There's a particular kind of PM that I call the connective tissue. You're the one making sure everyone's on the same page. You're holding the product vision while also making sure engineering doesn't feel blindsided, design doesn't feel unheard, and leadership knows what's actually happening. You're the glue. And you're probably terrible at taking credit for it. Because the better you are at your job, the more invisible your work becomes. The team moves smoothly. Launches happen. People forget that it's because you held all of that together. But here's the thing: your career doesn't move forward on invisible work. It moves forward on work that people know you did. So I'm curious: How do you balance being the person who makes everyone else successful without disappearing yourself in the process? What does that actually look like for you?

60%. That's the percentage of product teams not using AI at all who reported "no meaningful value yet" from AI. (page 77) I know. Shocking. 😂 But stick with me. Because buried in this data from the State of Product Management 2026 report is something actually worth thinking about. The teams who've made AI a core strategic capability? Zero percent reported no meaningful value. The teams using it across many workflows? 4.3%. The teams just experimenting? 21.8% still not seeing it. In other words — you don't get the value until you're actually in it. Which sounds obvious. But I think a lot of product teams are still waiting to feel convinced before they commit. And the data says that's exactly backwards. The strategic benefits — more time for actual strategy, better prioritization decisions, improved discovery quality — those don't show up early. They show up after you've moved past the experimentation phase and started weaving it into how you actually work. What's your honest relationship with AI right now? Are you in it or still watching from the sidelines?

Hey Product Room — we're talking prioritization on our call tomorrow and I wanted to drop this here before we jump on. Lately it feels to me like the hardest prioritization problem isn't the roadmap. It's the thing that's genuinely good, has real support, and you still have to kill it because you and your team only have so much bandwidth and you need to protect the best stuff. Come ready to talk about what you're holding onto right now that might need to go. See you soon!

Something I keep seeing with PMs right now...both the ones on my team and the ones I coach is that the inner critic is LOUD! And I'm starting to think it is sometimes responsible for why we are so bad at saying no. We all know how to say no. We've read the frameworks, we've done the prioritization exercises, we know what a good roadmap looks like. But the critic is running in the background telling you that saying no means you're not a team player, not strategic enough, not on top of it enough. So you say yes. And then yes again. And suddenly your roadmap looks like everyone else's priority list and nothing on it is actually yours. Let's discuss the role of that inner voice on our call next week when we talk about Prioritization. Because the pressure on priorities is both external and internal.

Saw this interesting idea for a Hackathon from Mind the Product. Looks like it could be fun! I know I've been having fun building stuff so now I just have to think of something cool to build. ;)