of startup life (14 hour days, 7 day weeks, hyper growth, small spaces and several office relocations) she learned a lot in the 7 months before the company was sold. And Leah also decided to exit when the ink was dry.

Takeaways: Many of us who have gone through startup life know what the highs and lows and learnings are. For Leah, she felt she was both ‘on’ all the time, but also fell into a ‘hole’ of corporate slowness. In this role she was able to make a meaningful connection with two individuals - Christoph and Andreas - who ended up lifting her up about a decade later in life.

Smallpdf, Product Lead

You’d think after her experience at DeinDeal she might not want to do #startuplife again. But in 2019, she was back at it at Smallpdf, thanks to Cristoph. At about $3 million in ARR, and millions of users, they were looking for someone to kick the product team into gear.

By the time she got to Smallpdf, she had already founded three startups. Three! She was very comfortable knowing in this new operator role she was brought in for that she would not have to lead so many people, but ended up managing the core product team of 11 at some point. Though managing and building at the same time was stressful, Leah laid the foundations for B2B at Smallpdf and the desktop application.

Perhaps it was her ‘always on’ experience at DeinDeal that helped her married with her founder experience, but she was able to help keep everything together during massive growth and pains of scaling the business day-to-day. Quick stats:

• 22 to 150 employees in her time

• 50,000,000 MAU

• Core acquisition channels increased their efficiency over the years to convert active users into paying customers by almost 90%

• One of the top 150 websites in terms of traffic worldwide at its peak

Takeaways: “the biggest gift I took from Smallpdf was my phenomenal friends and leadership role models that showed me how to think about business at scale, without grinding through people.”

Preach, Leah. Success can be achieved while having fun, and treating people with kindness.

Jua.ai, Head of Product

Leah is currently the Head of Product & Growth at Jua.ai, a company that leverages new tech and AI to deliver some of the most accurate weather predictions across Europe and America. In her seat she notes she has been able to bring all of her experience together, to rebuild a product organization of highly technical individuals who will lead the company into a new era.

In her time she helped the team go from a bit of technical chaos to build using outcome driven processes, while establishing a culture of autonomy through accountability.

Leah thought she had her work cut out for her at Smallpdf with the amount of data and complexity of the business and landscape, but at Jua it’s at a whole other level. These elements bring new challenges on the cost and product sides of the business which in turn impacts growth. Today as we face challenges and opportunities AI will bring, she believes we need to leverage new tech to be as predictable and reliable as we can for our customers.

Solopreneurship - in her bones.

Leah recently shared with her followers that she will be embarking on a new journey, thanks to her experience, learnings, and the support of those around her (who you’ll read about later). As she works on exiting Jua, she ramps up her own practice full-time, offering advisory services to those seeking how to build and grow through the product-led lens. Leah can’t wait to be able to geek out on this subject and she’s finally able to give herself the freedom and space to be available for those who will no doubt benefit from her expertise. It’s a huge accomplishment, and one well-earned.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Leah’s story to me so far is her time as a founder. In 2015, she founded a brick and mortar store and cafe with an online shop. This she said was what she wanted to do to counterbalance her tech endeavors at the time. Driven by the desire to dabble in experimentation and a strong passion from her childhood of board games, she learned so much more than she bargained for. She jokes that if we think tech is difficult, we should give retail and running a business on the side a shot as well. Leah’s business was cash flow positive in two years, and she sold it after 7 years. I personally believe the following were her best achievements in this role:

• 4.9 rating on Google at the time of sale

• No employee churn in the 7 years the cafe was run

She chose to put people first: her customers, and those delivering the experience to them. She regrets that she never brought on a co-founder to help her out on the admin side of the business to take care of financials and deal with partners and distributors.

