It was the morning after the largest comeback in NBA finals history. New York had been down by double digits. Most people had given up. And then, in very New York fashion, my team did not. I was working in Claude that night, looked up at the right moment, and my kids somehow slept through what happened next in my house (and again a few nights later because yes, we took the whole thing).

Christian was watching game four as well. We talked about the city erupting, about friends posting videos from across the river with their phones out the window so you could hear the celebrations from New Jersey. I had family at the Garden and felt so much pride. And what struck me, even before we got into the interview, was how much joy there was in that shared moment. Two people from very different places, both rooting for the same city to win.

There is something about watching a place you love succeed that is its own kind of homecoming. That feeling turns out to be at the center of everything Christian Idiodi does.

He is a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, co-author of TRANSFORMED, host of the SVPG podcast Product Therapy, and one of the most respected voices in product management anywhere in the world. He has built more than two hundred products across multiple industries. He has coached teams at Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Squarespace, and was a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

And he is the founder of the Innovate Africa Foundation, which brought more than one thousand product leaders from thirty-one African nations to Lagos for the inaugural Inspire Africa Conference in September 2023.

He was born in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.

This is his story. And it is not like any other in this series.

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Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG). Coach, advisor, and trainer to product leaders and teams globally.

Books: Co-author of TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model with Marty Cagan and SVPG partners. Host of the SVPG podcast Product Therapy.

Companies shaped: CareerBuilder, Merrill Corporation. Clients include Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Squarespace, and many others.

Teaching: Adjunct professor of product management and innovation, Virginia Commonwealth University. Mentors two student-led startups annually through SVPG.

Foundation: Founder, Innovate Africa Foundation. Chairman. Inspire Africa Conference, Lagos, September 2023: 1,000 plus product leaders, 31 African nations. Scholarship fund established for attendees.

Education: B.A. Psychology and Community Building, Emory University. Dual MBA and MPM, Keller Graduate School of Management.

Originally from: Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.

Where He Came From

Christian grew up in Calabar intending to cure disease. Not metaphorically. His childhood goal, the thing he told his mother over and over, was that he was going to cure all diseases. He wanted to go into virology. He hated what malaria did to people. He hated HIV. He saw suffering as a problem to be solved and medicine as the most direct path to solving it.

His family believed, philosophically, that a child should complete their first degree within their own culture. America was not initially a part of the plan.

Then two things happened. He was accepted into a gifted program at school, a kind of United Nations initiative for students with the highest scores, which offered direct placement to universities in the US. Through this program America became a real option.

Still, he was not convinced. He visited Harvard in the winter. He described it as the most miserable visit of his life. Cold air coming in one ear, out the other, eyes running. He told his parents: “America is cold. I am not going.”

His father visited a friend in Atlanta, noticed the weather was warm, and came back having spoken to people at Emory University about his son. Someone matched his Harvard scholarship offer. That is how Christian ended up at Emory, and the United States.

He arrived intending to be pre-med. Then, in his junior year, he was nominated for a fellowship program run by the fashion designer Kenneth Cole. Cole had created a program pairing twenty students with celebrity advocates working across social causes: environmental issues, homelessness, human rights. Christian was paired with Harry Belafonte in his first year and worked alongside Robert Redford after.

It changed everything.

“I started to find interest in a whole bunch of other things. I cared about impact and change. I was always fascinated by what people do, how groups work, how communities change. That prompted me to go get the community building and social change degree. Instead of studying medical school, I decided to take a year off and travel the world. And I’m still doing that.”

Christian did not become a doctor. He became something harder to name and more difficult to replicate: a person who understood, from very early on, that the problems he cared about most were human problems, and that whatever career he built would need to be in service of solving them.

The Competition, the Check, and Malawi

Christian stumbled into product management the way he has stumbled into most things: by paying close attention, by being the most curious person in the room, and by doing something with what he found.

He was working at CareerBuilder, still early in his career, when the company ran an internal entrepreneurial competition. Employees could submit ideas. Finalists would pitch to the board. The winner would receive funding and time to actually build something.

He entered the competition, and before he walked into the final presentation, the board chairman found him and asked how to pronounce his last name. Christian told him. The chairman said: “Good, because I do not think people will ever forget it.”

He walked in and changed his presentation on the spot. He had prepared a pitch. Instead, he talked about his values. About showing up with integrity. About what it meant to him to do this work.

He won. The prize was a significant cash prize, the biggest check he had ever held at that point in his life. He was twenty-two years old, making somewhere between eight and fourteen dollars an hour before that moment. Christian donated the entire amount to help a village in Malawi. He had been reading about the Millennium Promise and its work getting villages out of poverty across Africa.

He did not know what else to do with money at that scale. So he gave it away.

The CEO asked Christian about it in their next meeting, casually, expecting to hear he spent the prize on a sports car or a vacation. When Christian explained what he had done, the CEO flew with him to Africa to see the work. When he came back, he committed his own money to the cause and started a company-wide program through which about fifteen employees a year would travel to Africa to volunteer, fully funded.

“That was the great side of the competition. It was the first time I unlocked what you could do with success and what you could do with an identity. That shaped me. But the actual work itself, making something work for customers, for a business, for sales, for operations, that was real. That was hard. I called my mother more than once to say I think I’m going back to medical school.”

This is the part where I started chuckling… Product management being harder than med school is something my PMs and I have joked about many times. Of course, at the end of the day we remind ourselves that we’re not saving lives. Still the pressure and compounding needs feel so intense at times it’s easy to say most things are probably easier to manage!

He did not go back to medical school. But he did fail. After his first two products at CareerBuilder were both successes, he became head of innovation and was given essentially unlimited license to keep going. He had seventeen consecutive failures over the next two and a half years. He cost the company approximately two and a half million dollars in bad experiments.

He did a lot of soul-searching about what had changed. I want everyone reading this to absorb what he shared, and let it sit with you and echo when you feel you’re on shaky ground as you progress in your product careers: He had gotten further from the customer. He had stopped being curious. He had started acting like someone who had the answers instead of someone who was genuinely trying to find them.

He moved from Chicago to Atlanta to be physically closer to his engineers. He went back out to spend time with customers. Since then, his product work has been grounded in a very different discipline across the over 200 products he’s built: staying close to customers and evidence.

What the Job Actually Is

I asked Christian about emotional intelligence - something he has spoken about publicly as the most undervalued skill. We also talked about arrogance - the most common killer of transformation.

He described a pattern he sees everywhere: leaders who say they want a culture of innovation and empowerment, who invite product teams into discovery, but who have already decided what the answer is. Discovery, in those environments, becomes a process of confirming what the executive already believed. And when the team comes back with evidence that contradicts that belief, the leader becomes defensive. Resistant. The team learns very quickly that the safe thing is not to learn. The safe thing is to comply.

This struck a chord with me. It’s my belief that safety is non-negotiable yet it’s so difficult to find the companies that truly build that type of culture. When product people, especially, trade safety for compliance, the ones who suffer are customers.

He connected what he said back to his own failure at CareerBuilder. The secret to his early success was not talent. It was the clarity that he did not know anything, combined with the willingness to be curious, to be wrong, to be close to customers. When he got a title, he lost that. And the products stopped working.

He said something about managers as well that is rarely said clearly.

“Once you become a boss, there is an unwritten magical rule that descends: you can no longer say the vulnerable things. I do not have the information. I screwed up. That rule hurts product organizations more than almost anything else. Because the discipline of product management, the actual discovery work, has to be rooted in humility or it is not discovery at all.”

Twenty Dollars in a Lagos Internet Cafe

This is the story that tells you everything about what Christian is actually building and why. Truth be told, it was so difficult to not get emotional while he shared this.

He was in Nigeria visiting during his college years, at a time when people used internet cafes to get online. He went in late at night to send an email for school. The place was packed. He was waiting for a computer to open up.

Next to him was a young boy, maybe a teenager, replicating a fake central bank note pixel by pixel. Running the kind of email scam that Nigeria became infamous for in that era. Christian watched him work and then asked: why are you doing this?

The boy explained that his uncle made him do it. That he had to produce a certain volume of work each day. That the food he got that night depended on what he brought back. If he doesn’t do this, he does not get to eat.

Christian gave him twenty dollars. Everything he had in his pocket.

The boy took the twenty dollars and did not go back to his uncle. They exchanged emails and communicated over the next couple of years: “Hey, I’m working now in a shop.” “Hey, I’m learning computers.” And then silence for a long time.

Years later, Christian went back to Lagos and tracked down that email address. The boy had three shops. A computer repair business. A computer tutoring operation. A small enterprise built from nothing and twenty dollars and one moment when someone looked at him and saw something other than a criminal.

That is the mission. Not the conference. Not the numbers. Not the metrics. The one person.

Going Back With SVPG

When Christian brought the idea of doing product work in Africa to his SVPG partners, he did not know what to expect. He described it as being just a boy with a dream about something.

His partners said they were in before he finished the sentence. They offered financial support, time, planning, and brainpower. All of it, immediately.

Marty Cagan was among them. He has spoken publicly about what those trips did to him. In my own conversation with Marty for an earlier piece in this series, he described the talent he saw as extraordinary, and said what was missing was not ability but infrastructure, coaching, and access. Christian, who has known Marty for many years and credits him as one of the most significant people in his career, said Marty saw something in him before he could see it in himself.

The first trip back with SVPG started at Christian’s childhood elementary school. Before they arrived, he had funded the construction of a computer lab there, with machines and internet access, meant to serve not just students but the whole community. When he contacted the principal to confirm the visit, the principal said: this is wonderful. But our biggest problem right now is that the students do not have chairs.

So they got chairs.

At the school, his SVPG partners walked through the library, a mat on the floor and a few books, watched students learning from a chalkboard, and kept looking at Christian. He said he could see what they were processing: that he had come through all of this. And that what they were being asked to participate in was the creation of more people like him.

“I felt pride in some ways, but a deep sense of responsibility. My framing shifted. It was not about bringing the best of Silicon Valley to Africa. It was about connecting what already exists here with coaching and community and opportunity that can scale. That is what was missing. Not the talent. That was never a question for me.”

Lagos, One Thousand People, Thirty-One Nations

The Inspire Africa Conference in September 2023 in Lagos brought together more than one thousand product leaders from thirty-one countries across the continent. All six SVPG partners attended. The average Nigerian earns approximately thirty-five dollars a day, and the conference fee was the difference between people being in the room and people being left out. So, a scholarship fund was established.

