Beyond the Backlog
Product Management | AI & Legal Tech Insights
Distilled learnings from my career as a product manager—real-world case studies, frameworks, and the hard-earned lessons behind what worked (and what didn't). Focused on building AI-powered legal tech, product strategy, and leading teams.
Deep Learning Demystified: What Product People Actually Need to Know About Neural Networks
Every product leader I know is making decisions about AI features right now: which capabilities to build, where to invest, and how to evaluate what's real versus what's hype. And yet, I don't think the vast majority of product people know what's
The Changing Role of Product in the Age of AI
A few weeks ago, a PM friend of mine was prepping for an interview at a well-known growth-stage company. We were chatting about the interview process and how it's changed since they were last looking for a new role, and one set of questions in particular was different.
The Agentic Future Demands More Than Agents
There's enormous pressure right now to go agentic. Every product leader I talk to is feeling it — from their boards, their customers, their competitors, and honestly, from themselves. The promise is real. Agentic AI can automate complex workflows, reduce toil, and unlock value that wasn't
The Making of a Manager: What Early Product Leaders Can Learn from Julie Zhuo
I just finished Julie Zhuo's "The Making of a Manager," and while it's technically a book about general management, I found myself dog-earing pages that speak directly to the challenges I face as a product leader early in my management journey. Zhuo's
Your AI Strategy Has a Blind Spot: Internal Adoption
Most product leaders I talk to are obsessed with how to build AI into their products. What features to ship. What models to use. How to differentiate. Those are the right questions — but they're incomplete. The question that gets far less attention: how is your organization actually
The Dream Machine: What a 1960s Computer Visionary Can Teach Today's Product Managers
I just finished "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and I can't stop thinking about J.C.R. Licklider. The book is a biography of Licklider and the history of the early computing revolution. "Lick" (as everyone called him) was a psychologist who
Beyond the Chat Box: Designing AI Experiences That Actually Fit How People Work
This is the third post in my series recapping takeaways from Reforge's AI Strategy course. Part 1 covered how AI accelerates PMF collapse; Part 2 introduced the AI Maker Matrix for user segmentation. This week, I'm diving into something that's been gnawing at me
My Favorite Products of 2025
I'm taking a break this week from my takeaways from the Reforge AI Strategy course to do my EOY breakdown of products I've loved. Every year I find myself quietly building a "favorites list" in my head—the products that actually changed how
AI Maker Matrix: A Framework for AI Product Segmentation
Last time, I kicked off this series on my takeaways from Reforge's AI Strategy course by exploring how AI accelerates PMF collapse. This week, I'm going deeper: who exactly are you building for, and why does getting that wrong doom so many AI products? The framework
Product-Market Fit on Fast-Forward: How AI Compresses the Incumbent Advantage
I’m working my way through Reforge’s AI Strategy course and so far it‘s sparked a lot of great thoughts! In particular, it’s been a forcing function to pressure-test my own instincts about how to build AI products and modify my approach to
The Anatomy of an Empowered Product Team
When product teams are empowered, discovery-to-delivery tightens—and customers feel it as quicker, better-fit solutions. If your product org feels slow, doesn't consistently deliver customer value, and decisions get bottlenecked on PMs, evaluate moving toward an empowered operating model. In a waterfall world, designers wait on specs,
How I’m Using AI as a Product Leader
The pace of innovation in tech has never been faster. Every week, new AI tools emerge that reshape how we work. More than ever, it’s important to stay up to date on what’s happening to ensure you don’t fall behind. It’s one
The Most Valuable Career Advice I’ve Ever Received
I want to share a piece of advice that has been incredibly impactful for me, both personally and professionally. This isn't exclusive to product managers, but I find it especially helpful when working in product. The advice was this: you should compile your own personal board of directors.
Cultivating Safety at Scale: A Playbook for Product Leaders
If you didn’t catch my previous newsletter, I dove into cultivating strong, psychologically safe, empowered product teams as a product manager. That post is a precursor to this one, which focuses on cultivating psychological safety as a product leader. Psychological Safety Primes You for Success Cultivating psychological safety
Make Empowerment Real: A PM’s Playbook for Psychological Safety
"[Psychological Safety is] a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." — Amy Edmondson A psychologically safe environment enables product teams to take risks together. Psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have on empowered product teams—it’s the unseen arena that provides