Or, Who Decides What Goes in ‘Next’? You can usually tell how solid a roadmap is about two weeks after it’s shared.That’s when “Now” starts to shift, “Next” gets debated again, and “Later” quietly grows. Nothing dramatic. No big reset. Just small adjustments that signal something wasn’t resolved the first time. Now/Next/Later, as a planning approach, is meant to make roadmaps more honest. Less performative certainty, more flexibility. It’s a useful correction to date-driven p

Market research didn’t start as a department. It started as paying attention. Somebody noticed which version of a product people picked up first.Somebody else caught the hesitation right after a price was mentioned.Then they made a change—and watched what happened next. That was the essence of it: notice, understand, improve. Build something better because you actually saw what people did, not just what they said. As businesses scaled, that proximity disappeared. You couldn’t

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

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

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

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

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...

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....

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...

There’s a particular kind of tired we see on the faces of so many product managers. It’s not just from late nights or back-to-back...

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...

The announcement of new tariffs has sent ripples through global supply chains and boardroom discussions alike. For many businesses,...

“Measure what matters.”   It’s one of those phrases that’s become so widely accepted in business that it no longer gets questioned. A...

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

Whether it’s a new product, a reinvigorated marketing plan or a concept for more efficient operations, innovation is the cornerstone of...

In a world of subscription fatigue, fierce competition, and evolving customer expectations, lapsing customers are the silent killers of...

As product managers, it's natural to believe that we know our products inside and out. After all, we are the architects behind the...