Blog
Notes for product leaders.
The Promotion I Tried to Turn Down
I tried to turn down a promotion. When I was VP of Product at Vivint, my boss, Jefferson Lyman, told me he was promoting me to SVP, with my former peers reporting to me. I said I already had the influence I needed. His answer was "That's exactly why you should be the SVP." I had earned my colleagues' respect, and in many ways I was already leading the team. If you're aiming for your next product leadership role, look at the work you already take on. Are you helping peers make better decisions, connecting customer value to business value, and developing people? Practice those before the promotion conversation, because they're still the job once your former peers report to you.
Read the postNever Surprise Your Engineering Partner
Never surprise your engineering partner. Before you make a material commitment to a customer or the CEO, align explicitly with your engineering and design leaders. Agree on the outcome you're committing to, what you'll move or stop to make room, and which assumptions still need testing. Product may lead on vision and strategy, but decisions about how to deploy teams and what to promise the business should be made together. Make the tradeoffs visible, settle who decides what, and leave room to challenge an assumption before it turns into a commitment your teams have to deliver. For a leader new to the top product role, this builds the working agreement your teams will depend on. Over seven years leading product at Lucid, it's how we never missed a customer commitment.
Read the postWhat a New CPO Inherits
A new CPO inherits the company's past decisions, and the ones it has avoided, about where product creates value, not just an org chart. That gets urgent when a board review or budget cycle is close: you have to connect customer value to business value, align your peers, and build a team that makes good calls without you. So before polishing a strategy deck, find out where the executive team agrees, where it doesn't, and which decisions can't wait. A strategy only matters if it changes decisions, and the slides are just one way to communicate it.
Read the postExecutive Alignment Before the Roadmap
When a product organization struggles, the fix usually isn't a new roadmap, process or org chart. It's getting the leadership team aligned first. Leaders have to agree on what the business needs from product, what they're choosing not to do, and which decisions their teams can make on their own. Once those trade-offs are explicit and the outcomes are agreed, the roadmap becomes useful instead of just a tidy cover for an unresolved disagreement.
Read the postWhen Building Becomes Cheap, Learning Becomes the Advantage
As AI makes building faster and cheaper, the real competitive advantage for product teams is shifting from how quickly they can create to how quickly they can learn. Exceptional teams systematically reduce uncertainty—staying close to customers, discovering valuable problems, de-risking assumptions, and optimizing what already exists—then use that learning to make better decisions. AI can accelerate many of these activities, but it can’t replace the judgment and understanding required to know what is actually worth building. In a world where creating things is increasingly easy, the fastest-learning product teams will win.
Read the postThe Demise of the AI Product Manager
“AI PM” is a transitional label. As AI becomes table stakes, the scarce skill that drove the premium will stop differentiating most PMs—and executives who over-hire for AI expertise risk paying scarcity wages for work that soon looks like everyone else’s. Deep AI specialists will still matter; a separate caste of AI PMs won’t. The durable edge is still great product management—customer judgment, influence, ambiguity, business value, learning speed—practiced by PMs who are simply great at using AI.
Read the postI Hate Roadmaps
Feature roadmaps bore customers and waste executive time. What matters is whether the team understands vision, strategy, customers, and the value they’re trying to create—for the customer and the business. If that thinking is solid, you can trust the roadmap; if it’s weak, debating features won’t fix it. Value chunking reframes the plan as cohesive statements of customer and business value on a timeline, not a pile of ingredients. Review the thinking and the value, then end the meeting.
Read the postWhat’s Your Magic Wand Move?
A Lucid listening-tour practice: sort who would push back on you, rebuild trust with the rest, then ask one question that surfaces friction, ambiguous decisions, and where process gets in the way.
Read the postProduct Management Through the Golden Circle in the Age of AI
AI is not making product management obsolete—it is separating its enduring purpose from the work that can increasingly be automated. Viewed through the Golden Circle, the **Why** of product management remains unchanged: find and sustain the intersection of customer value and business value. The **What**—the decisions, interventions, artifacts, and deliverables product managers create—is being dramatically accelerated and automated by AI. The **How**—the learning, sensemaking, judgment, and wisdom required to make good decisions under uncertainty—is also being transformed, but AI introduces risks such as hallucination, shallow understanding, and false learning. As building becomes faster and cheaper, the real premium shifts toward product teams that can learn well, develop sound judgment, and determine what is actually worth building.
Read the postThe Product Manager Role Isn’t Going Anywhere
Predictions that PM disappears—or merges into a single PM/UX/eng role—confuse purpose with tools. AI is a tool; the enduring job is finding the intersection of customer value and business value. Hype and some capabilities are moving fast; applying them at scale to accelerate teams is lagging. Leaders should use AI to raise the rate of learning so PMs find that intersection faster—not rewrite the role.
Read the postWinning at Work Almost Cost Me My Family
Twenty-four years ago, a love of product and overwork left Dan’s family learning to live without him—even when he was home. Hard boundaries made him present as a husband and father, and his career accelerated anyway. Winning at work isn’t worth losing at home; if that hits close, he’s open to being a sounding board.
Read the postYour people are your product
Outcomes, roadmaps, and metrics still matter. The product a leader is really building is the team that can deliver them.
Read the postWelcome
Why I’m starting a blog, and what I plan to write about as a product leadership coach.
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