Some of the most capable product leaders I coach are also the most confused about why their careers have stalled. They're smart. They work hard. They produce good, defensible work. And yet the promotion goes to someone else, the high-visibility projects land on another desk, their ideas get overruled in rooms they thought they'd already won — and they can't quite explain why. The feedback they get back is vague: "be more strategic," "build executive presence." So they wonder

Three dimensions of Product Management growth A couple of posts ago, I wrote about scaling product teams while maintaining quality and the "soul" of the product. If you've done that, you've got an awesome team. It would be a shame to lose them after all that work to scale them. You'll have to "start over" by hiring new product managers and onboarding them into the culture, practices, and norms you've developed. And we all know hiring great product managers is hard. Keeping t

Balanced scorecard pillars There’s a saying I heard a lot over my career, and now often use when coaching product leaders: “What gets measured gets managed — and what gets measured poorly gets misunderstood.” Too many product teams are still measuring the wrong things. They celebrate output instead of outcomes, activity instead of impact. Dashboards are full of numbers, but few tell a meaningful story about customer or business value. And it’s not because leaders don’t care a

Technical vs. Innovation Debt descriptions Every product leader knows the pressure to move fast. Shipping new features, meeting deadlines, showing progress; these are the visible signs of momentum. But beneath that momentum often lies a quiet, growing problem: technical debt — and its lesser-known cousin, innovation debt . Both are easy to ignore when the focus is on delivery. Both can cripple a product’s long-term success if left unchecked. And managing them well is one of

Team Size vs. Product Quality tradeoffs When a team grows, so does the complexity (and risk). This is definitely true for product teams. As the market settles down from all of the layoffs, workforce reductions, and reorganizations, some companies are finding opportunities to scale meaningfully. While this is a good problem to have... it is still a problem. You’re hiring fast. Onboarding faster. Shipping more. But somewhere in the chaos, the product starts to feel... off. Qual

Employees in a conference room reviewing product priorities on a whiteboard In the midst of layoffs, workforce reductions, and...