Shoutouts to these humans along her path:

Leah has already noted her father is a huge influence in her life, and that she has been given opportunities through several colleagues that have helped her become who she is today. Here are some other individuals she wishes to recognize and thank as she’s grown:

Ralph Gloor was her favorite math teacher during her school years. She said she’s very bad at math (same, sis) and didn’t know back then it was due to dyslexia, which makes it harder to comprehend complex mathematical concepts. Gloor was extremely patient, but with a no bs attitude and got straight to the point. Leah struggled in his class but he never made her (or any student) feel bad or incapable through his style and humor.

Stephanie Schoss, her CEO at IPM is who she admires for her extremely focused leadership style, business sense, and giving nature. This stuck with her long after her time there, and she leveraged a lot of what Leah learned from Stephanie by observing her later in her career when she started working hard at her imposter syndrome.

She learned a lot from Mike Pilawski, the former CPO of Smallpdf. Mike gave her the tough love and guidance Leah needed to understand strategy and how it intertwines with growth and product. He also gave her resources she refers to as ‘spot on’ that have helped her over the years.

Finally, some of you may know the name Elena Verna, or as Leah refers to her, “my friend, WHOOP buddy (fitness watch), and absolute advising beast around growth”. She credits her for teaching her how to run her own show and for paving the way for women like her (and so many others), through her work, presence, and impact on the product & growth community. She shared that Elena is always there when she needs someone, makes her laugh, and that they’re a tiny bit competitive with one another. A little friendly competition as we push past our boundaries never hurts!

Diving into Leah’s Product Heart

With each spotlight, I ask my guest to answer a few questions I hope will help both aspiring product hearts start their journey, and experienced ones think about theirs.

Here are Leah’s responses in her own words:

1. What advice would you give to Product Managers today?

Leah: “Product Management is an incredibly diverse field and one where you have to put your learning resources together for yourself. Forget academia or the “one” resource that gives it to you. It doesn’t exist. Learn as little as you need to gather practical experience… fail fast and find your preferred way of learning. For me it’s newsletters and podcasts. Substack, Beehiv, Medium they are all great resources if you just look into the right direction for an absolutely laughable price compared to what you can learn.”

By the way, Leah also has her own Substack in case you have not yet subscribed. Make your way over there.

2. What advice would you give to Product Growth professionals today?

Leah: “Understand the connection to retention and monetization. Specifically in growth you need to understand that growth is not just bringing people in. It’s about bringing the right people in and in the case of PLG, how to connect them as fast as possible to value and the famous “Aha” moment. You can only understand this wholly if you understand what your product does and how.”

3. What grounds you as a product person?

Leah: “The fact that I’m mostly wrong, and that’s ok. When I’m right, I compensate with enough upside to make up for it :).”

4. What do you remind yourself of on the hardest days in this space?

Leah: “Life is much more than the amount of followers or clients you have. Once you lose a friend or family member you’ll be grounded fast.”

5. Imagine someone waved a magic wand and allowed you to sit with YOU, at the beginning of your professional journey. What would you say to yourself, Leah?

Leah: “Stop upholding this ridiculous picture of yourself. Be yourself unconditionally. You deserve to be loved and if you put the work in, you’re actually quite good at what you do.”

6. What do you feel people coming up in our space should spend time learning about or doing?

Leah: “Strategy, business casing, and financials. If you don’t understand how a company fundamentally works and you just create “fancy” products you’re missing out. You can’t think big, you don’t understand what effects your changes have in a company and you keep yourself as a result artificially small.”

My hope with each spotlight I share with all of you is that it allows you to gain a bit of perspective you didn’t have before. Each of these individuals have given us a bit of wisdom through some vulnerability and reflection.

To Leah: I know I speak for your followers when I say a sincere thank you for your time and for what you’ve given our product community. Keep being real with all of us.

Since then, I’ve watched him become another valuable resource for our community, sharing learnings and advice & tips for people interested in learning about Product Operations, while working on his next professional adventure. I asked Josh if he’d like to participate in this project because during the time we exchanged messages and met, he reminded me of the power and impact we have as former PMs who want to create a better space for product people to thrive in.

