Category
Product
Reading paths
Read end to end.
The Product Operating Rhythm
A five-part series on the work between strategy and shipping — a customer-request intake you can defend, the planning stack from undated vision through 5-year, 3-year, yearly, and quarterly plans without repeating yourself, the quarterly planning ritual as a runbook, stakeholder management as a system a product owner runs, and the recovery playbook for when sales sells a feature that was never on the roadmap.
Start →Continuous Discovery, Hands-On
A six-module hands-on course on opportunity solution trees and continuous discovery, run against one product end to end — Donut CRM, a relationship-first CRM for founders. Defining an outcome, mining interviews and JTBD for opportunities, recruiting and running discovery sessions (including the no-show playbook), ideating solutions alone and with a group using Liberating Structures, assumption mapping and experiments that test the riskiest thing first, and making discovery a weekly habit that coexists with Shape Up, OKRs, and the rest of your stack. Interactive exercises throughout — you leave with your own tree.
Start →The Product Context Repo
A six-part build-along: a git-based knowledge repo for product work, the structure that lets both agents and humans navigate it, a signal pipeline that turns support tickets, call transcripts, and CRM notes into structured evidence, MCP connections to your tracker, docs, and chat, commands that draft user stories and PRDs from the repo, and the editorial discipline that keeps AI slop out of your backlog.
Start →Product Stories
A two-part pair on discovery done right and wrong — Segment and Superhuman's evidence-driven pivots, set against Quibi, Juicero, and Humane's false validation, closing with Klarna and Duolingo's AI-first reversals — told from the record rather than the legend.
Start →Browse all series →
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- ·3 min read
Cascading OKRs to Department and Product Without a Status Report
Most OKR cascades are arithmetic disguised as alignment — the company KR divided by headcount becomes every team's KR, and nobody notices that no actual thinking happened between the layers.
- ·3 min read
Where Discovery Interviews and Marketing Research Are the Same Conversation
A product manager and a marketer sitting in the same customer interview, taking completely different notes, never comparing them — this is the most common waste of customer contact in organizations that can afford neither the waste nor the duplication.
- ·3 min read
Mining Support Tickets into the Opportunity Solution Tree, Not Just a Bug Queue
A support team closing 200 tickets a week while the product team builds features nobody asked for is not a resource problem — it's a signal-routing problem, and the fix is a two-hour extraction pass that turns the support inbox into the richest discovery input your team has.
- ·3 min read
Before You Write an OKR — OKRs vs. Rocks vs. a Bare North Star
Three goal-setting systems, each claiming to be the best — and all three are right, for different organizations at different stages, which is why the real skill isn't writing OKRs but knowing which framework your team actually needs.
- ·3 min read
What a PO Absorbs vs. Hands Off, by Team Size — and the Hat Nobody Actually Writes
At eight people the PO role develops a blind spot so consistent I've started calling it the orphan gap — QA ownership falls through the space between the PO's shoulders and the team's expectations, and nobody notices until the first real bug reaches production.
- ·3 min read
When to Sit in on Discovery, Not Just the Demo
Founders who only show up for demos are perpetually surprised by what the team built — because they're seeing the output of decisions they could have influenced three months earlier, at a cost thirty times higher.
- ·3 min read
When You Need a Dedicated BA, and When the PO Already Does This Job
A team that hired a BA too early burned six months of salary on documentation nobody read; a team that hired one too late lost a regulatory deal because requirements were scattered across Slack threads. The split point isn't team size — it's the ratio of domain complexity to product complexity.
- ·3 min read
Making Discovery a Habit: CDH Alongside Shape Up, OKRs, and Agile
Six weeks in, Donut CRM's tree almost died — not from bad discovery, but from a launch crunch. The habit, not the artifact, is the product. This closing module builds the weekly cadence that survives a real delivery calendar, shows where JTBD, Lean Startup, OKRs, and dual-track agile plug into the tree, runs the honest CDH-versus-Shape-Up comparison, and ends with your first six weeks, week by week.
- ·3 min read
Assumption Mapping: Experiments That Test the Riskiest Thing First
The auto-drafted follow-up email looked obviously good — which is exactly when a team stops asking questions. This module turns one build decision into a list of testable guesses: surfacing assumptions from the happy path, sorting them on the importance-vs-evidence 2×2, and running the smallest test that could change your mind. Two fully specified experiment cards included, plus what Donut CRM's concierge test actually found.
- ·3 min read
From Opportunities to Solutions: Ideating Alone and Together
Your first idea is almost always a category cliché, and your team's first shared idea is usually whatever the most senior person said out loud. This module covers picking ONE target opportunity, generating real solution variety solo, and running two Liberating Structures — 1-2-4-All and 25/10 — that beat groupthink with facilitation scripts you can copy. Then you put three solutions on your own tree.