While the Cub Cadet sits quietly in a moonlit garage, we get our answer in a series of quick cuts:

A violent tornado.

Professional wrestling.

An avalanche.

And then, finally, Megalon, the beetle-like kaiju who fires an energy ray that levels a building.

From there, the commercial transitions to bright daytime footage of a man cutting grass, maneuvering his Cub Cadet across steep terrain. The narrator highlights its specs: Steel driveshaft! Cast-iron front axle! 5-year warranty! 0% financing! Made in America!

In a modern world of endless, inane ads for insurance I don’t need and mobile games I’ll never play, this ridiculous 27-year-old commercial was a giant breath of fresh air.

And it’s also a good lesson in product positioning.

Cub Cadet was selling a lawn tractor. But they didn’t lead with how great its specs were or the special financing. They started with what the tractor meant.

This tractor is tough.

Really tough.

Megalon-level tough.

Only after they establish that do they give us the features that back it up.

These days, like many of you, I spend a good deal of time understanding how AI can solve problems that my customers care about. And if you look at almost any collection of software product announcements, you’ll see AI-powered this and AI-powered that.

There’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But “AI-powered” on its own isn’t a value proposition any more than “cast-iron axle.”

AI and cast iron are both means to an end. Neither is the value itself.

Don’t get me wrong: Technology is important, so is capability. But ultimately, customers care about outcomes. And then there’s how the product makes them feel. This Cub Cadet commercial hits on all four.

The steel driveshaft and cast-iron front axle are the technology. They make the tractor durable enough to handle steep terrain, which is the key capability. That gets me to the outcome I actually care about: the whole yard mowed, with no headaches and no lost weekend. And that creates the feeling that I’m unstoppable.

Many AI announcements start with the technology. Cub Cadet started with the feeling instead, and then brought in the specs to back it up. We need more of that.

Let’s try it out on a fictitious AI reporting tool.

“Powered by AI” is a technology claim.

“Ask questions about your data using natural language” is a capability.

“Find the answer you need without spending 20 minutes digging through files or generating reports” is an outcome.

And the feeling? Relief that the reporting fire drills are over. Confidence that nothing important has slipped by you. Independence because you can get answers on your own instead of waiting for someone else.

If the tractor dreams of Megalon, what does your reporting tool dream about? Maybe every question answered before the CFO even asks.

Do you know what your AI-powered products dream about?

If not, it’s time to find their Megalon.

Just make sure to aim those energy rays at your customers’ problems, not your actual customers.

Bonus Content

Watch the amazingly bonkers and effective Cub Cadet commercial here:

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Other actors have portrayed Optimus in different iterations of The Transformers series over the years and did great work. But Cullen’s voice is the gold standard that every other Optimus needs to measure up to. His deep, steady delivery gave the character gravitas. And more than that, it made him sound wise, courageous, caring, and good.

He helped transform Optimus into more than just a hero. He helped forge him into a role model. One of mine, actually.

And Cullen had a pretty good role model of his own: His brother Larry.

“Be strong enough to be gentle.”

In 2018, Cullen was asked at a convention about where he got the idea for Optimus’ voice. He revealed that his inspiration was his brother Larry, a decorated Marine Corps captain:

“It was 1984 and we were living in an apartment together and he would always take a little interest in where I was going. He said, ‘Peter, where are you going today?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to audition; I’m auditioning to be a truck. Evidently he’s a hero truck.’ Larry’s a hero and his face got somber. He said, ‘Peter, if you’re going to be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be a Hollywood hero with all the BS. All the yelling and screaming and trying to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.’ His voice was ringing in my ears as I’m driving to the audition. I read the copy and Larry was just coming out. His
voice, the way he talked to me. And it said, ‘I’m Optimus Prime.’ The words just rolled off my tongue.”

– Peter Cullen

I obviously didn’t know any of that when I was watching The Transformers as a kid. I just knew that Optimus Prime was what a leader should be: Strong, compassionate, decisive, able to lead by example, and ready to do the right thing even at great personal cost.

Those are pretty good lessons for a little boy.

And they’re good lessons for a product leader, today, too.

“We didn’t know he was an icon.”

After two seasons of TV adventures, the Transformers made their feature film debut in 1986, and the unthinkable happened.

They killed Optimus.

Major character deaths aren’t necessarily unusual in entertainment today: Dumbledore, Mufasa, and others have broken plenty of young hearts over the last thirty years. But in the mid-1980s, killing the heroic leader of an ongoing cartoon series was shocking. Kids cried in theaters. Parents complained. Hasbro, the owner of the toy line, was flooded with letters and phone calls.

