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

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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

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....

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

At some point, every product manager has felt it: The impossible weight of building the "perfect product." Perfect in functionality....

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

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...

A few years ago, we sat across the table from a product executive at a fast-scaling SaaS company. Their roadmap was...

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

In fast-moving product organizations, timely decision-making is often the difference between momentum and missed opportunity. Too...