Christian did not describe it as charity. He described it as access.

When he stood in that room on the first day and looked around at who had come, he said he had a moment of wondering if it was real. People had traveled across the continent, which in Africa is genuinely painful. They had sacrificed to be there, and the hunger in the room was unmistakable.

Christian told me about a twelve-year-old girl who was the CEO of a healthcare company. A nine-year-old robotics engineer. Marty told him there was a student who asked him the same question that a Google engineer had asked him the week before at his master class. The talent was there. It had always been there.

“Once you see it and you see that talent in one place, you cannot pretend that the problem is talent or people. You have to build systems around this talent. Enable their reach. That first day confirmed the mission for me. We don’t need pity. We need access, coaching, capital, community. A chance to build within our own context.”

He also spoke about AI in this context with such clarity. Africa is not trapped by the legacy assumptions that make this moment so disorienting for people who built their careers on the old playbook. The continent has a history of leapfrogging in technology, skipping over infrastructure that other places built and never needed to repeat. AI, he said, is the great equalizer. For the first time, people in Lagos have access to the same tools as people in Silicon Valley. The question is what they do with that access.

What AI Is and Is Not Changing

I asked Christian what he wants the broader product community to understand about this moment. He is on a speaking circuit across Europe for weeks, making the same argument everywhere he goes.

The discipline has not changed. AI does not change what you need to build a great product. It changes what you can do with the time you have and the capabilities you can access. But it does not change the fundamental question of who you are building for, what problem you are actually solving, or whether the thing you are making creates genuine value for a human being.

He used a photography analogy that is so precise. The iPhone gave everyone access to a good camera. It did not make everyone a professional photographer. You can see the difference between five hundred pictures taken by someone who just has a phone and the first shot taken by someone who knows what they are doing. The same is true of product management. AI is making it easier than ever to produce output. Which means we are about to see more product failure than ever, not less, because people are going to mistake building fast for building right.

“The discipline has always been about good judgment and product sense and understanding what makes good for humans in a world that is ever changing. If I were advising people in this age of AI: focus on the competencies that truly matter. Your product sense. Your deep understanding of the problem and the customer and the business. The empathy. The taste and discernment. That is the Michelin star chef versus someone just cooking. It is what makes a good meal. We need to get back to our roots.”

Christian dropped lines during this conversation that were so deep, I only hope you can feel his passion when you read this piece. He said something that I want to put down carefully here. People who used to confuse output with outcome are about to find out the difference in the most direct way possible. You can now build in one week, in two days. And if nothing changes, if there is no new revenue, no new customers, no meaningful shift in the outcome you are trying to drive, it will become clearer than it has ever been that shipping was never the problem. I cover what the problem is here.

The People Who Changed Everything

Christian thanked his parents first, and at length. His partners from SVPG had met them in Calabar, had seen where he grew up, had sat with his family for lunch before any of the conference work began. He said when you meet his parents, you understand him immediately. Their warmth, their generosity, their belief in service as a fundamental obligation.

“My father always says service is the rent you pay for your accommodation on earth. I am a product of a tree that was full of love and heart. It is hard to be a bad fruit if the tree itself is good.”

He thanked the African product community for giving him urgency. For making the work tangible rather than theoretical. For reminding him, every time he goes back, that access matters and coaching matters and none of this is abstract.

And he thanked Marty Cagan. He was specific about why. He said Marty saw something in him before he could see it in himself. After one of his very first workshops, he received a long email from the SVP of a major bank. The man had been in the industry for thirty-six years and said he had only a few times in his life seen someone so perfectly designed for what they were doing. Christian said he could not see that in himself at the time. Marty could. And the platform, the trust, the friendship that followed gave him the foundation to build everything he has built since.

He said he does not thank people enough. He said it plainly. But, do any of us, really?

What It Costs to Carry a Mission

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

Christian paused, and said he wishes someone would ask him what it costs him to carry the mission.

People see the conference. The stage. The books. The travel. The ideas. They see the impact and the reach and the numbers. They do not ask what it takes to hold all of that, what it does to the rest of a life, what you have to give up or give over in order to do something this personal at this scale.

I sat with that for a moment after he said it. It is the most honest thing anyone in this series has offered at the end of a conversation. It’s not a principle, and it’s not advice. Just: this is hard, I love it, and I am still figuring out how to hold it.

He grew up in Calabar wanting to cure disease. He became a product person who has built two hundred products and coached thousands of teams and flown back to his elementary school with the greatest minds in Silicon Valley to get chairs for children who did not have any.

The mission is the same one it always was. He just found a different mechanism.

And somewhere in Lagos, that man with three computer shops is out there doing the same.

You can find Christian at svpg.com and on LinkedIn. To learn more about the Innovate Africa Foundation and how to support the scholarship fund, visit the links below:

https://www.innovateafricafoundation.org/

https://africapla.com/

https://innovateafricafund.com/

https://www.inspireafricaconference.com/

Christian, thank you. You were the last Spotlight in this series (at least for now), and there was no better person to close it with. The product heart that this whole thing was named for is, in you, exactly what I always hoped it could be - someone giving back.

- Christine Itwaru

We were talking about why, after more than twenty years of writing and coaching and speaking, most companies are still not operating the way the evidence says they should. Still running feature teams. Still treating product management like project management. Still measuring velocity over value. And he paused, in the way people pause when they are about to say something they have said many times but still believe completely, and said:

“There is a level of arrogance behind this. CEOs are pretty sure they know what to build. But they don’t. And they’re not humble enough to realize they don’t.”

He was not saying this to be provocative. He has been watching the same pattern repeat for two decades: the problem is rarely a lack of capability, it is a lack of culture. The talent exists. The tools exist. The frameworks exist, more of them than anyone could ever need. What does not exist, in most organizations, is the environment that allows talented people to actually do the work.

This is the piece I want to write. Not about the frameworks. About the environment.

Some of you will be overjoyed to know I ‘partnered with AI’ (Nano) to generate this image for this article, because that’s what I felt like allowing it to do today for me. Anyway…

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Time to Market vs Time to Money

Marty painted the clearest picture of the culture problem I have seen in a while.

Most companies, when they talk about the value of moving fast, are talking about time to market. How quickly can we get this feature out the door? How many releases can we get in a quarter? How fast can we go from idea to ‘ship it’?

Lots of companies are thinking about time to money. How quickly can we get something into customers’ hands that generates the outcome we need? And those two things are not the same. A fast release of the wrong thing does not bring you closer to time to money. It moves you further from it.

“Speeding up time to market, if it’s the wrong product, is not going to give you the money. They don’t realize that.

The reason this distinction matters so much right now is that AI has removed the engineering bottleneck that used to obscure it. For years, leaders could tell themselves the problem was speed. Engineers could not build fast enough. The roadmap was too long. The cycle time was too slow.

That argument is no longer available. Teams can build faster than ever. And they are finding out, in real time, that building fast does not mean building right. The bottleneck was never the engineers. It was always the quality of the thinking about what was worth building.

The Coaching Culture Gap

Marty spent the first decade of his career at HP Labs. He described it as the most innovative company in the world at the time, with a reputation like Google has today. And when he left, he realized something that had never occurred to him while he was there.

Every single day at HP, someone was assigned to help him get better at his job.

He thought this was normal. He thought every company did this. He did not realize until he got somewhere else that almost no one does this. That the culture of deliberate, daily coaching that made HP what it was is genuinely rare, and that most product people spend their entire careers without ever experiencing it.

Google’s Project Oxygen research, which began in 2009 and has been validated repeatedly since, found that the number one trait of the best managers at Google, as measured by their own employee surveys and performance data, was being a good coach. Not the sharpest strategist. Not the most technically fluent. A good coach. The person who invests in helping others become better. (Source: Google Project Oxygen, updated 2018, re-validated across thousands of teams.)

Apple lists coaching as one of its four leadership pillars. It is a core principle in Amazon’s leadership framework. These are not coincidences. They are the output of organizations that figured out something most companies are still pretending they do not need to figure out: that developing people is the primary job of leadership, and that outcomes follow from that, not the other way around.

“The best companies are very public about their commitment to coaching. Google says, every year in their employee survey, the number one trait of a good manager is being a good coach. That’s the culture that actually produces the outcomes everyone says they want.”

What Marty is describing is structural. The companies that consistently build great products have built an environment where getting better at the work is treated as part of the work. Where a product manager is expected to grow, and someone is accountable for making that happen. Where discovering you need help is not a failure. It is a starting point.

The Catch-22 Nobody Talks About

Here is the version of this problem I hear most often from product leaders, and the one worth naming.

Companies want to move to the product model. They have read the books, attended the conferences, used the vocabulary. They know that empowered teams produce better outcomes than feature factories. They want the results.

But the managers who are supposed to lead those empowered teams have never worked this way themselves. They were formed in the project model. They were rewarded for output, not outcome. They learned to manage by being managed that way. And now they are being asked to coach their teams into a way of working that nobody coached them into.

“If my manager’s never worked this way before, how do I learn? The manager can get a coach. But then some managers don’t want to. Some don’t have time because now they have twice the number of reports. So we really didn’t have a good answer to how do you learn this stuff.

Until gen AI.”

He is optimistic that AI changes this equation. Not because AI replaces the coaching relationship, but because it makes a certain kind of learning available at any hour, in any context, to anyone with a connection. The product manager in a company that has never built this way before can now get access to a thinking partner who will push back on their reasoning, ask the questions a good coach would ask, and help them develop product sense in a way that was simply not accessible before.

But he is also clear-eyed about the limitation. AI can accelerate learning. It cannot substitute for a culture that values it. If the organization rewards speed over quality, features over outcomes, confidence over curiosity, the tool does not fix that. The tool amplifies whatever environment it operates inside.

What the Companies Getting This Right Are Actually Doing

Marty has spent more than twenty years inside the companies that consistently build great products, and he is direct about what separates them from the ones that do not.

It is not the talent, at least not primarily. He said this explicitly: he has seen people with tremendous potential wasting away in the wrong culture, frustrated, checked out, good at the job they have never actually been asked to do. He regularly makes calls to connect those people with companies that will actually develop them. His favorite for this, he said, is Google. Because once someone is in that environment, it usually takes just a few months before they start to blossom.

The companies that replicate this do a few specific things:

• They treat the development of their people as a leadership responsibility, not a HR function or a checkbox.

• They create explicit space for coaching, not just the annual review and the occasional 1:1.

• They measure managers on whether their teams are growing, not just whether they are shipping.