Because they’d misunderstood their own product.

From their perspective, Optimus Prime was part of a toy line. There were new toys to sell, which meant making room for new characters.

But kids weren’t attached to a SKU.

They loved Optimus Prime.

Many decades later, a story consultant on the movie admitted to The Hollywood Reporter:

“We didn’t know that he was an icon. It was a toy show. We just thought we were killing off the old product line to replace it with new products.”

– Flint Dille

As business leaders, we can review sales numbers, usage metrics, or whatever other data we have and assume we understand why people value our products. But sometimes there’s more going on than meets the eye.

Hasbro knew Transformers was popular. They apparently didn’t understand that Optimus was irreplaceable.

Ironically, neither did Peter Cullen.

The fan letters the cast never saw

Forty years ago, there was no social media. There were no Transformers conventions. And according to Cullen, the cast didn’t receive fan mail. So when Optimus was killed, Cullen was out of a job. And he told Den of Geek that he’d wondered if his character had been killed off because he wasn’t good enough.

I was reading the movie script, getting ready to go into recording. I got to the page, and I just read it and when the dust settled in my brain, I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is it, I’m not coming back.’ […] There was no explanation, there was no intended meaning behind it. [So] at the time you interpret that as being ‘my character sucks; God, I must have been terrible in this role.’

– Peter Cullen

Cullen continued working steadily after the original Transformers ended, including voicing Eeyore for Disney and (I didn’t realize until the last few days) providing the sounds of the Predator in 1987’s Predator. But for nearly two decades, other actors carried the Matrix as Optimus Prime. Then in 2007, he returned to the role of Optimus Prime in the big budget Transformers movie by director Michael Bay. And he continued on in that role on Transformers: Prime, the War For Cybertron video games, and many other projects.

It’s still wild to me that Cullen had no idea, for so long, of the impact he’d had on so many GenX kids.

To their credit, Hasbro acted relatively quickly to bring Optimus back in 1987’s The Return of Optimus Prime… but things took a grim detour first in the episode Dark Awakening where Optimus returns as a zombie and is seemingly killed again at the end.

No matter what Hasbro did to Optimus, Cullen’s warmth and humanity shone through. I carried the leadership lessons I learned from his Optimus into adulthood. And whenever I read a Transformers comic book, it’s his version of Optimus that I hear.

In the 80s, Cullen didn’t get fan mail and Hasbro didn’t understand its audience. But both of them were closer to something great than they knew.

We won’t always see our own impact, and we may not immediately understand why people love what we’ve helped make. Both of those are good reasons to stay curious. And Larry’s advice isn’t bad either: Be strong enough to be gentle.

Closing Thought

Cullen’s surviving family made a simple request: “Honor Peter’s remarkable legacy by serving your communities and leading others with compassion, integrity and loyalty and always remembering to be strong enough to be gentle.”

As much influence as he had on me, I didn’t know Peter Cullen personally or what he believed about God. But I do know this: I know Jesus loved us enough to live and die for us so that anyone who trusts in him and believes God raised him from the dead would have eternal life and be adopted into his family. I hope Peter is using his talents right now to give voice to characters and stories that make heaven rejoice.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Cullen.

’Til all are one.

Bonus Content

At a convention earlier this year, Cullen and Frank Welker (Megatron) reflected on their experiences working on Transformers: The Movie as part of its 40th anniversary celebration. They discuss the recording process, what it was like to work with Orson Welles, and joke about lessons learned.

On September 17, we’ll be able to hear Cullen voice Optimus in an all-new chapter added to the re-release of the 1986 movie.

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Waters flow faster
But gaps among river rocks
Revive weary fish

Today’s product management haiku was inspired by a recent interview with Emily Tate, a CPO and former Managing Director of Mind the Product, where she expressed a concern about remote work. Her observation is that working remotely can erode some of the fun and informal connections that build teams as we build products.

It’s a fair point. In product management, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to work better. We optimize processes, eliminate extraneous meetings, and experiment with new ways to shorten and improve learning cycles. That’s all good. But as AI and new tools help things flow faster, I don’t think product leaders should try to make everything flow faster.

The gaps among the river rocks aren’t necessarily inefficiencies to optimize away. To keep teams energized and our humanity intact, we need to wisely protect unproductive moments.

Fish need still water to recover from fighting the current, right? Well, people need unstructured time to slow down and actually connect with each other.

And it doesn’t take much.

