Blog
Honest writing about product, operations, leadership, and the career in between.
The Art of the Effective Meeting (And Why Most Are Just Expensive Silence)
Let me start with a number.
If you have eight people in a meeting for one hour, you have not used one hour. You have used eight …
Read moreBetter to Over-Communicate Than Under: A Lesson from the Train
I’ve spent enough time on Australian and British trains to notice something peculiar about how they talk to passengers. In …
Read more"Just Looping You In" — The Passive-Aggressive Email Problem
The phrase “just looping you in” should come with a trigger warning in corporate environments. It’s corporate …
Read moreHow to Write a Status Update That People Actually Read
Most status updates are written for the writer’s benefit, not the reader’s. They’re chronological recitations of …
Read moreWhat Most Meetings Are Really About (And It's Not the Agenda)
There’s the agenda, and then there’s what’s actually happening.
The stated agenda might be “quarterly …
Read moreThe One-Page Brief: Why Forcing Clarity Before the Meeting Changes Everything
The one-page brief is one of the most powerful tools in any operator or PM’s kit, and almost nobody uses it. Not because it …
Read moreDemystifying Agile: A Plain-English Guide to the Ceremonies
If you’ve recently moved into a SaaS or tech environment from corporate learning, project management, or operations, …
Read moreStory Points, Point Roulette, and the Great Estimation Debate
If you’ve been in a planning poker session where someone put down fifteen points for a task everyone else estimated at five, …
Read moreWhat a Good Retro Looks Like (And Why Most Are Awkward Therapy Sessions)
If your retrospectives feel like awkward therapy sessions where someone mentions a problem that doesn’t get solved, and …
Read moreEpics, Stories, Tasks: The Hierarchy That Only Makes Sense Once You've Broken It
If you’ve come from project management or corporate learning into a SaaS product environment, someone has probably told you …
Read moreThe Stand-Up That Isn't Standing Anyone Up
The daily stand-up has a reputation problem. People hate it. Every “how to improve your stand-ups” article gets …
Read moreWhen Agile Becomes a Religion (And That's a Problem)
I worked at a company once where the product team was fanatic about Agile. Every standup was attended. Every retro was …
Read moreWhat Is Product Management, Really? (Not the Job Description Version)
If you’ve scrolled through a PM job posting lately, you’ve seen the script: “Shape the vision. Drive strategy. …
Read moreWhat's the Difference Between Product Management and Program Management?
You’ll see the terms used interchangeably all the time. Job postings treat them as synonyms. People with one title do the …
Read moreThe Product Manager Is Not the CEO of the Product (And Other Myths)
Every PM cohort, every blog post about product management, every career fair talk includes this line: “The product manager …
Read moreHow to Write a Product Requirements Document Without Losing the Will to Live
PRDs are the thing people complain about most. Either they’re 40 pages long and nobody reads past page two. Or they’re …
Read moreFrom LMS to SaaS: What Learning Tech Taught Me About Product
I spent a decade in learning and development, mostly in the LMS space. When I talk to people about moving into product management, …
Read moreThe Fitness App I'd Actually Build (And Why the Market Hasn't)
I’ve been thinking about this in the gaps between learning tech and SaaS work. What would I actually build in fitness? Not …
Read moreRoadmaps Are a Promise, Not a Plan (And Most Teams Forget That)
The problem with roadmaps is that they look like plans. They have dates on them. They have features listed in order. They sit …
Read moreHow to Prioritise When Everything Is Priority One
Every product management framework ever created is an attempt to make an inherently political decision look rational. RICE. …
Read moreThe Spreadsheet Is Not a System (A Love Letter to Anyone Who's Ever Worked in Operations)
I have never met anyone who started their career saying, “One day, I’m going to build the entire operational backbone …
Read moreWhat Good Operations Actually Looks Like in a Remote-First Company
Good operations in a remote-first company is mostly invisible. You notice it by its absence. You’re not frantically Slacking …
Read moreHow to Document a Process So Someone Else Can Actually Follow It
I have inherited some truly terrible process documentation. There was one SOP that started with “Sync the data” as …
Read moreThe Hidden Cost of Unclear Roles and Responsibilities
There’s a particular kind of dysfunction that sets in when nobody is quite sure who owns what. It’s not dramatic. …
Read moreWhy Most Onboarding Programs Fail at the Operational Level
Your company has a really nice onboarding program. There’s a welcome package. A team lunch on the first day. A nice laptop …
Read moreThe Women Who Don't Help Other Women (And Why We Need to Talk About It)
There are women who will actively not help other women. They don’t mentor them. They don’t sponsor them. They compete …
Read moreBeing the Only Woman in the Room: What I Learned After a Decade of It
I have been the only woman in the room so many times that I stopped counting. Not in a dramatic way. Just regularly. In meetings. …
Read moreConfidence Is Not the Problem: Why Telling Women to 'Speak Up More' Misses the Point
The most common piece of advice given to women in professional settings is some variation of “be more confident” or …
Read moreHow to Be Ambitious Without Being 'Difficult': The Exhausting Double Standard
Men who are ambitious are leaders. Men who are assertive are business-minded. Men who negotiate hard are good at their job. Men …
Read moreMentorship vs Sponsorship: What Women Actually Need to Advance
A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor puts their name and credibility behind you in a room you’re not in. These are not the …
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