So, let’s dig into Josh’s story.

Background, Education & Professional Highlights

LinkedIn

Originally From: A small town in Nebraska. Josh moved to Omaha when he was 16 and finished high school there. He did a year of college and headed off to Arizona by himself with everything he could fit in his car. The intent was to experience Arizona for a short time but with no timeline in sight, he ended up calling it home with his wife and children.

University: A year at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, then part-time college a while after in Scottsdale and then Western International University.

Preference, company size: 250-500 people (but open-minded).

Preference, work environment: Remote at this stage in life, to be present for that beautiful family above.

Companies that attract Josh: Companies who entertain or genuinely help users. If a company works to improve their user’s life and surroundings, he appreciates the work more. He also loves collaborating with smart, talented humans who he can always learn something from.

Roles we’ll dive into:

• Website Manager

• Digital Marketing

• Product Manager

• Product Ops Manager

• Freelancer

A non-traditional approach to higher ed

When Josh completed his first year at Omaha, he moved to Arizona with the thought in his mind that he’d qualify for in-state tuition and stick it out there for a bit. He was initially interested in architecture, but gave it up after working at a small business for a while, which helped him decide to pursue business and e-commerce when he was to resume college.

Josh felt compelled to focus on a combination of real-life experience and academia at the same time. So he worked full-time and took night classes, applying what he learned during the day at work to his classes at night.

“I essentially did the whole college years backwards compared to how most people approach it. But I believed at the time (and I still do) that getting real-life experience in addition to academics was a great balance of acquiring street smarts and book smarts simultaneously. In other words, I was able to apply what I learned the next day in my job and bring examples from work into the classroom. For me, this was a great way to get value from both in ways I hadn’t initially expected. Even if it was simply understanding concepts from a distance.” 

Though this seems like a non-traditional approach to achieving higher education, we are seeing it more and more these days for several reasons. As parents we often wonder what will set our children up for success if traditional college degrees are no longer held in the same regard. This approach may be a great one to consider as the world shifts and tech continues to rapidly evolve every industry.

Learning how to learn and self-awareness - critical skills

Josh believes that having a learner’s mindset, an open mind, and being curious were as important back then for getting good grades as they are today for identifying new ways to solve user and business problems as product people. His meta-learning skills were achieved during this time. He also believes college is a time of significant growth, both academically and personally. It’s a time to develop social skills and learn more about yourself. “Learning doesn’t stop with graduating from school. So the more you can optimize your ability to learn, hone your curiosity, and leverage these to your advantage, the more they will serve you.”

As his career progressed into both Product Management and Product Ops, he leaned in heavily to these two skills. One of the books Josh recommends, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly, discusses the concept that everything is in a state of becoming - rendering all of us as “newbies” in this ever-evolving technological world. In this we learn that progress is a constant force and everything is perpetually moving forward. The book suggests there’s no escaping the feeling of being a newcomer and it's a sensation we’ll all feel over and over again. Embracing this reality and optimizing how we learn will be our most effective strategy in a world that never stops moving ahead. So the more we can optimize our ability to learn, hone in on curiosity, and leverage these to our advantage, the more they will serve us.

What about those seeking a route without college?

For those seeking to get into Product Management without going to college, Josh advises that the best way to learn is by doing. Probably not a surprise to read at this point!

When we immerse ourselves in tech and try different products, taking mental notes and thinking critically about why creators or product managers have made decisions, it helps us get into a different (and the right) mindset. He also believes people may have an easier time getting into product-adjacent roles like marketing or customer support or sales. The reason is because these roles teach you how to gain empathy, develop effective communication and problem solving skills, grow your analytical chops, collaborate across teams, and adapt to change in businesses and the market.

Josh’s Core Values

My favorite part of these spotlights may be this section. They help us understand what, at someone’s core, makes them who they are and what drives their decisions.

Josh’s two core values:

1. Always find balance - Josh feels he’s consistently the best version of himself when he has his personal and professional lives in balance, citing he knows it’s very easy to get swept up with work tasks at the expense of personal ones.