They also, and this matters more than people want to admit, hire for culture fit at the leadership level. Not personality fit. Not culture add. They are looking for leaders who have actually worked this way, who have experienced what it feels like to be coached into excellence, and who therefore know how to extend that to the people they lead.

The Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found that global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, the lowest since the pandemic. The cost: an estimated 438 billion dollars in lost productivity. And what Gallup found when they looked at what drives engagement was not compensation or perks or mission statements. It was the managers. Specifically, managers who coach, who develop, who create the conditions for people to do their best work. The research was unambiguous: when managers are equipped and supported to lead that way, engagement goes up. Retention goes up. Performance goes up.

None of this is new information. The research has been clear for a long time. What remains rare is the organizational will to act on it.

The Command-and-Control Problem

We talked about the cultural force that holds most companies back with openness and honesty.

In the United States the most common model is command and control, even in companies where nobody wants to admit that. The CEO or the leadership team is pretty sure they know what needs to be built. The roadmap comes from the top. The product team’s job is to execute it. And if only it could be done faster, everything would be fine. Right?

If the issue is that leadership is making the wrong calls about what to build, building those wrong things faster does not help. It accelerates the failure.

He shared this very important fact: the difference between feature team product managers and empowered product team product managers is not the title. It is the accountability. Feature team PMs are accountable for output. They deliver what they are told to deliver. Empowered product PMs are accountable for outcome. They are responsible for whether the thing they built actually solved the problem.

Most organizations say they want the second kind. Most organizations are actually structured for the first. The culture has not caught up with the vocabulary.

Companies that want the outcomes of the product model but maintain the structure and incentives of the project model are not transforming. They are performing transformation. That is different. And it costs them.

What Leaders Actually Need to Do

I’ll end with something practical. Most people think this type of thing is philosophical rather than operational, so here you are.

Marty is clear that the transformation to a real product culture requires leadership to do something most of them find uncomfortable: let go of the certainty that they know what to build. That requires humility. Not as a character trait but as a practice. A deliberate choice to trust the people closest to the customer over the instinct of the person furthest from them.

It also requires investing in coaching as a first-class activity. Not as a budget line item that gets cut when the quarter gets hard. Not as a perk for top performers. As the mechanism through which everyone in the organization gets better at the work. Marty had someone assigned to help him get better every single day at HP. That was not expensive. It was cultural. And it produced one of the most enduring product practices in the history of the industry.

It requires measuring managers on the right things. Not just whether the team shipped. Whether the team grew. Whether the people on it are better at discovering and delivering value than they were a year ago.

And it requires patience. The companies that have done this well, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, did not get there in one transformation initiative. They got there by making coaching and development the consistent expectation over years, until it became the way things work rather than the initiative of the quarter.

“There’s enough people that really do have the passion and the product sense. That’s sort of what gives us hope. And there will be more. Because the tools have never been better for developing this stuff. But the environment has to allow it.”

The tools are better than they have ever been. The research is clearer than it has ever been. The case for doing this is stronger than it has ever been.

What is still missing, in most organizations, is someone at the top willing to admit that they do not already know the answer. This is the most courageous and wise thing they can do. And to then build a culture that treats figuring it out together as the actual work.

This piece is drawn from a longer conversation with Marty Cagan for the TPH Spotlight series. The full human piece, covering his father, the computer center, HP Labs, Netscape, and what he most wants this community to understand, is published separately.

It seems obvious. He wrote the book. He hosts the meetup. He runs the summit. He speaks at conferences on every continent. He has been consulting on product since before most people had a name for what he was doing. Of course he loves it.

But the why matters. And when you sit with him long enough to get to it, you realize that the reason he loves it is also the reason the work is hard, and the reason most people who try it either fall deeply in love or quietly find something else to do.

We will get there. First, we talk submarines.

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Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Product management consultant, trainer, speaker, and author. Clients include Google, Walmart, Amazon, Meta, Box, Microsoft, Medallia, and One Medical Group.

Book: The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback. Published by Wiley, 2015. Bestseller. Still widely read. Dan narrated the most recent audiobook version himself.

Meetup: Host of the monthly Lean Product and Lean UX Meetup in Silicon Valley.

Before consulting: Product leader at Intuit (Quicken), Friendster (VP of Product, 2004 to 2005)

Before tech: Lead Technical Product Manager, Naval Reactors, US Navy. Designed nuclear-powered submarines for five years.

Education: BS Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University. MS Industrial Engineering, Virginia Tech (lean manufacturing). MBA, Stanford University.

Based in: Silicon Valley.

Where He Came From

Dan’s parents gave him a computer when he was ten years old. He used it the way a ten-year-old with a curious mind would: he wrote a program to help him practice spelling words for school. He wrote another one to track his newspaper route and of course, he played games. But underneath all of that was something more durable than any specific application.

He became completely comfortable with computers. Not as a user. As someone who understood that you could have an idea and make it real.

“The most important thing is it just made me comfortable with computers and coding. I was not intimidated by that at all. I was excited by the ability to create something.”

That comfort, and that excitement, never went away. It threaded through three degrees, five years in the Navy, a career built across submarines and social networks and financial software and early-stage startups, and eventually into the book that tens of thousands of product people have used to understand what their job actually is.

His father was a science-minded person who encouraged curiosity and loved math. Dan credits him with the thread of first principles thinking that runs through everything he has built since: the instinct to understand the causality behind things, to find the mental model that explains why something works, rather than just accepting that it does.

He went to Northwestern on a Navy ROTC scholarship and studied electrical engineering, because it felt like a natural extension of his strong interest in computers. At Virginia Tech he got a master’s in industrial engineering and studied lean manufacturing, years before lean startup existed as a concept. When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, Dan read it and instantly recognized how it reinforced many principles of good product management.

The MBA at Stanford was the most deliberate step. He knew he wanted to move beyond engineering, he knew he wanted to work in high tech, and he knew that Silicon Valley was where that would happen. Stanford was the most direct path to all three.

Five Years Designing Nuclear Submarines

After Northwestern, Dan went to Naval Reactors in the Washington, D.C. area where he spent five years as a Technical Product Manager working on the nuclear propulsion plant design for the next generation submarine that would become the Virginia class.

He describes it as probably the best job you could have right out of college.

The work required first principles thinking applied to one of the world’s most complex products. Every decision had consequences. Everyone working there was exceptionally smart and completely focused on the mission. Naval Reactors was founded by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the person who almost single-handedly created the nuclear-powered submarine program in the 1950s. Dan says that although he is not well known, Admiral Rickover was an innovative tech maverick on par with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Rickover was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine back in 1954. The culture Rickover had built over decades at Naval Reactors was so strong that Dan says it felt like his ghost was still roaming the halls.

As part of Naval Reactors training, he also spent six months studying nuclear and mechanical engineering in Pittsburgh, essentially another graduate degree on top of the ones he already had. By the time he finished his five-year commitment and went to Stanford for his MBA, he had built significant expertise in how to design complex systems .

He did not know yet that it was perfect preparation for product management. He just knew he wanted to do something broader.

Walking Into a Machine

In his second year at Stanford, Dan had a general sense that he wanted to work in high tech, but hadn’t figured out the details yet: Which company? Which job? He discovered product management through an on-campus recruiting info session by Intuit. The PM from Intuit was super enthusiastic about his job, and as he explained what product managers do, it instantly clicked with Dan that this role sounded like it could be a perfect match. Despite his excitement for this job he had just discovered, Dan realized he had never done it before. He had never even worked at a software company. So he asked people in the know: where is the best place to learn product management?

Everyone said Intuit.

He interviewed at Intuit and accepted an offer to join the Quicken product team. And he walked into what he still describes as a machine.

Intuit’s approach to product was unlike anything else that existed in software at the time. The company’s founder, Scott Cook, came from Procter and Gamble, and he brought with him a deep belief in customer research, marketing discipline, and product differentiation grounded in genuine understanding of what people actually needed. Dan had a PhD in market research sitting next to him on the Quicken marketing team. They flew around the country doing qualitative discovery research with customers. They mailed CD-ROMs to beta testers. They followed people home from stores to watch them install software. They had a usability lab before usability was a recognized discipline.

“As a PM you were the spokesperson and the public-facing person. You had to go represent your product to Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, people at PC Magazine. They were also just really good at planning and executing the different phases of a cycle. You started with research and discovery. Then planning. Then the MRD. Then you kicked off. Then specs. Then beta. Then GA. It was a one-year cycle, which in hindsight was great because you had enough time in each phase to do it properly before you moved on.”

He also learned something at Intuit that he has carried ever since: the best research and product management in the world does not save you if the UX design is not right. He made it a deliberate choice to learn as much as he could about UX design, not because it was his job, but because he could see how it was so critical to creating successful products.

He led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. He left after five years. Not because anything was wrong, but because he was ready to take what he had learned and go do it somewhere smaller and faster.

Transition to Startupland: Being Inside Friendster During the Wild West of Social Networking

If any of you reading this was like me back in college getting hooked on Friendster, you can imagine the excitement I had talking to him about this part of his journey. Friendster, to so many of us, was a cultural phenomenon and a moment - something that opened up the future, and perhaps sealed a part of our past, as we all became a little too connected and conscious about what we appeared like to the world.

Dan joined Friendster as Head of Product the summer of 2004. Facebook launched in February of the same year.

He went in with his eyes open, at least as open as they could be. They were on their third CEO. The heads of product and engineering were not speaking to each other. He wanted to make sure he understood what he was walking into. Before accepting the offer, he interviewed everyone with whom he would be working. Compared to the Intuit machine, Dan found this early-stage startup to be a completely different and more chaotic planet. He tailored his product process to the startup environment, created a hierarchy of user needs framework based on uptime and performance as table stakes before features and UX, facilitated the creation of the company’s first business OKRs, and drove viral loop optimization at a time when no one had a name for that yet.

But he could also see, almost from the day he arrived, what was actually happening.

“I learned right away that we were basically walking dead. We had this terminal disease, we just hadn’t died yet. Everyone was looking at the worldwide numbers of users, and we looked great because we were huge in the Philippines and South America. But when I looked at just the US numbers, MySpace had already passed us before I even joined. The curve was going up. We tried to fight the good fight, but you could tell how things were going to play out.”

Network effects in a social network are the strongest type: exponential. He watched it happen in real time. MySpace ate Friendster’s lunch. Then Facebook ate MySpace’s lunch.

