Introduction and the interview question (0:00) Aakash: Product design is dead. That’s not clickbait. It’s actually what candidates are telling me after their AI PM interviews. AI product managers are making millions of dollars. At OpenAI, the average stock grant per employee is $1.5 million. At companies like Google and Meta, employees are getting huge […]
A bloated story usually looks harmless in backlog grooming. Then engineering asks where to start, design asks what’s in scope, QA asks what “done” means, and the sprint slows down before anyone writes code. That’s the moment when create sub task jira stops being a clerical action and becomes a product leadership skill. The PMs […]
A growth review once opened with applause. Sign-ups were up, activation looked healthy, and the team felt fast. Then the retention cohort closed, renewal conversations started, and the business learned the ugly truth. We had improved motion, not outcomes. The Ten Million Dollar Mistake We Saw Coming Too Late We celebrated a quarter that should […]
I’ve watched teams spend months building polished features that died on contact with reality. I’ve also watched scrappy PMs validate the same core idea with a doc, a fake door, and a week of customer calls, then earn the right to build. That’s the job. Not shipping more. Reducing uncertainty before you ask the company […]
A PM once brought a sprint plan to review with stories like “improve onboarding” and “fix auth.” Engineering didn’t push back. They just spent the next week asking clarifying questions, splitting hidden work, and shipping less than anyone expected. That’s what bad agile story writing does. It doesn’t just create messy tickets. It burns team […]
You’re probably in one of two situations right now. Either you’re building a roadmap and someone senior has asked, “What’s the business value?” Or you’re interviewing for a PM role, and you know the hiring manager doesn’t care that you shipped a feature. They care whether you can connect product decisions to company outcomes. That’s […]
Most PMs don’t lose credibility because they lack ideas. They lose it because their ideas enter the organization and come out late, diluted, buggy, or commercially irrelevant. That gap is where careers stall. I’ve hired and mentored enough PMs to know the pattern. The ones who rise fastest aren’t always the best strategists in the […]
A release goes out on Tuesday. Engineering closes the sprint. The PM marks the feature as shipped. On Wednesday, sales asks a basic question: “How do I explain this to a buyer in one sentence?” Nobody agrees on the answer. That’s the moment product marketing and product management stop being org-chart labels and become a […]
Most advice about the vp of product role starts in the wrong place. It tells you to think bigger, act like a mini-CEO, and own the vision. That sounds impressive. It also produces a lot of weak product leadership. The role is not about personal ownership theater. It is about disciplined judgment across a portfolio, […]
In 2012, I watched a brilliant team with a technically superior social product get dismantled by Facebook. Their product was faster, cleaner, and more privacy-conscious. They still lost because users did not buy “better tech.” They bought familiarity, identity, network effects, and a product that felt meaningfully different in their lives. That lesson has stayed […]