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Discovery Debt: When Learning Falls Behind Building
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

Paul Peterson
Oct 193 min read


The Flywheel Effect and Catalytic Customers
Jim Collins popularized the idea of the flywheel effect in Good to Great . The metaphor is simple but powerful: success doesn’t come...

Paul Peterson
Sep 162 min read


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

Paul Peterson
Sep 32 min read


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

Paul Peterson
Aug 92 min read


Infinite Ideas, Finite Chips: Winning the Innovation Game
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...

Paul Peterson
Jul 302 min read


"The Customer is Always Right" is Wrong
For more than a century, businesses have been told to treat “the customer as always right.” Coined by retailers like Harry Gordon...

Paul Peterson
Jul 283 min read


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

Paul Peterson
Jun 132 min read


Don't Have "Innovation" in Your Title? Doesn't Matter.
In my humble opinion, we’ve let the word innovation get too far away from its meaning. It’s been hijacked by pitch decks and product...

Paul Peterson
Jun 82 min read


How to Tune In When Everyone's Tuning Out
We’ve reached a strange inflection point in marketing and innovation. On one hand, we’ve never seen more content, more campaigns, more...

Paul Peterson
May 303 min read


The High Price of Getting It Almost Right
When we talk about product failure in tech, we tend to picture the big blowups. The high-profile launches that crater on impact. The...

Paul Peterson
May 183 min read


Design Isn’t Optional
A few weeks ago, I posted something on LinkedIn that went viral. It wasn’t a hot take. It wasn’t tied to a product launch or a trend....

Paul Peterson
May 163 min read


“Wait. What?” The Spark Behind Real Innovation
We like to think of innovation as a process: structured, sequenced, neatly mapped. But more often, it begins with a glitch in the matrix....

Paul Peterson
Apr 302 min read


The Myth of the Perfect Product, or Why Progress Beats Perfection
At some point, every product manager has felt it: The impossible weight of building the "perfect product." Perfect in functionality....

Paul Peterson
Apr 272 min read


“Product Owner?” That’s Cute.
Somewhere along the winding road of Agile transformation and Silicon Valley job title inflation, we decided to start calling people...

Paul Peterson
Apr 183 min read


Be Bold or Be Boring
We work with product teams every day who want to build what’s next. They want to stand out, be different. They want to grow. But too...

Paul Peterson
Apr 83 min read


Creating a Culture of Innovation—with Catalytic Customers at the Core
A few years ago, we sat across the table from a product executive at a fast-scaling SaaS company. Their roadmap was...

Paul Peterson
Apr 24 min read


How to Develop More Effective User Stories
In Agile product development, User Stories are a cornerstone for delivering features that delight users and drive business growth. But...

Paul Peterson
Mar 283 min read


The Research Bottleneck Is Slowing Your Best Ideas
In fast-moving product organizations, timely decision-making is often the difference between momentum and missed opportunity. Too...

Paul Peterson
Mar 243 min read


Designing for Real People in a Synthetic Age
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in product development—powering everything from personalization engines to...

Paul Peterson
Mar 233 min read


The Best Experience Insights Don’t Come from Surveys
Innovating experiences starts with understanding how people actually use what you’ve built. Experience innovation gets discussed a lot....

Paul Peterson
Mar 203 min read
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