How the Book Got Written

After Friendster, Dan went back to school. Not to another graduate program. To City College of San Francisco, eighty dollars a class, where he took HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Unix, Apache, and Photoshop back to back. He wanted to understand the web stack the way he understood electrical engineering and submarines. He ripped off the bandaid and dove in.

Then he started consulting. The first engagement was serendipitous: a startup needed a product leader but could not wait for him to finish his classes, so they agreed to a part-time arrangement as interim VP of Product. It worked out well. He did it again for another company. And another. He realized he was seeing more in a year than most product leaders see in five, working across multiple companies, multiple spaces, multiple teams, each time learning what was working, what wasn’t, and trying to fix it in a defined window.

He worked with Box post-series A when they were just getting going. With One Medical when they had three engineers. With Medallia, where he helped grow the product team from six to twenty-one people. And along the way he was giving talks, iterating on his frameworks based on the questions people kept asking, and accumulating hundreds of slides that captured what he was learning.

On January 1st, 2012, he opened Excel and made a project plan to write a book. He then proceeded not to write a single word.

In 2013 he gave a popular new talk at Google about lean product principles. The talk was recorded and published online because it was Google and they owned YouTube. A Wiley editor saw it and emailed him. Had he thought about writing a book?

He signed the contract partly because he knew writing a book would take tons of work and he needed a forcing function. Without a contractually committed deadline, he knew it would keep getting deferred. The book enabled him to go deeper than he ever had in his talks, to sit down and think without distractions, and to push beyond the frameworks he had created across hundreds of slides.

That is when he created the Product-Market Fit Pyramid. Precursors of it existed in earlier, piecemeal fragments. But the sustained focus of actually writing the book gave him the space to make it coherent.

The Lean Product Playbook came out in 2015. It has been widely praised ever since.

What Still Holds Up Eleven Years Later

I asked Dan what in the book has held up most cleanly. His answer was immediate.

The concepts. All of them.

• Understand who your customer is.

• Understand their problems before you think about solutions.

• Define your differentiated value proposition.

• Identify which features should be in your minimum viable product.

• Design a great user experience.

• Test before you build.

None of those things have changed, because none of them are tied to a specific technology or a specific moment. They are tied to how people make decisions about what to buy and what to use, which has not fundamentally changed in eleven years and is not going to change in the next eleven.

What has changed is the tools. When he recorded the most recent audiobook version, which he narrated himself, he updated all the tool references. InVision became Figma. The rest stayed.

By the way, I highly recommend you get the book and the second version of the audiobook which he narrated himself. You’ll get genuine, energetic, focused, Dan Olsen in those assets.

The Design Gap and Why Vibe Coding Actually Matters

Dan has been excited about AI prototyping for over a year, and he is specific about why in a way that cuts through a lot of the noise.

He has a slide he first created in 2006 based on what he saw in many companies. He calls the problem it describes “the design gap”: the persistent reality that most product teams do not have adequate prototyping resources. When he asks audiences to raise their hands if they feel like they have enough prototyping support to test ideas properly before sending them to engineering, fewer than ten percent of hands go up. Every time. For nearly two decades.

What vibe coding and AI prototyping tools have done, he says, is unblock all the teams that always wanted to do discovery prototyping but could not, because they did not have a designer available or the time to wait for one. Now a product manager who cannot code and is not a designer can create a high-fidelity, functional prototype in a fraction of the time it used to take. The behavior that was always right, prototype before you build, is now accessible to almost everyone.

“Before, you’d be stuck if you didn’t have a designer who could create a prototype for you. Now that’s unblocked. And actually there are multiple audiences for the prototype. The first audience is you as the PM. You’ll put your PRD in as a prompt, get the first shot prototype, and instantly realize three things you forgot to specify. So you’re the first audience. Then your team. Then senior stakeholders. Then customers.”

He is also honest about where the tools are not yet delivering what the loudest voices claim. The last mile is hard. Getting from a working first shot to something at the ninety-fifth percentile requires debugging and iteration and enough technical fluency to navigate the bumps. The super fans and the skeptics are both wrong. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and the people who will get the most out of these tools are the ones who bring persistence and judgment alongside the prompts.

He is currently most excited about task automation tools, with Claude Cowork as the leading example. Unlike chat-based AI or code generation, these tools automate workflows without requiring coding knowledge. He has been giving talks and teaching workshops on this specifically, because he thinks it represents the next frontier of what becomes accessible to all knowledge workers, even those who are not technical.

The Problems That Are Always the Same

Dan has worked with enough companies across enough stages that when a new CEO or CPO starts describing their situation, he can often predict what they are going to say before they say it. He keeps this observation to himself. But the pattern is unmistakable.

Lack of role clarity. People have not defined what a PM’s role is versus a designer’s versus an engineer’s. Turf battles emerge not from bad intentions but from unspoken assumptions about who is supposed to do what.

No clear process. Teams jump straight to coding without doing discovery first. Not because they do not know they should do discovery, but because no one has made discovery an explicit part of how they work.

And above all: starting with solutions instead of problems. YES!

“Everyone is coming to you as a PM with solutions. Your CEO, your stakeholders, your clients. They’re all asking for features. And the number of times you build exactly what they asked you to build and it doesn’t actually solve a problem or create value, it’s sad how many times that happens. The PM’s unique value add is defining who the customer is and what their problems are. That’s really the biggest thing.”

He has a move for when a CEO brings a solution instead of a problem. He calls it the judo move. You do not tell them their solution is wrong. You say it sounds like a great idea, and ask if you can make sure you are clear on what problem it is solving. You open the door. Once they are talking about the problem, two things often happen. First, they realize their original solution would not actually solve it. Second, a different solution idea emerges that does, usually with a much smaller scope.

He said something else about this that I love. No professional sports team would take a group of random people, put them in jerseys, and tell them to go play. They would ask, what are our positions? What are our plays? Let us practice. Product teams do this constantly. They throw people together with similar titles into a room and assume a functional team will emerge. It almost never does. And many companies don’t take the time to train or even discuss with those people how to actually work together.

The People Who Changed Everything

Dan thanked his parents. His dad, the science-minded curiosity-encourager who pointed him toward first principles thinking. His mom, who was always supportive even when the path was not obvious.

He thanked Admiral Hyman Rickover, whom he never met. Rickover created Naval Reactors and the culture of the place where Dan started his career. The culture was so strong, Dan said, that it felt like the admiral’s ghost was still roaming the halls decades later. You can learn a lot from a ghost with that kind of imprint.

He thanked Steve Grey, his GM at Intuit, who saw potential in Dan early and made a specific, deliberate choice: when the manager between them left, Steve did not backfill the role. He let Dan report directly to him instead, which meant more access, more exposure, and more learning than he would have otherwise had. That kind of quiet, specific act of investment in a person is easy to overlook. It is also the kind of thing that compounds for decades.

He thanked Dave McClure, who invited him to give a talk in a Stanford class on Facebook app development in 2007, saw him speak, and then got him a slot at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone. That was the moment Dan got off and running as a speaker. More than five hundred people in the room. Every question the audience asked became a new slide or talk. The whole body of public work grew from there.

He thanked Richard Narramore, his editor at Wiley who saw the potential for The Lean Product Playbook and supported Dan’s choices as he wrote the book.

And he thanked Vanessa, his wife of twenty years. He said it plainly: he calls her his co-founder in life. When he was writing the book and their kids were one and three, the only way he could make real progress was to go into an office on Saturdays and Sundays when his energy was good and his attention was unbroken. She made that possible. She has made a lot of things possible, across years of travel and workshops and conferences and all the demands that come with the work he does.

“She’s always been very supportive. With my work, I travel a lot for conferences and workshops. That can be tough on our home schedule. So she’s always been very supportive. That’s why I call her my co-founder in life.”

Why Do You Love Product Management So Much?

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

Dan had thought about it. He said he had come up with a few candidates, but this one was the best:

He wishes someone would ask him why he loves product management so much.

He explained that the answer is obvious in one sense: he has been obsessing over this discipline since his first day at Intuit, he wrote a book about it, he hosts a monthly meetup, he runs a summit, he speaks about it everywhere, he teaches it. Of course he loves it. But nobody ever asks why. And the why, he thinks, is worth saying out loud.

He paused. And then he delivered again:

He has spent thirty-plus years in this field. He designed submarines, watched social networks rise and fall, helped build some of the most important companies in the Valley, and wrote the book that a new generation of product people is still reaching for.

He loves product management.

I’m so happy we all get to understand why.

_______________

You can find Dan at dan-olsen.com and on LinkedIn. The Lean Product Playbook is available wherever books are sold. Make sure you get the audiobook version narrated by Dan himself. He will know if you did not.

Dan, thank you. I owe you a better photo from the next time we are in the same room :)

Mike Belsito is the second kind. He is currently the Head of Product Evangelism at Pendo, and was one of the co-founders of Product Collective, and an organizer behind INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We know this event to be one of the most respected gatherings of product people anywhere in the world. He is, by almost any measure, one of the most consistent contributors to this space over the last decade.

And like my other guests, he will tell you none of it was planned.

He stumbled into product after a startup failure and built a conference out of a lunch conversation and a $0 marketing budget. He has spent years collecting the stories of product people because he believes, at his core, that the thing this community most needs is to feel less alone.

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This runs through everything he has ever built. And when you sit down with him and ask him about it, he talks about it the same way he talks about everything else: with warmth, with honesty, and with the kind of self-awareness that only comes from someone who has done a lot of figuring out in public.

Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Community Leader and Head of Product Evangelism at Mind the Product and Pendo.

Community: Co-Founder, Product Collective - the unit that served over 30k product management professionals across the globe. Co-Organizer, INDUSTRY: The Product Conference and New York Product Conference. Adjunct Professor, Department of Design and Innovation, Case Western Reserve University. Co-Host, Rocketship.FM podcast.

Before Community: Twelve years across startup companies including Employee Number One at Findaway (later acquired by Spotify). Co-Founder and CEO of eFuneral (acquired by Homesteaders Life Company, 2014).

Book: Forthcoming, February 2027. On the timeless characteristics of product people that help them thrive through massive change: product sense, taste, curiosity, judgment.

Education: MBA, Case Western Reserve University, 2005. BS, Bowling Green State University.

Based in: Cleveland, Ohio.

Named: One of the Top 40 Influencers in Product Management on multiple occasions.

Where He Came From

Mike grew up in Cleveland and came back to it. That is not a small thing in a world where ambition is usually measured by the direction you leave, not the decision to stay.

