Product teams talk about risk constantly. They track it, mitigate it, escalate it, and reference it in nearly every decision discussion. What they rarely do is define it. As a result, “risk” becomes a vague proxy for unease. A catch-all label applied to disagreement, uncertainty, incomplete information, or the simple fear of being wrong. When that happens, risk stops being a tool for better decisions and starts functioning as a brake on them. Most stalled product decisions do

or, What to Do When Decisions Keep Getting Stuck There’s a particular kind of stuckness that shows up on capable product teams. It doesn’t look like chaos. The calendars are full. Research is happening. Dashboards get updated. Customer conversations are logged and circulated. Everyone involved can explain their point of view clearly and back it up with evidence. And yet “decisions” keep reopening. The roadmap shifts without really changing. Priorities feel provisional. Plann

Most product teams say they want fewer constraints. What they usually mean is fewer limits on ideas. Fewer gates. Fewer people telling them no. More room to explore. More freedom to imagine. It’s an understandable instinct. We see it all the time in our work at CoinJar Insights. But after decades of listening to customers, and after working closely with what we call Catalytic Customers, I’ve come to a different view. The right constraints don’t suffocate good ideas. They’re w

AI is changing how product teams work, no question. It listens, summarizes, predicts, and drafts. It’s efficient and, at times, eerily competent. But it also creates a kind of distance. The more time we spend reading summaries, the less time we spend listening. That’s how empathy gets dulled. And once it dulls, everything else does too: judgment, curiosity, imagination. Empathy isn’t about being nice. It’s about paying attention. About catching what people mean when they don’

Planning season comes around like clockwork. Budgets, OKRs, capacity models, prioritization frameworks—the rituals of focus and alignment. On paper, it’s a time for clarity. In reality, it often feels like an annual stage play: certainty (captured neatly in PowerPoint) built on incomplete understanding. Every PM knows the pattern. The more polished the plan, too often the shakier the foundations beneath it. The Fiction of Certainty Most of what gets discussed in planning seas

Most marketers and product teams can recite their funnel metrics by heart. Awareness, consideration, conversion. The ratios are tracked, the dashboards updated, the slides refreshed. But ask those same teams why  customers move (or don’t) through those stages, and the conversation usually thins out. That’s what we refer to as funnel myopia — the habit of staring at flow without seeing the forces that drive it. It’s an obsession with movement, not meaning. Funnel myopia narro

Every product team I know carries some form of debt. Most think in terms of technical debt—the shortcuts taken in code that later slow development. But there’s another kind of liability that quietly shapes almost every roadmap, meeting, and feature decision: discovery debt . It’s what accumulates when a team moves faster than it learns. When assumptions outpace evidence. When a backlog fills with guesses disguised as insight. And unlike technical debt, which can be seen and m

Jim Collins popularized the idea of the flywheel effect in Good to Great . The metaphor is simple but powerful: success doesn’t come from one big push, but from steady, repeated effort that builds momentum. Each turn of the wheel makes the next one easier. Over time, what once felt heavy and slow begins to move almost on its own. The same applies to innovation. Breakthroughs rarely come from one lightning bolt of inspiration. They come from repeated cycles of listening, buil

Consensus is seductive. It feels democratic, responsible, safe. Teams gather feedback, tally the votes, and tell themselves they’re...

Data analytics has become the default language of product decision-making. Every product manager we know spends at least part of their...

Most teams treat the “opportunity space” like it’s a chart you can fill in with the right research. Field the surveys, conduct the...

We’ve crossed into an era where generating ideas isn’t the hard part. AI can surface dozens of plausible concepts in seconds. Your team...

For more than a century, businesses have been told to treat “the customer as always right.” Coined by retailers like Harry Gordon...

Ideas aren’t the problem. Most product teams have more than they can manage. Whiteboards overflow, frameworks stack neatly, and someone...

Product managers rarely suffer from a lack of customer contact. Calls, site visits, advisory councils—most teams have some version of...

I've come to the uncomfortable realization that nobody—I mean nobody —really knows how to navigate the current economic craziness with...

At its core, a business has one job: to generate profit. That profit can come from growing revenue, lowering costs, or—ideally—both....

A lot of product teams are doing the right things, at least on paper. They’re shipping regularly, talking to users repeatedly, running...

Most brand health trackers are still built on a model that doesn’t reflect how modern buying happens. Especially in B2B. We’re still...

Seems like the signal-to-noise metaphor shows up everywhere anymore. It used to clarify things, helping us focus on what matters. Now it...