   He lives and dies by his calendar but he now carves out time to tackle personal items and defends it so ruthlessly to make sure he has a balance in his life. In the past, pushing himself to his limits has had diminishing returns and he has seen the quality of his work slip as a result. In order to be his best at work, he needs to be his best at home. I love when people come to this realization! Some of the most impactful strides in Josh’s career have come alongside the moments he’s struck the right balance at home.

2. Do more, say less - For this core value, he recalls two quotes some of us may know:

   “Those who know don’t talk, those who talk don’t know.” - Chapter 56 in the Tao Te Ching. Josh notes he prefers to let his actions define his character, not his words. If people have to go around telling others how great they are, they’re probably not so great after all. Related to this is the next quote, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker. In product, finding the right solution is hard enough. As professionals we find ourselves pushing to deliver a solution in the fewest number of iterations, always reaching for perfection in the first version. However, he believes we can save time in the long run and reduce waste if we instead slow down and validate that our solution is the right way to move forward, even if incrementally.

   Another quote that came to my mind up while learning his story is “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” - Stephen Covey. Josh he believes people fall into this trap often - trying to have others see their points first. By investing the effort to grasp context, data, and nuances of the situation, you’ll set yourself up for success. Josh notes: “Throughout my career, there have been instances when my decision to slow down, apply critical thinking, particularly when dealing with third parties or external vendors, has led to identifying oversights and avoiding costly assumptions.”

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Career Deep Dive

Josh’s transition to knowledge-based work happened when he was offered the role of website manager from the owner of the warehouse he worked in. He was grateful for this opportunity as it gave him a glimpse into the inner workings of go-to-market, which then triggered his creative side and pushed him to want to enhance the user experience and streamline discoverability of their products. He notes that at that time he did not realize this role would set him up to explore different avenues that ultimately led him to the world of Product Management. Before we dive into that world, I’ll share that Josh is grateful for the CEO who took a leap of faith by entrusting a warehouse manager with this critical role.

He stepped into digital marketing for a while, where he learned skills like A/B testing, reporting, analytics, and deeper go-to-market strategies. This was another role that set him up for more to come as a PM. Funnily enough, my first guest for this series happened to kick off her career in marketing, and believes so many of those skills are what led her to become a better PM.

And the magic moment. Josh remembers how he became a PM so vividly. Like many of us, he was already doing the role and didn’t know it existed. This moment needs to be seen through Josh’s words:

I was managing an ecommerce site for what Marty Cagan would describe as a “feature team.” I reported up through Marketing but worked closely with IT who contracted out our development efforts to an external team of developers. Our company merged with another that excelled at software development, and resembled what Cagan would refer to as an “empowered product team.” I moved to the Product team as a Product Manager. I learned everything I could about the role and was hooked. I found my calling and I’ve been passionate about the craft of product management ever since.

Once the heart of a product person starts beating… you know the rest.

Later, Josh recalls reading about Product Operations from a piece I wrote in my earlier days in the space, when the role was quickly emerging. He believed the role might alleviate growing pains their team was experiencing, and shared the article with their CPO and Director. Though they were not yet ready to formalize the role, some years later they asked him to assume their first ProdOps manager role, which he initially declined as he was not yet ready to leave his role as a PM.

Callout from the author here: The amount of times I heard this struggle! And, the empathy I feel for those who have been in this seat. ProdOps was so unknown, and it was so natural to be nervous to give up something we all knew and loved, but I have found no one who has regretted it. Those of you reading who are on the fence, let this inspire you.

Josh realized shortly after declining the seat that he wanted to share his passion for product with his team in new ways. So he sat with his leadership, aligned on the role and officially accepted the chance to lead their Product Ops function. I will, again, let his words tell you all why this felt so special:

Creating the Product Ops function stands out as a significant accomplishment in my career, filling me with immense pride. It represents the culmination of numerous experiences that preceded it. Reflecting on my journey, I like to think it closely resembles the classic Hero’s Journey narrative. At first, I resisted the calling, but eventually, I fully embraced it. Now, it feels unimaginable to picture my life without having made that pivotal decision.