He graduated from Bowling Green State University, got his MBA at Case Western Reserve in 2005, and then did the thing that felt true to him: he joined a startup. Not because he knew what he was getting into. Because he was drawn to the founders. He wanted to learn what it actually meant to build something from nothing, and the fastest way to do that was to be in the room with people who were doing it.

Findaway was a Cleveland-based company creating digital audiobooks. Mike was employee number one. He stayed for six years, watching the company grow from three people in a room to a two hundred-person operation with twenty million dollars in revenue. He learned by proximity. Every call the founders took, he was there. Every decision, he was watching.

He calls those six years his real business school.

“I was really fascinated with the founders and their backgrounds and thought I could learn a lot from them. That’s what led me to joining Findaway. And once I did, for me it’s like my startup career wasn’t on any sort of path. But the common thread was that the companies I started happened to solve a big pain point I was personally experiencing.”

That pattern, building for a pain you have personally felt, would define everything that came after.

The Company He Built Out of Grief

In the summer of 2010, Mike’s cousin died unexpectedly. His family was put in the position that most families eventually find themselves in: needing to plan a funeral quickly, without any idea where to start or how to evaluate the options in front of them.

His dad was trying to help sort it out and asked Mike if there was something like Angie’s List for funeral homes. Mike told him he was sure there was and went to look. There was nothing.

What his family experienced was not just the grief of losing someone. It was the specific disorientation of being asked to make a significant, expensive, permanent decision without any information to help them make it well. Price, quality, services, reputation. None of it was transparent. They picked a funeral home and hoped for the best.

A year later, Mike launched eFuneral.

The idea was to bring transparency to funeral planning. Not just price comparison, though pricing was a part of it, but the full picture. What services does this funeral home offer? What do other families say about them? What should you actually expect? The goal was to make one of the most difficult moments in a person’s life slightly less disorienting.

They went through several business models and several years of trying to find the one that worked. In 2014, eFuneral was acquired by Homesteaders Life Company, a large life insurance company in the death care space. Mike was invited to stay. He did not.

He left and started figuring out what was next.

How Product Found Him

While eFuneral was still running, Mike had been invited to speak at a local Cleveland event called Tech Pint, a community gathering for the broader tech scene organized by his friend Paul McAvinchey. He was the first speaker at the first Tech Pint. They became friends.

After eFuneral, a company called Veritix came looking for a director of product strategy. They were a ticketing company owned by Dan Gilbert, who also owns Quicken Loans and the Cleveland Cavaliers. They wanted to build a lightweight ticketing platform for high school sports and they wanted Mike to lead the product for it.

He Googled the job title.

He had no idea what a director of product strategy actually did. He told them he was not remotely qualified. They told him nobody went to school for product management, and that his background as a founder was exactly what they were looking for.

Looking back, he can see that he had been doing product work the entire time he was building companies. He just had not known it had a name. The realization was exciting and disorienting in equal measure.

“It felt like being right out of business school again. Like, how does this world work? Because I had to figure out how the best product people actually thrive in their jobs. I knew what entrepreneurs did. But being in this role, it’s like they said we trust you, go figure it out. And so I had to figure it out.”

He read. He listened to podcasts. He talked to other product people. He found out, consistently, that they felt exactly the way he did. Nobody had it fully figured out. They were all constructing their understanding in real time.

That discovery, that the feeling of not quite knowing what you are doing is almost universal among product people, would become the foundation of everything he built next.

The Conference That Started at a Lunch Table

Paul had organized a day-long version of Tech Pint called the Industry Digital Summit. It was a broad tech event, well attended, and well received. When he asked Mike for feedback, Mike told him the truth: there were too many events in Cleveland saying similar things with similar people. What if he went deep on one area instead?

Mike was trying to figure out what it meant to be a product person. There was not much out there for people like him. What if Paul made an event specifically for product, and it just happened to be in Cleveland?

He pointed to a model he had seen work. Content Marketing World was a conference that Joe Pulizzi had built in Cleveland, not for Cleveland content marketers but for content marketers everywhere. The event was in the city but the audience was not local. Mike wondered if the same thing could work for product.

Paul’s response was: you seem passionate about this. What if we did it together?

That first year, fall of 2015, they both still had day jobs. Mike was up from five in the morning to seven, cold-emailing strangers before he went to work. They had no marketing budget to speak of. They had Paul’s Tech Pint mailing list, which was a completely different audience from the one they were trying to build.

Two hundred and fifty people came. From twenty-one states and seven countries. When he said this to me, I could see the pride in his eyes, when he said those numbers out loud. Like the pride one feels when they remember health stats when their baby was born.

“That’s what blew my mind. Because it’s like, what could this have been if we were full time? What could this have been if we had any money? We each put in a little bit and that was the only money we had to work with. But seeing people come from all over, that let me know we were at least on to something.”

By summer of 2016, Mike left his job and went full time into Product Collective. Paul followed shortly after. The community, the newsletter, the second conference, all of it started building from there. INDUSTRY has since run in Cleveland, Dublin, and New York. The community now serves more than thirty thousand product professionals globally.

The thing he is most proud of has nothing to do with the numbers. It is that from the very first year, they decided that speakers would be invited on merit, not on whether they were paying to be there. Some sponsors came and said they would only join if they got a keynote slot. Mike and Paul turned the money down.

It cost them. And they did not regret it.

Everything Is a Product

Mike’s wife Hannah is the Chief Experience Officer at Destination Cleveland, the city’s convention and visitors bureau. Her job is to bring business travelers and leisure travelers to Cleveland and to shape the experience of being there.

She came to one of the early editions of INDUSTRY to see what her husband had quit his job to build. When she left, she told him something that has stayed with him ever since.

She said: “I think I am kind of a product person too. Cleveland is my product.”

This is the center of Mike’s view on the craft. Us tech product people get lost in our own bubble. We read the same newsletters, follow the same accounts, attend the same conferences, and gradually lose the thread back to the actual humans we are supposed to be serving. Getting out of that bubble, spending time with people who build things in completely different contexts, is not a nice-to-have. It is how you stay calibrated to what problems actually feel like.

The Chick-fil-A example he tells from an early INDUSTRY conference makes the same point. A woman approached him after a talk and told him she worked at the fast-food company. When you walk into Chick-fil-A, she said, that is my product. There are teams of people thinking about every part of that experience. She came to INDUSTRY to bring learnings from the software world back to what she was building. And Mike came away with something too.

Empathy, curiosity, problem-finding. These things do not belong to tech. They belong to anyone building something that other people have to live inside.

What He Is Seeing Right Now

Mike just came back from Australia, where he spoke at the Leading the Product conference. He was struck by how similar the conversations felt to the ones he has in Cleveland and Rochester and every other place he goes. Not the Bay Area conversations, where the assumption is that everyone has fully adopted AI and is now managing agents that manage other agents. The real conversations.

He asked a room of product people to write down the one thing they were most excited about and the one thing keeping them up at night. For most of them, it was the same answer for both.

The pace of change. Exciting and terrifying in the same breath.

He has a friend who has been an engineer at a Fortune 10 company for twenty years. Six months ago, that friend asked Mike if he thought AI was a fad. Mike told him no. But the fact that the question was being asked told him everything he needed to know about where most of the world actually sits right now.

“Not everybody is all pilled in and doing all the things. And I think that is important to realize because sometimes people feel exhausted and like they’re completely behind and everybody’s ahead of them. That’s not the case. Most of the tech world is actually where you’re at. It’s not what we read about all the time.”

He thinks the product people who thrive in this moment will be the ones who adopt a beginner’s mindset again. Not because they have to pretend they do not know things, but because the willingness to not know, to stay curious, to be comfortable with uncertainty, is precisely the quality that will separate the people who grow through this from the ones who get left behind.

He remembers what it felt like to be new to product. The naivety, the curiosity, the reading everything he could find because he genuinely did not know where to start. He says that feeling is not a weakness. It is the thing.

“AI will help us automate away the mechanics of product work. The 80% that isn’t really the reason we got into this. What’s left is product sense, taste, judgment, curiosity. The things that probably attracted us to this role in the first place. My hope is that this frees us up to actually do more of the real product work.”

The Book

Mike is finishing the first draft of a book. It was not on his radar a year ago. He would tell you that plainly.

The book is about the timeless characteristics of product people that help them thrive through periods of massive change. Product sense. Taste. Curiosity. Judgment. Things that have always mattered, that now matter even more, and that most books on the subject treat as either innate or unteachable.

He disagrees. The book is about how to actually get better at these things. How do you practice product sense? What does it mean to develop your taste deliberately? What does curiosity look like as a discipline rather than a personality trait?

Expected: February 2027.

He built a community because he was a confused product person looking for one. He is writing this book for the same reason. Because he is still in it, still figuring it out, and still believes that the most useful thing he can do is be honest about that and share what he is learning with everyone else who is doing the same.

The People Who Changed Everything

Mike named the founders of Findaway as the people who shaped him most. He still keeps in touch with all three: Christopher Celeste, Blake Squires, and Mitch Kroll. He still looks up to them as mentors. They were his real business school, he said, in a way that the MBA simply was not.

He named Paul McAvinchey, his co-founder at Product Collective, as someone without whom none of the community work would exist. They started something together with nothing and built it into something real.

He named Bryan Chaikin, his co-founder at eFuneral, and Kurt Pettit, his partner on an earlier side project called Appstand. He said something about co-founders that I want to share here, because it is true and not said often enough.

“Starting things can be a lonely process. The ups are very high and the downs can be very low, and sometimes you feel them both in the same day. Having somebody who is there with you the whole time makes a big difference.”

And he named his wife, Hannah. He said that having someone at home who is supportive, who is successful in her own right, who understands what it means to build something, made it possible for him to do what he did. He could not imagine going through it without that.

Is It Okay to Not Know What You Are Doing?

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

Mike thought about it. Then he said something I had not heard before.

He said the question he wishes someone would ask product people, in interviews and in conversations and in all the places where we perform our competence, is this: “Is it okay to not know what I am doing?”

He built a conference because he was looking for a community. He built a community because he was a confused product person who did not want other confused product people to feel alone. He is writing a book about the qualities that make product people good at their work, not because he has them mastered, but because he thinks they can be practiced and he wants to show other people how.

Everything he has built has been for the version of himself who needed it first. And having one of the truest product hearts I’ve seen, Mike shares because he knows how to help solve pain and need in our community.

