Current State
A team can be surrounded by status updates and still be unable to answer a simple question: what is actually true right now? The difference is not more reporting. It is a current state.
Brief Blog5 min read
product strategy
31 stories
Standing Brief
An interrupt-only system has to be stingy with interruptions or nobody listens to it. That's a deliberate design choice, not a flaw, but it means real, true information routinely doesn't clear the bar to get surfaced at all. Something has to carry the rest.
Brief Blog5 min read
Coase Theorem
A support lead says the real problem is sales overpromising. The sales lead says the real problem is support refusing to commit to real deadlines. Both descriptions are accurate. Assigning blame between them turns out to be the wrong question entirely, and there's a rigorous reason why.
Brief Blog7 min read
Conway's Law
Three engineers each own one service, and the API between them ends up with three separate ways to represent the same customer, because each engineer built the version they understood best. Nobody sat down and designed that inconsistency on purpose.
Brief Blog6 min read
Nerve Center
A PM says she can't hand a decision to someone else because no one else has the full context. It sounds like control. Transferring everything she's picked up from a dozen scattered conversations this week would take about as long as making the call herself, and that's the actual reason it doesn't…
Brief Blog6 min read
IKEA Effect
A team keeps defending a homegrown internal script that breaks monthly, over a purpose-built tool that does the same job without breaking. Ask why, and the real answer is rarely about which one actually works better. It's that one of the two, they built with their own hands.
Brief Blog7 min read
Survivorship bias in product decisions: how to measure what your roadmap misses
Ranking product requests by how many times they were mentioned is still the most common way I see roadmaps get built. Twenty-three mentions beats eleven, so twenty-three goes higher.
Bagel AI Blog18 min read
Situation Awareness
A weekly brief lists twelve tickets shipped, three deals closed, and a competitor's price change. Every line is accurate. The reader finishes it and still can't say whether the week was good or bad, or what it means for the one coming.
Brief Blog6 min read
Soundness
A quarterly plan names 'reduce onboarding time' as a top goal. Nobody on the team can point to a single shipped thing under it. Meanwhile a team has been heads-down all quarter on something the plan never mentions. Both facts can be true on the same day, in the same company, without anyone lying.
Brief Blog8 min read
State Estimate
A product agent looks at a backlog with 183 items and says the roadmap is full. Then an engineer points out that half of it is abandoned, three shipped already, and the one thing the customer is waiting on changed shape in review. The agent was not dumb.
Brief Blog8 min read
Throughput
34 points this sprint, 41 the one before, 29 before that. The number moves every two weeks and nobody can say whether the team is actually getting faster, because points measure a guess made at the start, not anything that happened after.
Brief Blog7 min read
Drift
A competitor's pricing page said 'no setup fees' for two years. Three weeks ago a fee quietly appeared under implementation, everything else on the page untouched. The page changed. Nobody caught what it meant.
Brief Blog5 min read
The PM and developer used to pass work across a wall. AI knocked the wall down. Now what?
For twenty years the product manager and the developer ran a relay. The PM gathered customer input, wrote the spec, and handed it over. The developer took the spec, made the technical calls, and built it. The PM checked the result against the intent. Then the baton went back.
Bagel AI Blog8 min read
Showing 31 of 31 stories
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