I'm starting to realize that helping an idea become real is a key part of product work. Opportunity → Confidence → Momentum → Ownership The goal is to leave the idea stronger than you found it until the team can carry it forward. buff.ly/xqoS2R9

Your Idea Isn't Finished When Everyone Agrees

How product managers create momentum behind their ideas

amycmitchell.substack.com

Start building reusable judgment through continuous monitoring: - Customer friction points with your product - Demand validation points - Potential adoption blockers - Evals and feedback Doing this persistently helps in decision-making.

Build your own narrative to explain to yourself: - The user pain - Identify the conflict simply - Suggest the solution - Describe the outcome Using this plain language, you can move from problem to solution very fast.

My favorite takeaways from Barbell-Shaped Product Roles: - Focus on the big, risky, hard-to-reverse strategic bets. - Time-box decisions about smaller features and fixes. - If we can't explain why someone would use our product, then revenue doesn't flow. buff.ly/vlDTe1S

Barbell-Shaped Product Roles

I had yet another call last week with an AI engineer/cofounder who has built some very interesting software but gotten zero interest from his intended buyers.

richmironov.substack.com

AI initiatives often look like normal product work at the beginning. The strongest product managers are the ones who: - preserve momentum, - create safe learning, - introduce rigor at the pace the organization can absorb.

AI initiatives often expand into: - governance redesign, - workflow standardization, - knowledge cleanup, - operational restructuring. The organization starts solving future scale problems before it has learned enough from the present workflow.

Product work can be the connection between two useful things. Sometimes the connection is the contribution.

Build Anyway

Creating momentum while the strategy is still emerging

buff.ly

AI exposes organizational inconsistency early. Traditional features: - operate inside workflows. AI systems: - interact dynamically with workflows, - knowledge, - and operational variation. Organizational inconsistency becomes part of the product problem.

Add an AI assistant to a workflow. Then suddenly: - workflows differ across teams, - documentation becomes a blocker, - ownership becomes unclear, - trust concerns appear, - governance discussions expand. The initiative stops behaving like normal product work.

Career moves for product managers in the coming year: Find new measures of progress - count users touched and decisions changed Practice writing for humans and agents Give your unique point of view by pairing your domain insight with nerve buff.ly/DMUA0HN

Inside PM at Stripe: What Comes After "Become a Builder"?

Kevin Yien on the judgment, opinions, and systems the PM job demands now.

theskip.substack.com

Builder PMs use their process knowledge to insert into the usual workflow. And the workflow insertion is a pilot…not a launch. By finding the smallest workflow changes, builder PMs make the pilot easy for the affected teams.

For new product ideas, visuals instead of words bring builder PM initiatives into development systems. - Before and after: the customer’s perspective afterwards - Operational ROI: how this makes the customer's life easier This shows what it’s like to live with the change.

Everyone is working. Decisions get made. And yet the product manager keeps reconnecting everything. Sometimes that's not a communication problem. It's cognitive concentration: too much of the initiative's understanding lives in one person's head.

When Product Understanding Stops Spreading

How strong product teams build shared understanding before one person has to carry everything

buff.ly

It was fun talking about product building with @engineerthrive.bsky.social

Thriving In Engineering@engineerthrive.bsky.social · 2w ago

🎙️ New episode of Thriving In Engineering Podcast is live! @amycmitchell.bsky.social has lived both sides of the engineer/PM divide, and she's watching AI collapse the line between them again.

You don’t need to wait for a mandate to take your builder PM progress further. Instead of asking people to approve your idea, you create situations where they experience its value directly.

Builder PMs form a temporary working group by: - Pulling them into the solution - Giving visual proof - Making it easy to adopt - Inserting it into the workflow After this, you shift to shared understanding with the product team.

"Decide where your attention goes before the day decides for you." Managing our cognitive load is becoming an important part of product work. 🔹 What you can't automate, you can at least write down 🔹 Take breaks, because they used to be free 🔹 Budget your attention buff.ly/wFs2JZL

With AI Agents, Attention is the New Bottleneck

In software's history, the limit on what you could ship was how fast you could type and build. Execution got cheap. Attention got expensive.

spin.atomicobject.com

The goal is to run the problem in a way that lets executives contribute at the moments it matters most. Because: - you don’t get full clarity upfront - you don’t get uninterrupted time to figure it out - you don’t get alignment for free You build it. Over time. Across functions.

Most executive conversations drift because the question keeps changing. Builder PMs anchor the work to a single, persistent question that doesn’t reset each time. Everything else, such as updates, insights, and analysis, connects back to that. It gives the work a sense of accumulation.

Builder product managers can accomplish more than ever. Products still need someone connecting the pieces across teams, decisions, and customer experience. This week's article explores the invisible integration that turns fast decisions into product growth.

The Invisible Product Work AI Didn't Replace

Fast Products Still Need Someone Connecting the Pieces

buff.ly

Builders treat executive engagement as part of the system, not an interruption to it. It starts with recognizing that you’re not just updating leadership on progress. You’re running a problem that needs to converge over time with leadership involved.

Leaders want to stay engaged with your complex solution. They want to be involved in: - the tradeoffs - the constraints - the direction it takes across the organization They need a way to participate without getting pulled into the weeds and without slowing the work down.

Tips product managers can use on a business outlook: 💠 Show where you are starting from 💠 Explain what will drive growth 💠 Let the numbers do the talking "Every number needs to be grounded. Random numbers on a slide without context are not helpful." (Liz Christo) buff.ly/rHZpcu3

How to Build a Pitch-Perfect GTM Slide That Wins Investors

VC insights inside - how to convince investors to give you the resources you need to win the market

knowledge.gtmstrategist.com

Solution packages can drift back into custom solutions. It's about keeping it reliable enough to reuse. High reuse → reinforce. Consistent customization → pull in. Low adoption → revisit keeping the package

A solution package isn’t real until someone can use it without you. Treat the package like a standalone product. Then make it usable. Start with: - one use case - one configuration - one clear path to value Then expand as you see adoption.

Every product seems to leave behind a lesson you didn't notice while you were building it. I've started thinking of those as the hidden curriculum of product management. This week's newsletter explores four patterns I wish I'd recognized sooner.

What Product Managers Learn Between the Frameworks

The lessons product building teaches over time

buff.ly

Most solution packages start with a pattern you can’t ignore. If customers keep assembling the same solution, you have a packaging gap, not a product gap.

Product managers usually have "solution packages" in sales decks and reference architectures. They represent a way your product comes together to deliver an outcome. Treating these solution packages as products saves time for the whole team.

Peter Yang's hot takes on where AI is headed next: If your product isn't built for agents, it might as well not exist The future is agents living in the cloud, accessible from any device, and collaborating closely with both you and your team. This will happen very soon. buff.ly/Gz9qyxV

18 Hot Takes On Where AI is Headed Next

Real talk on the collapse of the frontier-only AI stack, the super app era, and why your app could become a dumb pipe for agents

creatoreconomy.so

A Solution Package includes pre-configured settings, a common data schema, and the “connective tissue” that ensures the products within it solve a specific problem out of the box. Think of it as moving from selling “flour, eggs, and sugar” (a bundle) to selling a “pre-mixed cake kit” (a package).