You can find Mike at MikeBelsito.com and on LinkedIn. You can also see him in person at Pendo and Mind the Product’s various community events and conferences throughout the world. His book will be published by Wiley and is expected to be released in February of 2027.

Go find him before then and tell him Christine sent you.

When I asked her to be a part of this series and she said yes, something told me it would be a real real one. The conversation we had felt less like an interview and more like catching up with a friend I had been meaning to call.

Debbie is currently VP of Product at loveholidays, a UK-based online travel company. Before that she was interim CPO at the Financial Times, and before that Product Director for FT.com and apps. Before all of that she was at the BBC, and before the BBC she was in the UK civil service for nearly a decade, building things for the people who needed them most.

That last part is where her story really starts. And it is, I think, the most interesting part of who she is.

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Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: VP of Product at loveholidays, a UK-based online travel company.

Before that: Interim CPO at the Financial Times (2024 to 2025). Product Director, FT.com and apps (2021 to 2024). Head of Product, BBC Account (2020 to 2021).

Before tech: Nearly a decade at the UK Department for Work and Pensions. Head of Product Strategy, Universal Credit (2016 to 2019). Head of Service Design, Universal Credit (2015 to 2016). Jobcentre District Manager, Essex (2012 to 2014). Private Secretary to the Minister for Employment (2009 to 2012).

Education: BSc Hons Mathematics, University of Glasgow.

Grew up in: Ayr, Scotland. Population 40,000. No product managers to be seen ;)

Known for: Outcome-focused leadership, calling it out when something needs to be called out, and the ability to spot potential in a person before they can see it themselves.

Where She Came From

Debbie grew up in Ayr, a small town on the west coast of Scotland. Forty thousand people. Both her parents were teachers, her father a head teacher, her mother an assistant head, and neither of them moved around much. Her dad worked at one school for his entire career and got promoted up through it. The idea that their daughter would end up as a VP at a consumer tech company in London, having spent a decade building digital products at some of the UK’s most recognizable institutions, would have likely been unimaginable.

She said this herself, with the particular kind of warmth that comes from people who have traveled a long way from where they started and still feel the distance.

She studied mathematics at the University of Glasgow. When it came to figuring out what to do next, she knew a few things: she did not want a traditional profession, she did not want to pick one specific thing, and she grew up in an environment where stability was what you aimed for. The civil service, which offered the chance to do many different things without locking her into a single track, made sense. So that is where she went.

She has been figuring out what is next ever since. And every time she has figured it out, it has been bigger than the time before.

What the Civil Service Actually Gave Her

I asked Debbie what the civil service gave her that a more traditional tech path might not have. Her first answer was perspective, and she gave a very specific version of it.

She said that even the worst thing that could happen in a product organization, a budget overrun, a launch that goes badly, a quarter that misses, feels different when you have previously worked in an environment where a staff member getting punched in the face was not an unusual occurrence. Where the stakes of a bad day were not retention metrics but whether someone could put food on the table.

She was not dismissive of the stakes in tech. She was clear that she does not use this to minimize what goes wrong. But she said it does give her the ability, even in her hardest moments, to ground herself in the fact that the problem is solvable and that she has dealt with worse.

Her second answer was about management. She led her first team at twenty-three. By the time she got to tech she had managed large teams in genuinely complex human situations, people navigating circumstances she had never personally experienced, and had learned early that when you have a team of that size, delegation is not a philosophy. It is a survival mechanism.

“I have never found delegation all that difficult because relatively early in my career I had a huge team. You cannot do the jobs of eighty or ninety people. It is impossible. So you have to learn to let go. But then have empathy with the individual when that is the right thing.”

She said something else about management. I think it is the thing she most wanted to say. She is watching the current wave of flattening and de-layering in tech and she recognizes it from previous waves. She sees people being promoted to VP earlier today, before they have ever bought a car, then having someone come to them with a cancer diagnosis, and not knowing what to do. She is not against leaner structures. But she believes, with real conviction, that humans motivating humans and having empathy with humans in a way that makes a company more than the sum of its parts is something that stripping out management cannot replicate.

The People Who Made a Difference

When I asked Debbie who modeled a way of thinking she still recognizes in herself, she first named a former boss, JP, from her civil service years.

She worked for JP three times across different roles in the same organization. She said she only understood what she was learning from him many years after the fact. He made a specific, deliberate choice: he traded junior headcount for senior leadership, believing that investing in the quality of leadership, even at a short-term cost to worker capacity, would produce a better workforce, better outcomes, and ultimately better results for the people those teams served.

He did it in multiple organizations. The people who followed him tended to carry the lesson even when the structure eventually unwound. Debbie was one of them.

“He was willing to put himself on the line to make it happen. He didn’t go to his boss and say he needed extra money. He said I can make this happen in my own environment. I can make these choices and I can achieve the thing I’m standing by.”

That combination, the belief in the power of leadership and the willingness to stake your own position on it, is something she has carried into every role since.

She also shared thanks for another human, JK, with a beautiful and simple why: He reminded her many times that our lives actually don’t go in a nice straight path and our dreams can take many forms and must be our own, and no-one else’s.

And finally, there is Lara Sampson. She was the first woman Debbie worked for in tech, and she described her with a specific kind of warmth that I recognized immediately - the warmth you reserve for someone who made something feel possible that you were not sure was possible for you.

Lara was juggling children and a demanding job and working part-time, and doing all of it with a quality of thinking that Debbie said she has rarely seen matched. But what she kept coming back to was not the accomplishment. It was the accessibility of it. Lara was not someone who made you feel like you were watching a performance you could never replicate. She was someone who made you feel like you could get there too, if you paid attention and kept going.

“She was an accessible version of amazing. You knew she wasn’t amazing at everything. But she totally knew how to mitigate those things and hire people around her. I just learned so much from her. I wouldn’t work in product if it wasn’t for Lara.”

Not the most famous name. Not the biggest platform. The woman who made the path feel navigable when it might otherwise have felt closed. That is the kind of thanks that means something.

Fifty Million Users, a Pandemic, and a Product That Went Down

Debbie joined the BBC as Head of Product for BBC Account in 2020. She had been there for eight weeks total when the pandemic hit. She went on holiday for one week. She came back on a Monday.

That Monday evening, the UK went into lockdown. The entire country tried to get onto iPlayer at the same time. BBC Account was the gateway. Her product went down.

She told me this with the particular tone of someone who has processed the memory thoroughly and emerged with a very specific lesson:

But the deeper thing she took from the BBC was about value. At a commercial company, she said, you can attach value to a price. Someone pays four ninety-nine a month and you can build a list of what that buys them and ask whether the exchange feels fair. At the BBC, that mechanism did not exist. What she discovered was that people could articulate the value the BBC brought to their lives with remarkable clarity when asked, even without a price tag anchoring the conversation. The research the BBC had done, actually removing the service temporarily from sample groups to understand what they would miss, produced results that surprised her.

“People were able to articulate much more clearly than I had ever anticipated what value the BBC was bringing to them. But the organization found it difficult to cut through the noise to communicate that back.”

The metric she kept coming back to was something the BBC had developed internally around habit and multi-modal engagement. If a user came to the BBC for a certain number of hours across a certain number of days through at least two different modes, whether that was web, TV, radio, or app, and they were logged in and getting a personalized experience, they renewed their license fee. They kept paying because the value had become tangible rather than assumed.

She still references that framework. At loveholidays now, she said, they are asking what it means to describe something as a good value holiday. Not the cheapest. The best value for whatever you spent. That is a hard question to get to the heart of, and the BBC taught her that the way to get there is not to assume you know the answer. It is to ask.

Operating Inside the Bubble

The Financial Times is subscription-driven, journalist-forward, and very clear about what it is and what it is not. I asked her what the hardest thing was about building product inside a world-class editorial organization. Her answer was not what I expected.

She said the hardest thing was not the journalists. It was learning to know your bubble.

She gave a very clear example. If her team went out and did thorough research and discovered that millions more people would read the FT if it had a celebrity gossip column, that was a useless piece of information. Because that was never going to happen. The editorial strategy was the container within which she could operate, and the sooner she understood the shape of that container and started working powerfully inside it rather than fighting its edges, the more effective she became.

“The parameters in which I operate are around me almost like a bubble. The editorial strategy. I can only operate within that. I can push the boundaries of it and figure out how to best utilize it. But I still have to operate within it. Otherwise, I’m essentially useless.”

She talked about finding the people inside the organization who were also up for pushing the boundaries within the container. Working with one of the heads of newsletters, for example, who was genuinely curious about experimentation. Testing something in a space where the door was open, and then using that evidence to explore somewhere else.

I asked her whether that felt relevant to the AI moment we are all in now, where everyone is being told to move fast and ship AI features and the customers are still just trying to get through their day. She lit up.

She chuckled somewhat, and told me she is giving a talk the next day called the AI Adoption Gap. Her central argument: the product community is living in a bubble, talking about AI every minute of every day, and has almost entirely lost the thread back to the humans outside that bubble who are just trying to get on with their lives.

Hallelujah!

She used WhatsApp’s Meta AI integration as her example. The top suggested prompt when she opened it to check was parenting advice. She is not a parent. She did not ask for the feature. Nobody asked her if she wanted it. Mind you, she loves WhatsApp but this experience was not one someone like us would find delightful. Many of us would do well to think about this for a moment today, and ask whether we’re still focused on that customer who brought us success in the first place.

This is the thread running through everything Debbie has built: who is this actually for, and are we still talking to them?

What She Was Looking For Next

When Debbie started thinking about what came after the FT, she was very clear about what she wanted. Smaller. Faster. A company that knew where it was going. And she wanted to be the only one.

That last one took me a second to understand. She explained it with a bluntness I have come to appreciate in our field: she was tired of negotiating across a peer group as well as up and down and across the rest of the organization. She wanted to drive the product strategy without the horizontal politics that come with being one of several people who each own a piece.

Loveholidays, a PE-owned UK online travel company of fewer than five hundred people, gave her all of that. She is VP of Product. She is one of one, as she says.

One of the first things she built there, shepherding it closely because it mattered to her, was the company’s own customer review system. Loveholidays became the first UK-based online travel agent to host its own customer reviews on site for hotels. She had a product manager on her team who believed in it before the rest of the company did. She backed them, spent six months aligning the organization, navigated the compliance questions, and watched the product manager grow through the complexity of getting it across the line.

Two weeks before we spoke, they had launched in Scandinavia. Customer service called some of the first customers who had booked in a brand new market to ask why they had chosen loveholidays. One of the first people they reached, a customer from Norway, said: because you had your own reviews and I read them and they convinced me.

