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

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...

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

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

Why Catalytic Customers Are Crucial in an AI-Fueled Innovation Era Let’s start with the obvious: AI can generate more ideas, faster, and...

We’ve reached a strange inflection point in marketing and innovation. On one hand, we’ve never seen more content, more campaigns, more...

Most product teams aren’t starved for data. They’ve got usage dashboards, survey tools, helpdesk logs, and analytics stacks. And in many...

When we talk about product failure in tech, we tend to picture the big blowups. The high-profile launches that crater on impact. The...

Spend enough time in strategy sessions and it comes up sooner or later: We need to future-proof this. It’s well-intentioned. Smart, even....

We like to think of innovation as a process: structured, sequenced, neatly mapped. But more often, it begins with a glitch in the matrix....

What if the real reason your innovation efforts stall has nothing to do with strategy? Nothing to do with budget. Nothing to do with...

Somewhere along the winding road of Agile transformation and Silicon Valley job title inflation, we decided to start calling people...