Industry News

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Thorne on The LaunchNotes Podcast. I think I’m a little rusty with the speaking thing, but I did have a lot of fun here. We covered a bunch of topics, including how people got into product management before Inspired was published, how to enable autonomy and ownership in product teams, the value of writing and publishing what you learn, and also somehow… my favorite kettle. Give it a listen if you’re into that sort of thing!

I think about The Fog of War in the context of product management often. The term started as shorthand for an important concept during battle:

The fog of war is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.

Of course, most of us of a certain age know this concept mainly...

Yesterday, Google began to slowly roll out Google Bard to some initial reporters and also Google opened up a waitlist to users in the US and UK. I personally do not have access just yet, but I have a feeling I might have access soon.

Shift left on go-to-market to build better products is a great post by Frank Tisellano on why product managers have to consider Go to Market efforts while they are still deep in the understanding/planning phase of a project:

Great PMs recognize that building a good product is table stakes and that the way to truly differentiate themselves is by taking a strategic approach to how customers or users find and adopt their products.

In other words, great PMs shift left on go to...

David Poblador writes about The Pitfalls of Hyper-Growth: How Companies Can Do More with Less. Startups tend to operate more with a scarcity mindset at the onset, but as they grow…

As businesses grow, they often rely on flawed indicators of success that do not necessarily correlate with sustainability. One of the most common measures of success is headcount growth. Unfortunately, hiring lots of new employees can create inefficiencies, harm company culture, and reduce productivity....

I recently came across two articles that combine the topics of music and product management. That is basically catnip for me, so I have to share.

First, I know “What X Can Teach Us About Y” articles have become a bit of a trope, but trust me on this one. What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Business by Rex Woodbury is an excellent case study on what good product management is all about. I’ve always been impressed by Taylor’s business strategy, and this is the first article I’ve seen that...

This feed of imagined alternate universe tech products is mind-bendingly wonderful.

Employees Are Feeding Sensitive Business Data to ChatGPT. Feels like this should be a bigger story. “Employees are submitting sensitive business data and privacy-protected information to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raising concerns that AI services could be incorporating the data into their models, and that information could be retrieved at a later date if proper data security isn’t in...

Here’s an interesting take by Sheril Mathews on why people often don’t trust their managers, or find them inauthentic:

Managers don’t come across as authentic because more often than not they don’t have an intimate understanding of the day to day realities of how their teams actually get work done.

Sheril goes on to discuss some some great advice on how to show up for our teams in authentic ways (spoiler: it’s about getting our hands dirty in the trenches). But I also wanted to...

Google Search has started to roll out the first broad core update of the 2023 year, and this one is named the March 2023 broad core update. It started on March 15, 2023, at about 10:30 am ET and can take about two weeks to roll out. This update touched down fast and hard - it is a big one...