“This is what I do this job for. This is my joy.”

Using the Privilege You Did Not Ask For

Debbie has spoken publicly about being the only woman in rooms and choosing to call out behavior that makes women uncomfortable, not just for herself but for the junior women who do not yet feel they have the weight to do it.

I asked her what pushed her to advocate so fiercely. Her answer was disarmingly honest.

She laid out her own privilege for me. She is a white middle-class woman in tech with no disabilities, no health conditions, and no children. She is clear that she is in the room partly because of that privilege, not despite it. And she said that the only thing she can do with the privilege of being there is use it, because there are many other talented women who have had a harder time getting to the same place.

I told her, as a brown woman with children who has fought for seats, sometimes bringing my own chair, and then realizing some tables were not worth fighting to be a part of, that I appreciated her for doing it. She heard me.

To any woman who can identify with Debbie’s position, and uses that to advocate - not to be performative - for the drowned out voices, we appreciate you.

When I asked her about her advice to women in tech, she was equally direct about what she was not saying. She was not telling anyone to lean in or act like a man or pretend the system is designed for them. She knows it is not.

What she was saying is that she has watched women spend enormous amounts of energy looking backward and inward, measuring themselves against where they should have been by now, rather than looking forward at where they actually want to go. And she thinks that shift, even partial, even imperfect, is the thing with the most practical impact.

“You are here now. And the more time you spend looking forward, the more chance you have of getting to that place. And then probably from there the next place will be easier, and then the next, and it compounds.”

There is no magic in this advice. She said so herself. But it is sound, and she said it with the particular authority of someone who went from a job center in Essex to a CPO seat at the Financial Times and still wakes up slightly amazed at where she ended up.

The Thread You Pull That Changes Everything

Nina was working at a job center in Harlow, Essex. She was a team lead, a couple of levels below Debbie in the organization. She was smart, switched on, and doing work that was not close to the ceiling of what she was capable of.

In one of their early one-on-ones, Debbie looked at her and asked a question that must have felt very strange to receive: what are you doing here?

Not an accusation. A genuine question born of recognition - a Debbie question. Someone with this much going for her, still here, still in this particular box. What was keeping her there?

This was 2012, roughly fifteen years ago.

A job came around for a subject matter expert role on Universal Credit. Debbie saw it and knew immediately. Nina came around the corner at that exact moment, on her way to ask whether she could apply. Debbie said yes before she finished the question. Nina moved from subject matter expert to business analyst to product manager, was eventually promoted to lead PM, and two years later, after Debbie had already moved to the Financial Times, Debbie had the same conversation with her again: why are you still in government? You have a profession now. Come and try somewhere else.

Nina was very far in her professional career in years, and concerned time was not on her side.

Debbie, characteristically, told her to stop it.

Nina came to the FT. She is now a Group Manager there, working with journalists on content products.

“I pulled a thread that resulted in so many things being different for her than they possibly would have been. And what it reminds me of is that you can have a huge impact on an individual person. I didn’t make her apply for that job. I didn’t get her the job. But I pulled a thread.”

She paused. And then she said something that she didn’t know I needed to hear right now.

Nobody is too old. Nina had thirty years in the civil service when she was fifty. She took a risk anyway. The worst that happens in almost all cases is not as bad as we build it up to be inside our heads. The boxes we put ourselves in are almost always smaller than the life that is available on the other side of them.

What Nobody Tells You About the CPO Seat

I asked Debbie what surprised her most about making the jump from Product Director to CPO. She did not hesitate.

She said she genuinely believed she was about to run one enormous delivery unit. She had been running a large piece of the FT’s consumer product and now she would get to run all of it. She was excited.

What she discovered was that she was not running one big delivery unit. She was running five separate ones, and the tools she had used to manage a single delivery unit, moving people around, rebalancing outcomes, responding quickly to what was working and what was not, were simply not available at the CPO level in the same way.

“The levers I used to have within one delivery unit to go, okay, this bit is not going so well, I can move people around and swap some outcomes around. At the CPO level, you can’t do that. Because the organization has spent months negotiating how the investment is structured. You cannot just come in and move ten people from here to there.”

The second thing she named was the team. At CPO level, she said, your home team - or as some of us know it as, ‘first team’ - has to be your cross-functional peers. Not the product organization. The whole leadership table. Because if every person around that table is only fighting for their own area, the company goes nowhere. And the moment you walk into that room, you have to be able to ask what is good for the whole company right now, even if the answer genuinely annoys every product person in the building.

What She Wishes Someone Would Ask

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

Debbie thought about it for a moment. I wanted to honor her honesty without overreaching into territory she shared in the spirit of thinking out loud.

She said that whenever anyone asks how she is, the answer is always fine. And that after a while, you forget what the real answer would even be. She mentioned this quietly - that there are hard things happening outside of work, the kind that do not belong in a team meeting or a board update, and that the performance of being okay is so well practiced that the authentic answer and the question almost stop connecting.

Debbie also shared that she thinks women in the workplace, in particular, need spaces where that question gets asked and answered honestly. Not in the team meeting. Not in the board update. In the smaller, safer spaces that are harder to find when you are often the only woman in the room.

She did not say this as a complaint. She said it as an observation from someone who has spent a long time in rooms that were not designed with her in mind, finding ways to do extraordinary work inside them anyway.

That is, in the end, the story of Debbie McMahon. Not the trajectory, though the trajectory is remarkable. The way she moves through every environment she enters: clear-eyed about its constraints, curious about what is possible within them, and always, always paying attention to the humans.

Even, and maybe especially, the ones nobody else has noticed yet.

You can find Debbie on LinkedIn. She is giving talks, building things at loveholidays, and probably already thinking three moves ahead.

Debbie, thank you. London feels like a long time ago now. I’m glad I was smart enough to know that day you are in fact, a real one. I am also very happy I snuck and took this photo of your laptop cover backstage - thanks for letting me share here :)

His teachings shaped how an entire generation of product people understand what this role actually is. I took INSPIRED on vacation between companies and read it cover to cover with a highlighter in 2018. There is a line in there I have carried for years: “We can’t ignore the market, but remember that customers rarely leave us for our competitors. They leave us because we stop taking care of them.”

The proof :)

When I reached out to ask if he would sit down with me, I fully expected a polite no. He said yes.

We talked for over an hour about his father, about him working at some of the best companies that set the bar for product success, about what AI is actually changing and what it is not, about the culture problem that nobody wants to name, and about why the thing that gives him the most hope for this community is the same thing it has always been: the people in it who genuinely care.

Here is how the product heart of Marty Cagan came to be.

Education and Professional Highlights

Currently: Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG). Coaching, writing, speaking, and advising. Founded in 2001.

Before that: SVP Product and Design at eBay. VP Platform and VP E-Commerce at Netscape, working directly for co-founder Marc Andreessen. Software developer and engineering manager at HP Labs for ten years. Three major companies in a row, each bigger than the last.

Books: INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (2008, second edition 2017). EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (with Chris Jones). TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model.

Education: B.A. Computer Science and Applied Economics, UC Santa Cruz, 1981. Stanford University Executive Institute, 1994. Learned to program at age seven.

Currently based: Colorado - making his way back to Cali after 15 years.

His father: The first person in the United States to earn a PhD in computer science. Started as an MD before the NIH funded him to go back to school because they believed computers were the future. Published the first book on database management systems via Wiley.

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Where He Came From

Before SVPG. Before INSPIRED. Before Netscape and eBay and HP Labs. There was a little kid running around a university computer center in a small college town, because his father was going back to school.

Marty’s father made a remarkable decision. He was an MD who became convinced that computers were going to change everything. The National Institutes of Health agreed and paid for him to pursue a PhD in what was, at the time, a program that barely existed. Though there were many computer scientists around, they had graduated from electrical engineering programs. As far as anyone can verify, Carl Cagan was the first person in the United States to earn a doctoral degree in computer science. He went on to become a professor, and along the way he published the first book on database management systems through John Wiley and Sons, the same publisher that would one day publish his son’s work that changed the way we build.

Marty was six when his father started the program and ten when he finished. Which meant that for the years in between, he got to grow up inside a university, surrounded by people who thought about computing as the frontier of what was possible.

His father taught him to program at seven. At the time, Marty told me, this was genuinely unusual. Today, as some of us parents know, it is common. Back then, it was not. And what it gave him, more than any specific language or skill, was a mental model that stayed with him for the rest of his career: that you can make computers do cool things. That there is no limit to what those things might be. That you should not be afraid of the machine.

“It wasn’t even a question when I went to college. I had already known four programming languages. To me it was just more like a really fun thing. Timing was good.”

He watched his father struggle on the business side. His father started a one-person company, programmed everything in assembly language, which Marty gently describes as a terrible decision, and watched him execute on extraordinary engineering with no business thinking in the mix. He felt the business went nowhere because of this. Marty sat with that. He did not want to repeat it. So when he got to UC Santa Cruz and discovered that there was no business program but there was something called applied economics, he signed up. He did not plan on a double major. He just kept taking the courses until someone pointed out he had one.

He graduated in 1981 and started his career at HP Labs.

None of the rest of it was planned either. We can see the pieces assembling themselves in real time. The kid in the computer center. The programming languages at seven. The father who knew the technology and missed the business.

How Product Found Him

Marty spent ten years at HP Labs as a software developer and engineering manager, and he describes it the way people describe a place they did not fully appreciate until they left. HP at the time had the reputation Google has today: considered the most innovative company in the world. What he did not know until he got somewhere else was how unusual the culture was.

“Every single day I had at least one person assigned to help me get better at my job. And I thought everybody had this. It wasn’t until after I left that I realized almost nobody has this advantage.”

If he wanted to learn design, they arranged for a designer to coach him. If he wanted to understand product management, they found someone. It was not a perk. It was the culture. Coaching was how HP made people better, and making people better was how HP made things worth using.

He also spent part of his time at HP in the Software Technology Lab, which was led by a brilliant researcher from MIT named Ira Goldstein. And he worked in the AI group. He mentioned this almost as an aside, in that way people mention things that seem obvious to them in retrospect: he has been thinking about artificial intelligence for more than forty years. What is happening now is not new to him. It is just finally arriving.

For those of you who know the history of Product Management, you know that HP was one of the earliest to adopt the right mindset and weave certain things into their culture. This includes deeply understanding the customer, following in P&G’s footsteps, and formalizing the role of the PM, separating engineering from business and customer focused individuals. HP ended up delivering to the world some of the best minds in the business, Marty Cagan being one of them.

