◆ PLAYBOOK

The road to great
product management

A journey to product management, drawn from my own experience across product roles in startups and enterprise. You'll find the key crafts an excellent PM needs, each a stop you can learn, in roughly the order it starts to matter, and updated for how AI is reshaping the role.

Tailor the path to your context

F

F

Foundations

The non-negotiables every PM needs.

Writing good product specs

The doc that aligns ten people before a single line of code.

Scoping & cutting

Deciding what NOT to build. The most underrated PM skill.

Discovery & validation

Knowing you're building the right thing before you build it.

First-principles thinking

Derive the right product from the customer truth up, not from what competitors shipped.

Definition of Done

Agreeing what "done" means before you start, so "done" doesn't mean "demo-ready" to you and "shipped" to engineering.

C

C

Core craft

The daily engine of the job.

Prioritization

RICE, value-vs-effort, and the conversation the framework forces.

Roadmapping

A communication tool, not a promise.

Working with engineering

Earning trust with the people who actually build it.

Influence without authority

Owning outcomes across teams you don't manage.

M

M

Mastery

Where you become a multiplier.

Metrics & outcomes

Outcomes over output; the one metric that matters.

0→1 vs 1→N

startup ⇄ ent

Building something new vs scaling something working, different jobs.

These are the evergreen craft. For point-in-time takes on where the discipline is heading, AI-DLC, the absorption gap, see Thinking.