I got all the feels when I heard that. I bet some of you are feeling it too.

Major learning along the way

Thinking back, there’s a moment where Josh realized he made a misstep that could have been avoided. Before I dive in, it’s important to note that what drove this decision was his belief in transparency and trust with the team, something that is a non-negotiable in the product world if you want to build a world class product team.

Back to the misstep. Josh dove into his ProdOps role head-on. He did tons of research with the team to understand their pains and gather feedback to help him determine where to place his bets first. I love this because I believe this is what sets you up to build Product Ops as a product! Through his research he realized there was a sense the team lacked influence in strategic decision-making for the product. Josh shared the results with the broader team, without first giving leadership the opportunity to process and discuss. The information was based on objective data vs. personal opinions, but it still hit leadership in a no-so-pleasant way, since they were a bit surprised by what was shared.

As the company shifted, so did leadership (he notes they were going through changes post-acquisition). It worked in his favor that new leaders sought the information he had on hand in an effort to make a positive impact quickly. Still, he learned it’s just as important to not surprise your leaders as it is for them to not surprise you.

What’s he up to today?

What’s so interesting about our Product Ops space is the mighty community. There is such a strength in it from those who are working hard to help others understand it, and to help each other. By luck, Josh was connected to another ProdOps enthusiast who took a chance on him and asked if he’d help with a project for one of their clients. It was because of this and the success he achieved on the project that Josh jumped into the world of freelance product work, which he assumed full-time for a while.

Today, even though he is back in the mix full-time at a new company, he still works on the side as a product and product ops consultant and advisor across different industries. He loves being able to learn something new from each of them, gaining exposure to many new areas, and learning more about himself on this part of his journey. Freelancing forces people to step outside of their comfort zones, ask questions, and pay attention to details. Not to mention it shows them how to build a business, generate their own leads, and market themselves. Proving he can do all of this with experience he gained along his career has been a huge success story in Josh’s book.

Invaluable Resources

During his time above, Josh leaned on several resources many of you have found, or will find valuable:

• Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan

• David Allen’s Getting Things Done (productivity system)

• Good to Great by Jim Collins

• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

• Shreyas Doshi’s twitter feed, LinkedIn, and YouTube videos

• John Cutler’s twitter feed, LinkedIn, and substack newsletter

• Lenny’s newsletter and podcast

• Marty Cagan’s Empowered and SVPG articles

• Reforge

• Rocketship.fm (particularly the episodes with Bob Moesta about Jobs to be done)

• This is Product Management Podcast

• Toresa Torres (any video he could find with her, her blog, and eventually her book Continuous Discovery Habits)

So much impact in his life has come from these people who he says he’ll probably never meet. Go ahead and add them to your lists :)

Giving Thanks…

I don’t need to belabor this… we are nothing without learnings and support from those around us. Here’s who Josh wants to give special thanks to:

His wife, Jessica: For being his rock of stability at every stage of his crazy ride.

Andrew Krause: A fellow PM who became his manager who then became a close friend, confidant, and a fellow hot sauce enthusiast.

Jenny Wanger: Originally stranger in his online network who took his call and helped pivot his career towards solopreneurship.

Bill Davis: Another stranger on the Internet who became a kindred spirit for Josh of all things Product Management and Product Ops.

Josh also notes all of his managers who have hired or inherited him are to be thanked. They gave their time and effort to help develop his skills and abilities and he now calls some of them lifelong friends.

Getting back to the Product Heart, in Josh’s words:

With each spotlight, I ask my guest to answer a few questions I hope will help both aspiring product hearts start their journey, and experienced ones think about theirs.