After HP came Netscape. He was there for the birth of the internet, working directly for Marc Andreessen, building the infrastructure the whole world would eventually run on. After Netscape came eBay, two years as SVP of Product and Design during one of the wildest periods of growth in the industry’s history. By his own account it was intense. Pretty much seven days a week. No balance.

And then it was suddenly more intense, and in the best way for his personal life.

He and his wife had adopted two babies. He was exhausted after more than twenty years of building at that pace. He wanted something different. He thought maybe he would take a year, write a book, share some of what he had learned. It was not supposed to become a twenty-plus year practice that would reshape how an entire industry thought about its work.

“I was in the right place at the right time, especially at Netscape. Because of that, a lot of people were calling me and saying, can you come talk to our team? And I realized maybe there’s something there. Maybe it’s not just an informal thing. Maybe there’s a real need to share these things.”

He started writing, giving talks, and spending time with teams. INSPIRED came out in 2008. And it just kept going.

What He Actually Believes About This Work And the Best Product People

Some of the best things Marty said in our conversation were not the things most people would expect to pull from a conversation with Marty Cagan. Not the frameworks. Not the models. The things underneath them.

He has said before that product management is the most important non-executive position in a company. He also said it is a tough career and he does not recommend it to everyone. And rather than treating those as contradictory, he held them together carefully.

The difficulty is not the hours, though the hours are real. It’s the accountability. When you sign up for outcomes - not just outputs - when you genuinely care about whether the thing you built solved the problem you were trying to solve, that weight does not go away at the end of the sprint. The best product people he knows, he said, work incredibly hard. But they do not feel like they are being forced to. They feel like they are finally doing the thing they were supposed to do.

“I was taught very early on as a first-time manager that if you have to tell your people to work more, you failed. I really think that’s true. I see the power of inspiring people and empowering them over forcing or coercing them.”

He said something else about people that is incredibly important. He told me that he occasionally meets someone who he is completely certain is going to do extraordinary things in product. And he is usually right. What is the quality that makes him certain? He said he cannot fully articulate it. But here are a few things he notices:

1. The people who “have it” tend to have agency.

2. These people are not afraid to think.

3. These people believe in their own judgment even when they are uncertain about everything else.

And then he said: “Often they need to be convinced. Often, especially women, they do not believe they can do it.”

Marty, we feel seen.

He described an anti-pattern he has seen repeat throughout his career: someone sitting in front of him with all of the qualities of an exceptional product leader, who does not believe it is possible for them. And him saying, with complete conviction: “You are so much better than you think. Please trust me on this. You are going to love this work like you have never loved a job before.”

I thought about Elena Verna when he said this. Two weeks prior she had told me the same thing from the other side of the table: the imposter syndrome she carried for years, the realization that the confidence she was comparing herself to was often a performance, and how the doubt eventually became a superpower. It is the same story told from two different vantage points. And it keeps being true.

Build to Learn vs Build to Earn

This is the framework Marty has been writing about most recently, and it is the one that I think really matters in this moment. He did not invent the phrase. Jeff Patton did, years ago, and Marty wrote it down the first time he heard it and kept it. In the age of generative AI, he said, it finally has the resonance it deserves.

The core idea is simple. In product discovery, you are building to learn. You are trying to discover a combination of technology, experience, and business constraints that actually works. You are building prototypes, not products. You are testing against risk, not shipping against a roadmap. The purpose of what you are making is to find out if you should make it at all.

In product delivery, you are building to earn. You are building something commercial, something customers can depend on, something that needs to perform and scale and be secure and work as advertised. The skills, the tools, the mindset, all of it is different.

What AI has changed, he said, is not the distinction between these two things. It has made the distinction more visible and more urgent. Because now that building is cheap and fast, it is finally clear to everyone that the bottleneck was not the engineers. It was always knowing what was worth building.

“Before, if you talked to a CEO three years ago, they would say, give me a break. 90% of our costs are engineers. It takes forever to get anything launched. Now it’s pretty clear. It’s not the engineers after all. It’s what they’re trying to build. Which is the hard part.”

He is also watching something happen right now that concerns him. A lot of product managers have simply been using these amazing new tools to just speed up the process they’ve always used (which SVPG refers to as the “project model” and “feature teams”). They are using gen AI to aggregate feedback, generate roadmaps, and generate PRDs - essentially just accelerating their old way of working. Yet they are confused when output increases but outcomes remain unchanged.

He said it directly: if that is what you think your job is, you have just automated your job out of existence. You have shown your manager that you are not necessary. That is not the contribution.

On AI, Coaching, and What Is Actually a Game Changer

Marty has been thinking about artificial intelligence for more than forty years. He said this almost offhandedly, mentioning that he studied AI at UC Santa Cruz as part of his computer science program, that he worked in an AI group at HP Labs, that the problems he was working on then are the problems everyone is working on now. The difference is less about the arrival of the tools we’re all leaning into, and more that the technology is far beyond the primitive AI technology that existed a few decades ago. The technical progress and breakthroughs that have enabled today’s generative AI are incredible.

He is genuinely excited about two things in the current moment. The first is what AI is doing for delivery: in the hands of knowledgeable engineers, tools like Claude Code are making it possible to build production-quality software in ways that were not possible before. He thinks we are still in the early innings of this and that the progress will continue.

The second is prototyping for discovery. The four types of prototypes have always existed, but the calculus has completely changed. The live-data prototype, which used to be the most expensive and time-consuming kind, is now one of the easiest to create. For product managers who are building to learn, this is, in his words, “manna from heaven”.

But the thing he is most excited about, and he said this with a clarity that surprised me, is AI as a coaching tool. He has been spending time in Africa with his partner Christian Idiodi, who runs the largest product conference on the continent, Inspire Africa, pulling in a thousand people each year. What he sees there is extraordinary talent with almost no access to coaching, no managers who have worked this way before, no infrastructure for developing product sense.

“The idea that anybody in the world - if you’re in Lagos, Nigeria, or in Kigali, Rwanda, wherever you are - and you’ve got a phone with an internet connection, you can get a very good seven-by-24 product coach to teach you. That’s a game changer.”

Even in the best companies, he said, a product person might get one coaching session a week if they are lucky. AI makes that available at any hour, in any context, to anyone with a connection.

That is the thing he is most optimistic about. Not the speed of shipping. The democratization of becoming.

The Book, His Father, and What Stayed True

INSPIRED came out in its first edition in 2008. Marty told me that when he went back to write the second edition ten years later, he assumed it would be a revision. A few updates, some new examples.

There is not a single page from the first edition in the second. He rewrote everything. Not because the principles had changed, but because the techniques had evolved so dramatically that everything around the principles needed to be rebuilt.

I naturally asked about a third edition now. I think the most quietly confident thing he said in our entire conversation was this: Up until a couple of years ago, INSPIRED was inspiring for a lot of people, but something they felt they could not actually do. Today, he is hearing something different. Today people are saying: that is our playbook.

YES.

The tools have finally made possible what the principles always described. And INSPIRED, by something that looks like luck but is probably more than that, has never been more relevant.

I asked him what he thought his father would make of all of it. The books, the community, the decades of work. He was quiet for a moment and smiled. Then he said his father got to see a chunk of it, which was good. That he liked what he saw. That even though his father was a hundred percent on the engineering side, he had learned his lessons about what lies beyond engineering. And that he was glad, Marty thought, to see his son carrying those lessons into the world.

“I’m very grateful to him that he showed me this path.”

I told him with full feeling that we are all grateful for that.

The People Who Changed Everything

When I asked Marty who he wanted to thank, he resisted the easy answer and gave the specific one.

He talked about HP, where the culture of coaching made him who he is as a developer and as a leader. About Netscape, where working for Marc Andreessen and alongside Ben Horowitz gave him a front-row view of what product excellence actually looks like at speed. About Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay, whom he genuinely liked and learned from during some of the hardest years of his career.

And then he named the person who rarely gets named. Chris Jones, his partner at SVPG. Co-author of EMPOWERED. The person who has read every draft, pushed back on every piece of content, found every blind spot for more than twenty years.

“It’s really good to find somebody who thinks differently than you when you’re a content creator. Chris thinks totally differently than me. I write a draft and I send it to him and I don’t know what he’s going to say, but he always comes at me with something I didn’t see. I can’t believe I missed that. And that happens every time.”

If you have read something from Marty and thought it was good, Chris probably has his fingerprints all over it. He shared this proudly with me. Not because Marty cannot write - but because the best ideas are not solo performances. They are the result of someone who can tell you what you need to hear, with enough care that you actually hear it.

That is also what the best product culture looks like. Not a leader who has all the answers. A leader who has built the space where someone can say: this is not right, and here is why. The yes-people rise in cultures where that space does not exist. Where being challenged feels like a threat instead of a gift. Marty has spent more than twenty years building one of the most influential bodies of work in this industry. And he is the first to tell you that the outcome is better because someone he trusts has never been afraid to tell him he is wrong. That is not a small thing. For most leaders, it is the hardest thing. And it is exactly where the best cultures separate from the rest.

What He Most Wants This Community to Understand

I asked Marty what he most wants this community to understand. Not read or know abstractly, but actually internalize.

His answer was product sense. And his argument was that too many people believe it is something you either have or you do not. That it is intuition. That it is innate.

He does not believe that at all.

Developing it takes time and it takes deliberate effort. It takes getting close to customers in a way that is not optional and cannot be delegated. And it is, he said, the foundation of everything else. The techniques are learnable. The tools are learnable. The frameworks are learnable. Product sense is the thing underneath all of it that makes the rest of it actually work.

I thought about the forty years he has been in this. The kid in the computer center. The college kid who just knew that balance was necessary in his majors. The developer at HP who thought everyone got coached every single day. The executive at Netscape and eBay who built things that changed how the world communicated and bought and sold. The person who decided to spend the second half of his career teaching and giving back rather than building.

All of it is an accumulation. All of it is product sense, built over a lifetime of immersion.

We could all be so lucky.

You can find Marty Cagan and the full SVPG library at svpg.com. INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, and TRANSFORMED are available wherever books are sold. If you have not read them, start with INSPIRED. Buy a hard copy and a good highlighter.

Marty, thank you. For the interview, for the books, for always being authentic and outspoken on how PMs should do better, and for two decades of showing up for this community.

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.