Memos
Every memo, most recent first.
- All
- Product Strategy
- Artificial Intelligence
- Product Leadership
- Growth
- Analytics
- Marketplaces
- Organization Design
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.
Product Strategy
Your Best R&D Lab Is Your Customer List
Firms that turn their customer base into a distributed research division find product-market fit faster than firms with better internal labs.
Marketplaces
NIL's Ownership Gap: Daniels vs. LSU
LSU's jersey fight with Jayden Daniels exposes a missing layer in the NIL marketplace: contracts for who owns a number after the athlete leaves.
Product Leadership
What Doesn't Compress
Every automation wave commoditizes the mechanical middle of a job and reprices the scarce coupled inputs — judgment, taste, context, trust.
Product Strategy
RAF Bet the Format, Not the Talent
Real American Freestyle only pays off if wrestling's rulebook was the ceiling, and the Fox Nation deal says the format bet is landing first.
Product Leadership
Writing PRDs when AI drafts them for free
AI made PRD drafting a commodity, so problem framing is now the only PM skill that matters.
Marketplaces
Marketplaces Still Work — the Liquidity Math Changed
AI has quietly rewritten marketplace unit economics, and match quality can be a moat again for the first time in a decade.
Product Strategy
YouTube's Peacock Bundle Is Slop Insurance
YouTube bundled Peacock into Premium to buy brand-safe inventory that reassures advertisers as AI-generated content floods its core feed.
Analytics
Stop Burying Token Costs in COGS
If CFOs don't attribute token spend to the feature, team, or customer driving it, they'll over-invest in cheap AI and under-price expensive usage.
Organization Design
Red Bull's Real Problem Is a Leaking System
Red Bull's decline isn't the loss of Verstappen or Horner — it's the erosion of the system that once made any single exit survivable.
Artificial Intelligence
AI Is Oil, Not God
Treat AI as a commodity input that has to be refined and distributed, and you predict where the money actually lands.
Marketplaces
Why Alpine's Next Co-Owner Needs More Than Cash
As F1 team valuations spiral toward $10 billion, capital is commoditized and control is scarce—money-only co-owners get diluted out.
Organization Design
FIFA's Equity Plan Exposes a Broken Structure
FIFA cannot sell a stake in the World Cup because its command structure was built for control, not the consent monetization now requires.
Growth
Strategic freemium — the death of "give it all away"
Unlimited free tiers are dead; the winning move is drawing a deliberate upgrade line that converts without alienating your existing users.
Growth
The 60-second time-to-value benchmark
PLG 1.0 chased a 10-minute time-to-value. PLG 2.0 demands 60 seconds, and AI-native products deliver value before signup.
Marketplaces
The NFL's Prediction Markets Fight Is About Rights
The league's 'objectionable' framing isn't consumer protection—it's a defense of who gets paid when its games become tradable events.
Product Strategy
Anthropic's Open-Weights Stance Is Containment
Anthropic's refusal to open-weight frontier models reads as a competitive containment strategy, and it survives only while open models trail closed ones.
Product Leadership
Vibe coding is a PM skill, not an engineering shortcut
PMs who ship a working prototype in the interview win offers because they close the gap between hypothesis and evidence fastest.
Product Strategy
Spending the Audience to Buy the Ecosystem
The FIA optimized the 2026 F1 rules for manufacturers and sustainability, and paid for both with the one asset it can't refill: fan trust.
Product Strategy
The substrate is always rented
Compounding advantage requires a stable substrate you don't control, so the strategic question is how long yours stays stable.
Product Strategy
When the moat becomes the anchor
A shift in the underlying substrate turns an incumbent's greatest strength into a liability, leaving it least able to adapt.
Growth
PQLs Are the New MQL
The signals that predict conversion aren't email opens and webinar sign-ups — they're the sequence of features a user adopts in their first week.
Product Strategy
The Mom-and-Pop SaaS Era and the End of Scale-or-Die
AI-built single-operator software will fragment horizontal markets into thousands of durable niches, proving defensibility no longer requires venture-scale growth.
Organization Design
Product Ops Is Now Load-Bearing
Product Ops stopped being a support function; in an AI-native org it's the structure the whole product team runs on.
Product Strategy
AI Killed the Founding Team, Not the PM Job
The real casualty of a no-engineer SaaS built in nine months isn't the PM or the engineer—it's the technical-plus-business cofounder split.
Artificial Intelligence
AI-first is a lie your CEO is telling themselves
Individual AI productivity gains feel like progress but rarely compound, leaving most organizations stuck at Level 1 adoption.
Product Leadership
Skills Are a Trap
Betting product architecture on discrete packaged skills is a local-maximum play that loses to systems built around generalized judgment.
Growth
Consumption Comp Won't Kill ACV, It'll Absorb It
Databricks' usage-based rep pay isn't the death of bookings comp; it's a maturity stage that only works after ACV comp funds the land.
Product Strategy
AI-Native Margins and the SaaS Multiplier Lie
AI-native products run 50 to 65 percent gross margins against 78 to 85 for classic SaaS, and your board deck is comparing incompatible businesses.
Product Leadership
The PM Role Is Splitting — Pick a Side
Generalist PM is now a career risk; the market has resolved into five tracks, and staying between them is the slow way out.
Growth
The Activation Metric Problem
58% of B2B SaaS runs PLG, but only 34% track activation — that gap is the whole PLG story in one statistic.
Organization Design
Two-slice pods
The two-pizza team was sized for a coordination problem AI just removed, so the new unit is three to five people.
Artificial Intelligence
The AI CapEx Question Every PM Should Ask
Amazon, Google, and Meta will spend roughly $700B on AI infrastructure in 2026, and that number reaches your product whether you track it or not.
Product Strategy
Why Full-Stack AI Beats Best-of-Breed
In AI-native markets, owning the stack from model to distribution beats assembling best-of-breed tools, inverting the SaaS platform orthodoxy.
Artificial Intelligence
AI Confidence Theater Is Wrecking Your Roadmap
Performed certainty about AI strategy masks real product uncertainty, and admitting you don't know yet would build better roadmaps than the theater.
Artificial Intelligence
Your Next Customer Might Be an AI Agent
PLG 3.0 has to serve non-human users, and the instrumentation, pricing, and onboarding models don't survive the transition intact.
Product Strategy
Own the Loop
In any market, value accrues to whoever owns the layer where usage compounds into a proprietary advantage; everything else commoditizes.
Product Leadership
Most Human Wins
As AI turns more of the PM job into commodity, the scarce human work stops being the extra and becomes the whole job.
Product Leadership
What Operator's Memo Is (and Isn't)
This site is a body of work, not a blog — it exists to argue product positions in public and let them compound.