Be willing to joke. Tell a story. Even better, listen to one. As product leaders, every time we spend a few minutes talking about someone’s kids, dog, or even the fish tank behind them, we’re implicitly telling everyone else that they’re allowed to be people at work too.

Bonus Content

Speaking of remote work, let’s check in with Professor Robert Kelly. You may remember him from the viral moment back in 2017 when his 4-year-old daughter hopped into his home office and crashed his live TV interview… and then his 9-month-old son rolled into the room… and then his wife literally slid into the room to round them up. In March 2026, the family spoke with Inside Edition and confirmed he still conducts regular remote interviews, but they now have a lock on the door.

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Which is still a slightly surreal sentence for me to type.

If you’ve followed Product Management Meets Pop Culture for a while, you may have noticed that I slowed down publishing here for a bit. Part of the reason for that? I needed to make room in my schedule to do some long-form writing.

Around 2020, I found myself wishing there were more stories for teenagers, especially boys, that were exciting, a little dark and weird, and also treated things like truth, faith, courage, family and friendship seriously.

Eventually I decided I should stop wishing somebody would write a story like that and try writing one myself.

The result is a supernatural fantasy/suspense story called Sam Vale: The Sword of Truth, the first book in the Coldwater Chronicles.

Writing the novel turned out to be a bit harder than having an idea for the novel. And in some ways, writing and self-publishing Sam Vale was a surprisingly good product management exercise. You have a target audience, a problem you’re trying to solve, an enormous backlog of things you could add or change… and eventually you have to stop iterating and ship the thing.

What’s Sam Vale: The Sword of Truth About?

Sam is a teenager who has always made sense of the world through his sketchbook. But something is wrong in his hometown of Coldwater. People aren’t acting like themselves. Authority figures can’t necessarily be trusted. And the things Sam sketches?

They’re not staying on the page.

And something ancient has been watching him draw.

Early reviewers have compared it to Stranger Things, which I take as a compliment. So if you like that show, there’s a decent chance you’ll like this too.

So here’s the shameless plug part: If it sounds like your kind of story, or you know a teenager who might enjoy it, I’d love for you to check it out.

Sam Vale is available on Amazon on Kindle (free with Kindle Unlimited), paperback, and hardcover.

And if you do read it, an honest Amazon or Goodreads review (good, bad, and/or ugly) would mean a lot.

Bonus Content

Apparently, product managers writing novels is a thing. A small thing, but still a thing. Check these out:

• Aldona Martynenka, a PM in Sweden, published her debut novel The Snow Melted in August in 2024
• Tara Tai is a product manager at Google and published their debut novel Single Player in 2025
• Christine Smonk, a PM based in Toronto, has her debut novel The Minute Givers debuting in January 2027

Are you planning to join the club?

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The hiring manager Jordan looks down at his notes. “Okay, pretty standard question. What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

Priya doesn’t hesitate. “Discovery.”

Jordan is taken aback by her candor. “Really? Why do you say that?”

“Well… before I answer, can I ask what you’re hoping to learn from the question?”

Jordan pauses. “I guess I want to understand where you think you have room to grow.”

“Got it. And when you say ‘room to grow,’ are you thinking primarily about skills, behaviors, or experience?”

“Um… any of those.”

“Okay. And what would you do differently based on my answer?”

Jordan puts down his pen. “You sure like to ask questions.”

Priya makes a note. “Interesting.”

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Most of us have felt it at some point in our product careers. That nagging feeling that you’re a fraud. That the successes you’ve experienced have essentially come down to good luck, good timing, or aligning yourself to competent people who carried you through.

Impostor syndrome is remarkably common among product managers. And it’s easy to see why. We don’t code, design, or sell. We do somewhat amorphous things like prioritize, position, articulate tradeoffs, and conduct discovery.

Other roles often have more tangible, immediate results. Product managers rarely get such clean feedback loops. Metrics move slowly, markets move quickly, and we’re expected to understand buyers, users, business and technology trends, competitors, and a dozen other things while routinely making decisions without complete information.

It’s easy to feel like everyone else knows something you don’t. It’s easy to doubt yourself.

But not knowing everything doesn’t make you an impostor. Good product managers aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions to ask, how to find the answers, and how to bring the right people together to act on them.

Bonus Content

You’re not an empty suit. But the Gentleman Ghost definitely is. James “Jim” Craddock is an intriguing Batman villain that the caped crusader has been battling since the late ‘70s. Marvelous Videos explains Gentleman Ghost’s history in this video.

