Posts tagged "Team Empowerment"

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Your platform is either a tax or a multiplier

4 min read

Internal platforms that slow teams down are taxes. Those that accelerate them are multipliers. The mandate trap hides which one you're building.

Internal product managers often believe a dangerous myth. They think they don't have to worry about churn. Since the company mandates the use of their API gateway, design system, or data warehouse, they assume their user base is guaranteed. They have a captive audience. But in platform product management, users don't churn. They rot. When users are forced to use a tool they hate, they engage in malicious compliance. They do the bare minimum. They...
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AI Commoditizes Entry-Level Work While Amplifying Senior Value

5 min read

AI isn't eliminating product roles wholesale. It's commoditizing entry-level work while amplifying senior value, hollowing out the career ladder.

Everyone's asking the wrong question about AI and product teams. The debate splits into two camps: one believes product managers will code their way to replacing engineers, the other thinks engineers will own strategy and eliminate PMs. Both narratives miss what's actually happening. AI isn't replacing entire functions. It's splitting each function into three tiers, and only one of them is shrinking. The same pattern across three functions Look at what's happening to engineers first....
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Don't Contain Innovation—Spread It

3 min read

Innovation labs fail when they isolate thinking. The companies winning are the ones where core business teams have built the innovation muscle.

Your innovation lab isn't the problem. Keeping innovation isolated there is. The pattern shows up in different forms—innovation labs, Centers of Excellence, digital transformation teams. The setup looks similar: bring in smart people, give them freedom to experiment, then wait for breakthroughs while the core business operates exactly as before. I've watched this play out at multiple Fortune 500 companies. The lab discovers what customers need. Core business teams keep building the same way they...
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When Your Reports Become Your Customers

4 min read

Managers must add more value than they cost. Apply customer-thinking to direct reports: justify your existence through real services.

You call a meeting to "align on priorities." Your team spends two hours in a conference room. Decisions get deferred pending "more data." Everyone leaves to update their status decks for next week's follow-up. You just cost your team 10 hours of productive work. What did they get in return? If the answer isn't something concrete and valuable, you're net negative. And most managers are. I've been testing a framework inspired by Roger Martin's A...
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When Work Becomes the Practice

4 min read

Moving beyond the search for meaning to the practice of creating it. A product manager's reflection on making work matter, one sprint at a time.

A colleague and an inspiring leader, Puneet Maheshwari, recently wrote something about work and meaning that stopped me in my tracks. He talked about growing up around people who never had the luxury of romanticizing "meaning" in work. For them, work was survival and dignity. Nothing more, nothing less. His insight? The question isn't whether work is a means to an end, but which ends make the means worth it. When Time Disappears For me,...
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Treat Your Job Like a Product and Protect Maker Time

3 min read

Product leaders must treat their job like a product and protect maker time, or risk getting stuck in execution and missing leadership growth.

Product leaders know what happens to a product without a strategy. It becomes a treadmill of backlog items, bug fixes, and reactive feature requests. The same thing happens to your career if you treat your job as nothing more than a stream of execution tasks. Just like a product needs vision, prioritization, and trade-offs, so does your work. But here’s the challenge: execution will always crowd out strategy unless you intentionally design for it. Execution...
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What Leadership Really Looks Like

3 min read

Leadership for product managers isn’t about titles. It’s about daily choices—small acts of influence, initiative, empowerment, and courage.

In the product culture series, I want to delve into who the leader is. In corporate life, “leader” is a word that gets stretched in too many directions. Sometimes it refers to someone with direct reports. Sometimes it points only to the highest rung of the ladder. But the truth is simpler: leadership is not about job level or headcount. Leadership is about how you show up. It’s about whether you create momentum, clarity, and...
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Product Culture Is Your Real Operating System

3 min read

Strong product culture drives better decisions, innovation, and outcomes. Leaders shape it daily through hiring, rituals, and behaviors.

The most important product decision you make is not the roadmap. It’s not the features you prioritize or the markets you enter. It is the culture you build. Culture is not a poster on the wall or a slide in a town hall. It is how decisions get made when nobody is looking. It is how teams respond to setbacks, how they argue about priorities, how they treat customers when tradeoffs get hard. Culture is...
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Architect vs. Gardner: Product Development Mindsets

5 min read

Product leaders must know when to act as Architects and when to act as Gardeners. Learn how to balance precision and adaptability in product development.

Product development demands vision and execution. But the mindset you bring to the work often shapes outcomes as much as strategy or process. Two powerful metaphors illustrate this tension: the Architect and the Gardener. Both have value. Both can lead to success. But knowing when to adopt one mindset over the other—and how to balance them—can mean the difference between building structures that endure and nurturing products that adapt. The Architect Mindset Architects design with...
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Cultivating Strong Product Culture

5 min read

Learn how to cultivate a strong product culture by empowering teams, aligning leadership, and focusing on outcomes over features.

Culture may feel intangible, but in product organizations it’s one of the strongest predictors of success. Teams with the right culture move faster, make better decisions, and consistently build products that matter. Teams without it often drown in process, produce outputs that don’t add up, and lose trust with customers and stakeholders. A strong product culture doesn’t appear by accident. It is cultivated deliberately through leadership choices, organizational design, and team habits. Technology as an...
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Cultivating True Agile: From Process to Outcome

5 min read

Agile is not stand-ups or sprints. Learn how to cultivate true agility by focusing on outcomes, empowering teams, and decentralizing decisions.

Few words in technology are as overused—and misunderstood—as Agile. Too often, teams say they are Agile because they run sprints, hold stand-ups, or use Jira boards. But rituals without outcomes are just theater. True agility is not about process compliance. It is about creating organizations that learn quickly, adapt continuously, and deliver meaningful results. Agile Theater vs. True Agility The Agile Manifesto was written to emphasize people, collaboration, and adaptability. Yet many organizations reduce it...
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Making Better Product Decisions

2 min read

Great product leaders know not all decisions are equal. Learn how to apply the one-way vs. two-way door lens to improve decision speed and quality.

Great product leaders aren’t defined by their roadmaps, but by the decisions that shape them. Roadmaps shift. Markets change. But decision quality compounds over time. One useful lens comes from Jeff Bezos: the idea of one-way vs. two-way doors. One-way doors are irreversible. Once you step through, it’s costly to turn back. These require deliberation, diverse perspectives, and often leadership involvement. Two-way doors are reversible. If the decision doesn’t work out, you can step back...
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