It took us 9 years, 11 prototypes, and our life savings to learn that every great product has the same design process. Matic is now decisively the best home robot for families (I'm biased) A 500-word thread and video on the Universal Design Process behind every great product:

I fell down a Reddit thread about PM storytelling and honestly the advice was better than most PM books. Here's what stood out: 1. Storytelling isn't a soft skill, it's an efficiency metric. You'll know it's working when meetings get shorter, fewer people argue past each other, and decisions happen faster. If that's not happening, your story isn't working regardless of how compelling it sounds. 2. I used to bury the decision in slide 10. Then I tried opening with "This meeting is to decide X" and suddenly people stopped asking "wait, what are we deciding?" 3. I started tracking where people interrupt me. When it happens at the same moment across different audiences, that's usually a structural problem in my narrative (basically A/B testing for stories), not just difficult people. 4. You're not trying to entertain people, you're trying to get them to remember what you said. Are they repeating your framing back to you? If they're using different words to describe the problem, you haven't told the story well enough. If they're quoting you verbatim, you've created a shared mental model. 5. The book StoryBrand is mentioned, but it is missing something critical for PMs: "what's in it for me?" for internal stakeholders. The framework works for customer-facing stories but doesn't address org-political dynamics. Engineering needs to know resourcing impact, sales needs customer benefit proof, execs need financial outcomes. 6. Specific customers work better than aggregate stats. "Sarah from enterprise account X spends 3 hours every Monday doing this manually" lands harder than "many users struggle with this." Nobody asks if one person is representative. 7. I set a timer before meetings and try to say the entire pitch in 60 seconds. If I can't finish, my narrative is too complex. 8. What reads well doesn't equal what sounds good. I read my deck script out loud before meetings now. You catch awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, and unclear logic that looked fine written down. 9. Storytelling quality might be an org design problem, not a skills problem. If poor storytelling creates drag (repeated meetings, misalignment, wasted resources), why does your org allow low-quality narratives to reach exec reviews? Elite companies might have forcing functions that prevent bad stories from consuming bandwidth. 10. The runway metaphor for capability sizing: frame customers as planes (Cessna to A380), frame your product as a runway. "We're trying to land enterprise A380s but our billing system runway can only handle a regional jet." Everyone immediately visualizes big plane on small runway = crash. 11. Before/after framing helps. What's broken today, what changes if we ship this. Makes complex product changes easier to grasp. 12. If people aren't repeating your framing weeks later, your story didn't stick. The real buy-in metric is whether your metaphor becomes shorthand in planning meetings without you being there. 13. The "charisma trap" is real. Most orgs claim to value substance over style, but meeting culture rewards performance. Amazon's 6-page memo culture explicitly removes charisma as a variable by forcing written narratives. 14. Bad storytelling might just be bad strategy in disguise. If you can't explain the stakes in one sentence, maybe the stakes aren't clear. Storytelling struggle is often thinking struggle. No amount of narrative polish fixes directional uncertainty. 15. I write down what each stakeholder actually gets from this. What does the eng lead get? What does sales get? What does the exec get? If I can't answer these, I'm probably pitching product value without the org-political piece.

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1/12: The unraveling of Donald Trump is becoming more evident with each passing day. Once confident in his path to a second term, Trump now faces the unsettling reality that the race he thought was his to win is slipping away. His desperation is palpable. theintellectualist.com/the-f…