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

User stories look clean on the page. “As a [user], I want to [do something], so that [I get value].” They create the sense that the problem is understood. That the user is known. That the work ahead is mostly execution. Then you start building. And somewhere along the way, the story starts to thin out. The “user” turns out to be a composite. The “want” reflects a mix of requests, not a clear job. The “value” is directionally right but not specific enough to guide tradeoffs. W

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

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

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...

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

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

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....

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

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

Most teams say they want bold thinking. Most organizations don’t reward it. Not when the roadmap is already full. Not when the metrics...