Operator's Memo
Product Leadership. AI. Growth. Building enduring technology companies.
Latest essay
Essay · AI
AI Took the Middle. PMs Get Judged on the Ends.
AI now does the middle of product work. What's left for PMs is what you ask for and what you let it touch.
Recent
Product Strategy
Ship Fast, Price Slow: The Case for a Pricing Constitution
A standing pricing constitution lets teams ship pricing alongside features without escalation, protecting margin and willingness-to-pay.
Growth
Search Was Never a Channel
Search was an intelligence engine that happened to deliver traffic, and the companies that only measured the traffic built nothing that transfers.
Analytics
Nobody Ships Against a Number They Doubt
Data trust is a product problem, not a pipeline problem, and teams that rebuild pipelines to fix it keep rebuilding.
Product Strategy
Athletes Unlimited's Pause Is a Focus Lesson
By starving basketball and volleyball to fund softball, Athletes Unlimited confirmed that nascent leagues win on conviction, not diversification.
Experimentation
Infinite Variants, Same Traffic
Cheap variant generation makes most programs run more tests and learn less, because idea supply was never the binding constraint.
Product Strategy
Crawl, Walk, Run Is Sometimes a Lie
Sequenced rollout works when phases share a mechanism and misleads when they don't, and most teams never check which case they're in.
Marketplaces
The Cap Can't Police Sponsor Deals
The Kawhi-Aspiration dispute shows salary-cap enforcement can't police a sponsorship market where the teams under scrutiny broker the deals.
Product Leadership
The Scarce Assets of Product Management
The PM outputs that survive AI drafting are the ones that require standing inside an organization, not the artifacts that compress cleanly.
Product Strategy
The Solo Operator Can't Afford Inference
Two arguments this site has made are in tension, and resolving it narrows the mom-and-pop SaaS thesis to low-token categories.