I've never seen a roadmap survive contact with reality.

Not once. In 15+ years of product work.

Yet we spend weeks building beautiful charts and quarter-by-quarter feature lists like we can predict the future.

🧵 1/16 Watch any PM in December:

Frantically building next year's roadmap like they can predict customer behavior, market shifts, and technical challenges 12 months out.

Same energy as checking your horoscope for investment advice.

Confession: I've never seen a PM framework actually work in real life.

RICE, ICE, Value vs Effort - they're all just ways to make gut decisions look scientific.

But we keep pretending they're magic because it makes us feel less like frauds.

🧵 1/17 Product decisions are fucking terrifying. You're betting the company's future on incomplete information.

Frameworks give us the illusion of control. "I used RICE, so if this fails, it's not my fault - the system failed."

You're not bad at decisions. You're drowning in them.

The 3pm panic when every choice feels equally critical signals decision fatigue, not poor judgment.

Confident PMs don't make better decisions. They make fewer decisions.

This validation framework reduces decision load: ↓ 🔴 LEVEL 1: Irreversible (product direction, team structure)
🟡 LEVEL 2: Expensive to reverse (major features, partnerships)
🟢 LEVEL 3: Cheap to reverse (copy changes, small experiments)
⚪ LEVEL 4: No decision needed (delegate or automate)

Most PMs who naturally sort decisions by reversibility already operate at a senior level.

After studying high-performing PMs for years, I noticed something strange:

The most impactful product managers often do LESS than their peers.

They write shorter docs. Hold fewer meetings. Create simpler processes.

They've mastered making impact look effortless.

Here's how: I spent my first 3 years as a PM writing 30-page PRDs no one read and creating complex processes no one followed.

I thought "good product work = hard product work."

But what if the opposite is true? What if making it harder actually reduces your impact?

99% of PMs complain about their managers.

1% of PMs turn their manager into a career accelerator.

The 1% stopped "managing up" and started creating mutual leverage.

Here's the exact playbook ↓ Your manager spends 2-3 hours/week thinking about your work.
You spend 40+ hours executing it.

This 20:1 asymmetry creates most PM-manager tensions.

The solution isn't more meetings or better updates.
It's creating *mutual leverage*.

78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function (McKinsey 2024).

But most product leaders are still using it for basic tasks like writing PRDs.

Here's how to leverage AI for strategic advantage (with actual prompts that work): 🧵 McKinsey found only 1% of companies believe they're at AI maturity.

Meanwhile, 43% of professionals use AI tools without telling their bosses (2024 survey).

The gap? Most PMs don't know HOW to prompt AI for strategic work vs. documentation.

The real impact of AI on PM work:

PRDs: 8 hours → 45 minutes
Interview analysis: Full day → 30 minutes
Strategy decks: 2 days → 3 hours
Requirements docs: 5 meetings → 1 async session

Here's exactly how the workflow changes 🧵 BEFORE AI:
- Monday: Gather scattered inputs (2 hrs)
- Tuesday: Blank page to first draft (3 hrs)
- Wednesday: Stakeholder feedback rounds (2 hrs)
- Thursday: Endless revisions (1+ hr)
- Friday: "Actually, can we add..." (∞)

WITH AI:
- Dump all context into structured prompt (5 min)
- Review generated draft (20 min)
- Customize for specific needs (20 min)
- Ship

The "simple 2-week integration" that becomes a 6-month death march.

Every PM knows this nightmare.

Here's why it happens—and how to prevent it before writing a single line of code 🧵 It always starts the same:

Week 1: "Just need to add SSO login"
Week 3: "Actually, we need custom roles"
Week 5: "Oh, and multi-tenancy"
Week 8: "Can we also sync with their legacy system?"

Classic scope creep in action.

PMs: When a customer says “I want CSV export,” and you just write it down, you’re wasting the interview.

Here’s how to flip lazy feature requests into goldmine insights.

It took me 5 years of painful interviews to learn this. You’ll get it in 1 minute. 1/ The proper response is to probe the underlying need:

"What would CSV export allow you to do?"
"How are you handling this today?"
"Talk me through the last time this came up"

I've added prompts to AI Prompts for Product Work to help PMs dig deeper: 👉 ($15) 🛍️prodmgmt.world/products/ai-pr…

PMs: 60-hour weeks ≠ impact.

I wasted 2 years on work that looked productive but stalled my career. Elite PMs do the opposite.

Avoid these 6 fake productivity traps. Took me 2 years to spot, you’ll get them in 2 mins. 🧵 1/ Writing detailed PRDs that nobody reads

I spent weeks crafting 20-page documents with perfect formatting.

