Check out the conversation on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Intro (0:00) Aakash: Everyone has interview advice. Almost none of it comes from someone who has sat on the other side of the hiring table. Gal Eshel was a PM at Google for six years and most recently was a principal product manager at Microsoft. What is Googleyness […]
When I first moved into product management, a lot of teams still treated the roadmap like a promise document. You picked features, argued hard, shipped on schedule, and hoped the business moved. In 2026, that approach doesn't hold up, especially when AI, no-code tooling, and constant market shifts let competitors test faster than your quarterly […]
Check out the conversation on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Intro (0:00) Aakash: JZ, I’ve been teaching people a lot about how to use Claude Code with personal operating systems, with team operating systems. You guys at Laurel have taken it to a level I have not seen before. You guys have built out a company operating system. Can you […]
A VP once reviewed a roadmap review deck at a large tech company and asked a brutal question: “What are we trying to become?” The room had twenty slides, plenty of features, and no clean answer. That's the primary reason most product vision work fails. Teams confuse motion with direction, then wonder why every planning […]
A lot of PMs get assigned pricing the same way they get assigned incident response for the first time. Someone senior says, “You're closest to the product, take the first pass,” and suddenly you're in a meeting with finance, sales, growth, and engineering trying to answer questions you were never formally trained to own. That's […]
A PM gets pulled into this scenario constantly. The CEO sees a competitor launch an AI copilot. Sales says customers are asking about it. Engineering says they can spin up a version quickly. The roadmap gets rearranged before anyone answers the only question that matters. Should this exist for your users, in your product, right […]
A VP asks for a major feature on Monday. Design starts mocking it up by Tuesday. Engineering wants a decision by Thursday so they can protect the sprint. Sales says three prospects asked for it. Nobody can show whether the problem is real, whether the proposed solution is the right one, or whether the request […]
Check out the conversation on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Why most AI content misses the leadership tier (01:57) Aakash: I’ve been looking online at all of the content on AI for PMs and I noticed two really big gaps. The first is that most of the content is written for IC PM tasks. How to […]
A product ships on time. The demo is clean. The team solved hard technical problems. Sales gets trained, marketing launches the page, and then nothing meaningful happens. A few polite customer calls. Some trial signups. A lot of internal explanations about why the market “doesn't get it yet.” Most of the time, the market got […]
Product cannibalization is when a new product takes sales from one of your existing products, and the standard way to measure it is (Sales Lost on Existing Product / Sales of New Product) x 100. If an older product loses 200 units and the new product sells 500 units, the cannibalization rate is 40%. Most […]