Reading Paths

5-post curated journeys for where you are right now.

Deep Dives

Every team wants a north star metric — a single number that captures whether the product is working. But most north stars are secretly south stars: metrics that feel meaningful, get celebrated in all-hands, and quietly send teams in the wrong direction. This essay maps the 7 most common anti-patterns, from vanity metrics that look great in decks to gaming metrics that improve the number without improving the product. The goal isn't to abandon measurement — it's to get rigorous about what you're actually measuring and why.

B2B products don't achieve product-market fit once and coast — they have to flex continuously as the market shifts, the customer base expands, and competition intensifies. This framework maps the modes of adaptation: how to recognize when your current fit is decaying, and what levers to pull to re-establish it. The goal isn't to find PMF; it's to build the muscle for flexing with the market over time.

Total cost of ownership has always been a key factor in enterprise buying decisions — but AI agents are scrambling the math in ways most vendors haven't accounted for. When software can do in minutes what previously required headcount, the TCO calculus shifts from license cost to capability cost, and B2B products that don't reframe their value accordingly will lose deals they should win. The podcast episode and companion essay explore how to think about TCO in a world where AI is rapidly changing what "cost" means.

Most PM career plateaus aren't caused by lack of effort — they're caused by invisible ceiling effects that feel like walls but are actually asymptotes: you can keep approaching them forever without breaking through. This two-part series names the specific forces that create these ceilings, from reputation traps to skill gaps that compound over time. Understanding the asymptote is the first step to escaping it.

Strategy fails less often because it's wrong and more often because it's incoherent — different parts of the organization optimizing for different interpretations of the same plan. This framework maps the four dimensions of strategic coherence: what it takes to stay synced across levels, functions, and time. Getting these four things right doesn't guarantee the strategy works, but getting any one of them wrong almost guarantees it won't.

Getting promoted isn't about working harder — it's about understanding what the level above you actually requires and making those requirements visible to the people who decide. This playbook maps the promotion game as a product problem: who are the stakeholders, what are their criteria, and how do you build a case that's hard to argue with. The tactics here apply at every level, from IC to director.

The gap between what product teams ship and what shows up in revenue numbers is one of the most frustrating disconnects in B2B — and it's almost always a measurement problem, not a product problem. This framework builds a ladder from daily product decisions to business KPIs, making the causal chain explicit so teams can measure what actually matters. Understanding the ladder is what separates product teams that drive revenue from product teams that just talk about it.

The difference between a junior PM and a senior one isn't just experience — it's a fundamentally different way of framing problems, defining success, and deciding where to spend attention. This framework maps the rungs of the PM mindset ladder: the shifts in thinking that have to happen at each level, and what gets in the way of making those shifts. Most PM career development focuses on skills; this focuses on the mental models underneath them.

Enterprise buyers don't follow the expected adoption sequence — they enter products at different points, skip steps that seem logical from the inside, and often reach value through paths the product team never anticipated. Understanding skip-step behavior is the key to B2B FTUX: designing onboarding not for the ideal user journey but for the actual one. This essay maps the phenomenon and offers a framework for designing products that meet buyers where they actually land.

Every product leader faces the tension between holding a position and adapting to new information — between patience (staying the course when results are slow) and progress (knowing when the course itself needs to change). This framework gives you the diagnostic: what signals indicate you need more time vs. a different direction, and how to tell the difference before you've wasted too much of either. Getting this call wrong in either direction is one of the most expensive mistakes a product leader can make.

Shared vocabulary is infrastructure — and most product teams are building on a foundation of undefined terms, contested meanings, and language that means different things to different people. This lexicon maps the key product concepts worth agreeing on as a team, from the difference between outputs and outcomes to what "strategy" actually means in practice. The goal isn't pedantry; it's precision, and precision is what separates teams that move fast from teams that move fast in circles.

Being customer-centric isn't a mindset — it's a discipline, and it has layers. Most teams that say they're customer-centric mean they do user research; this framework maps what actual customer centricity looks like across the full stack: from how you gather signal to how you make decisions to how you measure whether the customer is actually winning. This is the third version of the framework, refined through years of coaching product leaders and watching where the earlier versions fell short.

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