Field Note · 7 min read
Prioritisation Frameworks Don’t Make the Difficult Decision for You
RICE, scoring models and tidy matrices can improve a conversation. They cannot decide which assumptions, obligations and strategic bets deserve to matter.
Product, between the lines.
Field Notes
View all ↗Concepts, definitions, and useful distinctions before they become jargon.
Field Note · 7 min read
Product Discovery Is Not a Phase Before Delivery
Discovery is not the polite waiting room where ideas sit before engineering makes them real. It is how a team keeps reducing the risk of being confidently wrong.
Field Note · 6 min read
What Product Managers Actually Do All Day
A plain-English look at the invisible work between a customer problem, a decision, and a shipped product.
Field Note · 6 min read
Product Sense, Explained Without the Mysticism
Product sense is not an instinct you are born with. It is a trainable pattern of noticing, framing, and choosing.
Backchannel
View all ↗The incentives, strategy, revenue, and decisions underneath the official story.
Backchannel · 7 min read
Your Product Strategy Is Probably a List of Good Intentions
“Delight customers, use data and grow sustainably” sounds admirable. It still does not tell a product team where to play, how to win or what to refuse.
Backchannel · 7 min read
The Metric Looked Great. The Product Was Still Getting Worse
A metric can rise while customer value quietly falls. The problem is rarely the number itself; it is the story the organisation allowed the number to replace.
Backchannel · 7 min read
Roadmaps Are Not Strategy. They’re a Negotiation in Disguise
The roadmap is not the strategy document. It is where strategy, confidence, politics, and delivery reality negotiate in public.
After Hours
View all ↗Longer, funnier stories told through the conversations after the meeting.
After Hours · 8 min read
Everyone Was Aligned. Nobody Knew What to Do Next.
Yesterday everyone brought context, data and prototypes to the launch meeting. Today Sales needs to know what they can actually promise customers.
After Hours · 9 min read
The Week Everything Needed AI
By Tuesday, the roadmap, support queue and office toaster had acquired sparkles. The customer problem remained stubbornly analogue.
After Hours · 9 min read
The HiPPO Was a Spreadsheet
The highest-paid opinion never spoke. It arrived as a green cell, a deadline and a metric nobody felt authorised to question.
After Hours · 9 min read
The Feature Everybody Shipped and Nobody Owned
The launch had confetti, a video and three executive emojis. Six months later, the feature lived in a support spreadsheet called export things.
After Hours · 9 min read
When Customer-Centricity Became a Costume
A customer quote walks into quarterly planning, puts on a halo, and discovers it can approve almost anything.