Writing
Things I read, and what I make of them
Each piece starts with something I came across and ends with the part I could not let go of.
Daily column20 September 2026Your Product Backlog Is Hiding Unfinished Decisions
Product leaders should manage unresolved decisions with the same discipline as delivery work, including a deadline, an owner and a default outcome.
Daily column19 September 2026Evidence Quality Belongs in the Product Budget
Product leaders should fund the systems that make results trustworthy, rather than treating measurement as a free by-product of shipping.
Daily column18 September 2026Discovery Is Incomplete Until Operations Can Survive the Product
Product discovery should test whether the company can operate a product at scale, not only whether customers want it and engineers can build it.
Daily column17 September 2026Staff Product Teams Around Failure Modes
Team design should follow the ways a product can fail, rather than mirroring its feature areas or technical architecture.
Daily column16 September 2026Usage Can Validate Demand and Still Damage the Business
Product teams should treat marginal cost and gross margin as part of product validation, rather than discovering after growth that popular usage is economically harmful.
Daily column15 September 2026Your Product Must Earn the Context Switch
As platforms absorb more adjacent tasks, standalone products should compete on whether their added value justifies asking users to leave the environment they are already in.
Daily column14 September 2026AI Agents Need an Authority Map, Not Just Permissions
Treating agent access as a technical permission problem hides the business decision of who may commit money, customer trust and operational capacity.
Daily column13 September 2026Product Teams Need a Formal Right to Dissent
Product autonomy only works when teams have a defined way to record, escalate and revisit disagreement without turning every decision into a consensus exercise.
Daily column12 September 2026Your Roadmap Has an Assumption Limit
A roadmap becomes unreliable when one initiative depends on too many unproven assumptions succeeding at the same time.
Daily column11 September 2026Not All Friction Is a Conversion Problem
Product teams should distinguish accidental friction from deliberate friction that protects capacity, service quality and customer intent.
Daily column10 September 2026Ambient Products Need Boundaries, Not Engagement Goals
As AI products move into the background, product teams must stop treating engagement as the default sign of value and start managing observation, interruption and operating costs.
Daily column9 September 2026When Building Gets Faster, Review Becomes the Bottleneck
AI does not remove delivery constraints; it moves them from producing work to validating, integrating and operating it.
Daily column8 September 2026Internal Vocabulary Is Leaking Into Your Product
Product leaders should treat inconsistent terminology as product debt because it creates friction across acquisition, onboarding, support and measurement.
Daily column7 September 2026Manual Mode Is a Core Feature, Not a Failure State
As automation takes on consequential work, product teams should design user takeover and recovery as part of the primary experience rather than as an emergency fallback.
Daily column6 September 2026Product Leaders Must Own the Claims Their Products Make
Product management should treat every customer-facing promise as part of the product, with explicit evidence, scope and ownership.
Daily column5 September 2026A Pilot Without a Stop Condition Is Already in Production
Product teams should define when and how to halt a pilot before agreeing on the evidence required to expand it.
Daily column4 September 2026The Default Customer Hides Your Best Product Decisions
Product teams should treat differences in language, regulation, workflow and trust as primary discovery material rather than localization work at the end.
Daily column3 September 2026Every Critical Integration Needs a Replacement Path
Product leaders should treat the cost of replacing a critical vendor or platform as a product metric, not an architectural detail.
Daily column2 September 2026A Blank Prompt Is a Product Team Avoiding a Decision
AI products should replace open-ended prompt boxes with opinionated starting points that encode the choices users hired the product to make.
Daily column1 September 2026Measure the Time From Evidence to Decision
Most product organizations diagnose slow delivery when the real delay sits between receiving credible evidence and making an explicit decision.
Daily column31 August 2026Audience Overlap Is Not a Product Expansion Strategy
Companies should expand only when an existing operating capability gives them an unfair advantage in solving the next problem, not simply because current users might want more things.
Daily column30 August 2026Define Product Roles by Decision Rights, Not Task Lists
Product organizations should clarify ownership by naming who makes which decisions, rather than assigning activities to roles.
