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The Iron Triangle Is Back. AI Just Made It Sharper.
Every decade, the tech industry rediscovers a timeless truth and tries to dress it up as something new. Today’s version comes wrapped in synthetic intelligence and VC-grade optimism. But let’s be honest: AI did not kill the Iron Triangle. It fortified it. For years we have preached that product decisions always… Read more ⇢
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When Product Management Turns Into a Feature Factory
There is a point in every product organization where you can feel the shift. The roadmap gets longer. The backlog turns into a dumping ground for requests. The strategic narrative fades as the team becomes obsessed with throughput instead of outcomes. Somewhere along the way, product management stops being a… Read more ⇢
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Idea to Demo: The Modern Operating Model for Product Teams
Most product failures do not start with bad intent. They start with a very normal leadership sentence: “We have an idea.” Then the machine kicks in. Product writes a doc. Engineering estimates it. Design creates a few screens. Everyone nods in a meeting. Everyone leaves with a different movie playing… Read more ⇢
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Tunneling in Product Management: Why Teams Miss the Bigger Play
Tunneling is one of the quietest and most corrosive forces in product management. I was gifted Upstream by Dan Heath from a product leader, and of course it was full of amazing product insights. The section on tunneling really stood out to me and was the inspiration for the following article. Tunneling… Read more ⇢
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Aesthetic Force: The Hidden Gravity Warping Your Product and Your Organization
Every product and engineering organization wrestles with obvious problems. Technical debt. Conflicting priorities. Underpowered infrastructure. Inefficient processes. Those are solvable with time, attention, and a bit of management maturity. The harder problems are the invisible ones. The ones that warp decisions without anyone saying a word. The ones that produce… Read more ⇢
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The leadership myth: “I just know”
In product engineering leadership circles, people love to talk about instinct. The knowing glance at a roadmap item that feels wrong. The uneasy sense that a design review is glossing over real risk. The internal alarm that goes off the moment someone says, “We can just replatform it in a… Read more ⇢
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The PE effect on the Tax Industry
Private equity is not “coming” for the tax industry. It is already setting the pace, and 2026 is the year the gap becomes visible to clients. The Thomson Reuters Institute put hard numbers behind what many leaders feel in the field: roughly half of the top 25 US tax, audit,… Read more ⇢
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Revealed Preferences vs Stated Preferences: The Silent Killer of Product and Organizational Strategy
Every product and engineering leader has seen this pattern. A room full of smart people declares: Then, within days, behavior contradicts what was said. Side work appears. Priorities shift. Leaders quietly push their pet projects. Teams say yes to everything. Decisions made on Monday fall apart by Thursday. This gap… Read more ⇢
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From Middle-to-Middle to End-to-End
Most product organizations are structured to work middle to middle. Product managers gather requirements from the market, engineering teams build features, customer success teaches clients how to use them, and support handles escalations. It is an elegant theory of specialization. And yet, in practice, this model often creates distance from the… Read more ⇢