Here are Josh’s responses in his own words:

1. What advice would you give PMs today?

   Josh: “Immerse yourself:

   • Seek out and read books and articles about product management and related topics

   • Attend conferences and meetups

   • Talk to other PMs and learn from their experiences (Hint: Reach out to them on LinkedIn and ask to chat. You’d be amazed at how helpful this can be!)

   • Take online courses or workshops

   • Look at the products you use and try to think of the decisions that went into bringing them to market

   • Stay open to new roles and opportunities - you never know where they might lead you!

   The more you immerse yourself in the craft of product management, the better you will become at it. And the better you are as a PM, the more rewarding your career will be.”

2. What advice would you give to Product Operations people today?

   Josh: “Avoid getting caught up in a strict definition of the role and instead focus on developing the model that works best for their unique situation.

   • Product Ops can be a challenging role because of its variability and it has a shorter history than many other roles, making it difficult to shape where its boundaries should be drawn. Similar to the PM role, if you find your idea of the Product Ops work you’re passionate about doesn't match your current situation, you can find another opportunity where it’s a better match. 

   • Follow your Product Ops peers and these thought leaders in the space.

   • Cultivate these qualities in yourself and your team.

   • Get involved in the community, someone is in a situation now that you were once in, share your experience so they can find it!

   • By actively sharing our experiences, both triumphs and obstacles, we can collectively contribute to the growth and advancement of this role. Let's avoid overthinking and instead focus on the power of sharing knowledge and experiences.”

3. What grounds you as a product person? 

   Josh: “Spending time outdoors and engaging in exercise. Whenever these two components are absent from my routine, I noticeably begin to feel out of balance. I can’t stress enough the remarkable benefits I have personally experienced by simply going for a short walk while listening to something funny. It serves as an excellent way of disconnecting from the monotonous daily routine, reminding me not to take myself or most situations too seriously.”

4. What do you remind yourself of in the hardest days in this space?

   Josh: “I try to put things into the perspective that at the end of the day, we’re all still learning. Product development is about observing, testing, and adjusting. It’s about finding creative ways to solve problems. And while some of us have different levels of experience, time in a particular field, or studied in different disciplines, we all get the chance to learn something new about ourselves when times are difficult. Often the situations that make us most uncomfortable, the ones we’d rather avoid, hold the lessons we need to learn. Embracing this idea and leaning into the discomfort rather than running from it is usually the fastest way to overcome it.

   If you do find yourself stuck, it’s important to remember there’s a really great, large, and supportive community of product people just like you willing to offer their advice. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them - most are happy to chat if you just ask.”

5. Imagine someone waved a wand and allowed you to sit with YOU, at the beginning of your professional journey. What would you say to yourself?

   Josh: “Don't stress over having everything figured out. Having the vantage point of looking back, I now realize that there are numerous paths to reach the same outcome, some of which may seem unconventional, counterintuitive, and hidden from your current perspective as someone just starting out. Instead of obsessing over checking certain boxes, it can be beneficial to embrace the experience and let it guide you. This approach can lead you to the same destination with much less stress. I'm not dismissing the importance of setting goals and making plans to achieve them. What I'm suggesting is that sometimes you need to pay attention to the signals life sends your way and explore them, even if they don't appear to align with your intended direction in the moment. The thing is, you can't see the full picture yet. This advice might not resonate with everyone, but personally, it would have spared me a lot of unnecessary worry and anxiety.”

6. What do you feel people coming up in our space should spend time learning about or doing?

   Josh: “Foundational skills and first principles that are universal and are still present beneath the surface of today’s trending topics. For product professionals, these foundational elements are things like: 

   1. A user-centric mindset

   2. Agile methodologies

   3. Product lifecycles

   4. User research & validation

   5. Product strategy

   6. Data-informed decision making

   7. Effective communication

   8. Business acumen”

Huge thanks to Josh for taking the time to share his journey with us from Product Management to Product Operations, and for all he does for the community!

You can find Josh and follow along with him here: https://linktr.ee/joshmcla.