Daily column29 August 2026A Roadmap Is Also a Capital Allocation Plan
Product leaders should evaluate roadmap choices by the capital they commit and the payback they require, not only by user value and delivery effort.
Daily column28 August 2026Roadmap the Permission Ladder Before the AI Agent
Agentic products should be planned as a sequence of permissions, not a sequence of increasingly impressive capabilities.
Daily column27 August 2026When Output Gets Cheap, Product Teams Must Measure Removal
As AI increases the volume of code, ideas and analysis, product leaders should treat removal as a core operating discipline rather than rewarding teams for producing more.
Daily column26 August 2026AI Memory Needs an Expiration Policy
Persistent AI memory should be treated as a governed product state with explicit ownership, correction and expiry rules, not as a convenience feature.
Daily column25 August 2026AI Business Cases Must Price the Supervision
AI investments should be judged on the full cost of producing an accepted outcome, including human review, exception handling, security and maintenance.
Daily column22 August 2026The Model Demo Is Not the Product Review
As AI performance shifts from the model to the surrounding system, product reviews must evaluate the whole operating loop rather than celebrate isolated output quality.
Daily column21 August 2026Roll Out by Failure Boundary, Not User Count
Product rollouts should expand through complete operating contexts where consequences can be observed, rather than through arbitrary percentages of users.
Daily column20 August 2026Every AI Roadmap Needs a Bundling Test
AI product teams should test whether a larger platform can bundle their planned feature before treating it as a viable product or growth bet.
Daily column18 August 2026A Feed Is an Incentive System, Not Just an Interface
Distribution mechanics should be managed as product strategy because they change user and supplier behaviour long before a roadmap can correct the consequences.
Daily column17 August 2026Usage Is Not Adoption Until It Can Survive Disclosure
AI usage that employees feel compelled to hide is evidence of utility, but not yet evidence of durable product adoption.
Daily column16 August 2026Provenance Belongs in the Product Workflow
AI provenance should be designed as part of the user workflow rather than treated as a technical marker attached to the final output.
Daily column15 August 2026B2B Discovery Must Validate Buyer, User and Operator
B2B discovery must separately validate the needs of the buyer, user and operational owner before a product earns significant roadmap investment.
Daily column12 August 2026Do Not Remove the Constraint That Defines Your Product
When growth slows, removing a product’s signature constraint may improve short-term activity while weakening the product’s reason to exist.
Daily column10 August 2026Product Managers Should Design Decisions, Not Own Them All
The product manager’s real responsibility is to design clear decision rights, not to become the approval point for every product choice.
Daily column9 August 2026Internal AI Spending Needs a Kill Date
The discipline missing from internal AI spending is not better ROI reporting but the willingness to define in advance when an initiative should be stopped.
Daily column8 August 2026AI Makes Delivery Faster. It Also Moves the Bottleneck.
As AI accelerates production, the main constraint shifts from building features to deciding what deserves to be built and what should be stopped.
Daily column7 August 2026A New Interface Needs New Success Metrics
Replacing a familiar interface only creates a genuinely different product when the team also replaces the metrics and assumptions that shaped the old one.
Daily column7 August 2026Good Products Remove Work, Not Judgment
AI makes it easier to eliminate user effort, but product teams must distinguish wasteful friction from valuable acts of judgment.
Daily column7 August 2026AI Agents Need Recoverability Before Autonomy
The most important product requirement for AI agents is not autonomy but recoverability.
- Reading note5 August 2026medium.com
Spec-Driven Development Reframes an Old Requirements Problem
As most AI trend followers know, spec driven development is the latest trend in the overal AI software building hype. Personally I see very similar strengths and weaknesses as to the 'old days' when product owners had to be great a writing requirements in Jira issues, most often a user stories but nowadays teams decide on a common language that works for the team. When reading the article It strikes me as trying to defend why spec driven development is an improvement. That in itself already makes me question that notion.