Reality: Engineers skipped to the acceptance criteria. Stakeholders never opened them.

What to do instead: Start with a 1-page problem statement. Add details only when someone asks specific questions.

William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well," would roast 90% of product management writing.

Here's what he'd tell you: 🧵 HARSH TRUTH #1: Your muddled writing reveals muddled thinking

❌ "We need to optimize our user acquisition funnel leveraging synergistic touchpoints"

✅ "We're losing 60% of users at signup. Here's why and how we'll fix it."

The first sounds smart. The second shows you actually understand the problem.

I don't know if there's a way for product managers to not be obsolete, but we're going to try...

Claude Code can be your superpower (for a bit)
(not sponsored, but Anthropic hit me up)

Here are 10+ techniques that will change how you work with code/eng teams: 1/ Codebase Q&A is your new superpower

Stop asking engineers "where is the login feature implemented?"

Claude Code can:
• Identify where specific features live in the code
• Analyze Git history to understand how code evolved
• Summarize team contributions and recent shipments
• Pull context from GitHub issues and PRs

You get answers in minutes, not meeting requests.

Most PM learning focuses on frameworks and best practices.

But after 8 years in product, I've learned more from studying what successful PMs actually produce than from any course.

Here's an experiment worth trying (with important caveats) 🧵 The insight: Instead of asking PMs to explain their decisions, study the artifacts they create when making those decisions.

PRDs, roadmaps, customer research notes, stakeholder emails.

But here's what most advice gets wrong about this approach...

"Everyone can now vibe code features - CPO, customer success, data analysts."

PM's immediate reaction: "If everyone's building... what makes me irreplaceable?"

I watched this exact conversation unfold. The conclusion might surprise you: 🧵 The PM's fear is real:

• CPO has strategy vision AND can build
• CX has customer proximity AND can build
• Data analysts have insight depth AND can build
• Engineers have technical judgment AND can build

Where's the PM's unique value?

This guy breaks down how PMs can win with AI.

Here are the insights on navigating the new reality for product managers that I picked up from this niche talk 🧵 "What do I build and why will it win?"

For years, we buried this core question under layers of agile ceremonies and project management processes.

Now the environment strips away all that noise.

Fast-moving incumbents. New horizontal platforms eating entire use cases. Foundational tech shifts happening monthly, not yearly.

You've got this brilliant feature idea.

You've done the research, talked to users, even built a prototype.

But when you pitch it to the team, you get:

- "We don't have time"
- "What about technical debt?"
- "How does this fit our roadmap?"

Here's what I learned after 50+ feature pitches that failed: The biggest mistake I see PMs make:

They think "buy-in" means convincing people their idea is good.

Wrong.

You're not selling a feature. You're selling a story.

And the story isn't about your solution, it's about a problem everyone already agrees exists.

Your technical skills got you the PM role.

But your stakeholder skills will make or break you.

I lost multiple battles as a PM by being "right" but ineffective.

Here's what I’d do differently now: 1/ First, understand why smart people push back against good data:

• They have context you don't
• They're optimizing for different goals
• They see risks you haven't considered
• They have pressure from their stakeholders
• Past experiences are coloring their judgment

Your engineering background is a superpower for writing PRDs.

But only if you know how to translate technical depth into business impact.

After reviewing probably about ~ 100 technical PRDs last year, here's what separates great ones from the rest 🧠 1/ First, a hard truth:

Your technical expertise can actually work against you when writing PRDs for non-technical stakeholders.

The more you know, the harder it becomes to explain simply.

This is why senior engineers often struggle more than juniors when becoming PMs.

Most PMs burn out... Not from overwork, but misalignment.

They thought they'd build great products.
Instead: endless stakeholder alignment and decks.

After 100+ PM interviews and 200+ JD analyses, I decoded the hidden red flags.

I'll teach you in 5 minutes what took me years: "Strategic thinking" isn't what you think it is

Most PMs assume strategic work means:
• Vision creation
• Market analysis
• Product direction

Product Management Maxims: Hard-earned wisdom for the daily work

A thread of practical rules that will save you years of painful lessons. ⚡ 1. If you want good requirements, talk to five customers. If you want great requirements, watch five customers struggle with your product.

People lie about what they need. They never lie about what frustrates them.

How To Get Rid Of Analysis Paralysis Forever, Even If You’ve Tried Everything: 👇 1. Stop using good outcomes to validate your process.

A successful feature ≠ good decision
Failed experiment ≠ bad decision

Track your decisions BEFORE knowing outcomes. Compare your expected probability of success vs actual.

This exposes your true hit rate.