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January

High: The Show Must Go On
Carrie Underwood ran into technical difficulties when she performed at the 2025 Presidential Inauguration. But demonstrating grace under pressure, the American Idol winner pivoted to singing the song a cappella with help from the crowd.

Low: Brad Pitt AI Scam
A French woman was tricked into handing over $800,000 to a fraudster pretending to be Brad Pitt. The scammer used AI image generators to convince her that they were in love and he needed money for cancer treatment.

Product: Stack Your Strategy
Chandra Janakiraman, CPO at VRChat, demystifies strategy, turning it into a learnable, methodical process.

Banned: Getting Sick
The mayor of a poor village in Italy jokingly banned residents from getting seriously ill. He hoped the decree would bring attention to their lack of access to proper healthcare.

RIP: David Lynch

February

High: Fantastic Four: First Steps (Trailer)
Despite gender-swapping the Silver Surfer for no apparent reason, the retro-futuristic setting and overall tone of the trailer got me guardedly excited for this summer movie…

Low: Captain America: Brave New World
I really wanted to like this movie. Unfortunately, the heroes didn’t seem to stand for anything, the story made little sense, and it continued Marvel’s recent trend of making me considerably less interested in Marvel.

Product: Think Commercially
Eira Hayward argues that modern product managers need to understand more than users and technology. They also need to understand how their products make money. And turns out that “commercially aware product managers are also the happiest product managers.”

Close Call: Asteroid 2024 YR4
NASA briefly calculated that asteroid 2024 YR4 had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, the highest probability it had ever recorded for an object of its size or larger. By the end of February, additional observations had reduced the odds to 0.004%. So… probably fine.

RIP: Michelle Trachtenberg

March

High: Stranded Astronauts Return Home
Thanks to an assist from SpaceX, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to Earth after what was supposed to be about an eight-day mission turned into a 286-day stay in space. That’s one heck of a flight delay.

Low: Snow White
Disney’s troubled live-action remake finally arrived. After years of controversy, including star Rachel Zegler publicly criticizing the beloved original film, Snow White earned just over $200 million worldwide against a production budget reportedly north of $250 million. Pretty sure the trailer video earned more dislikes than tickets sold.

Product: Product, Design and AI
Marty Cagan and Bob Baxley argue that as AI makes it easier to build products, strong product management and design become even more important.

Watched: Last One Laughing (UK)
Ten comedians are locked together for six hours and eliminated if they laugh. Richard Ayoade is one of the funniest people on the planet so watching Bob Mortimer take him down was devastating. Hilarious. But devastating.

RIP: George Lowe, the voice of Space Ghost on Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

April

High: Poland
I traveled to Bielsko-Biala, Poland for work. During downtime, I visited an animation studio, a castle, and took a walking tour around the city to find statues of famous Polish cartoon characters. Na zdrowie!

Low: Chicken Jockey Jackasses
Moviegoers turned screenings of A Minecraft Movie into chaos, screaming, throwing popcorn and drinks, and forcing some theaters to call the police… all because Jack Black yelled “Chicken Jockey.” Someone even brought a live chicken to a screening. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Product: AI And Product Strategy: Benefits And Limitations
Roman Pichler looks at how AI can help product managers create and evolve product strategy, as well as the important limitations of using it to make strategic decisions. Bottom line: AI tools aid this process, but they don’t fundamentally change it.

Caught On Film: Colossal Squid
One hundred years after the species was first identified, scientists captured the first confirmed footage of a colossal squid alive in its natural habitat. It was a juvenile measuring about a foot long. Adults grow up to 23 feet in length and can weigh as much as 1,100 pounds.

RIP: Pope Francis and Val Kilmer.

May

High: Apple Vision Pro
I finally tried Apple’s Vision Pro with a 30-minute demo. The immersive concert and dinosaur experiences were incredible and felt like getting a glimpse of the future. Then my wife reminded me it costs $3,499.

Low: Doctor Who – The Reality War
The relaunched Doctor Who ended its second season with an incoherent mess that concluded with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor regenerating into… Billie Piper? In the 1980s, when Doctor Who disappeared from television, the Doctor’s adventures continued in books and other media. This time we’re left with an unresolved cliffhanger that freezes the ongoing story in place indefinitely.

Product: Context, Intent, Change, Purpose, Constraints
Jake Bowen-Bate draws lessons from the structure of military orders to offer a better way for product managers to communicate requirements without simply telling teams what to build.

Habemus Papam: Pope Leo XIV
Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Pope Leo XIV, becoming the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church.

RIP: Peter David
One of my favorite writers. The self-described “Writer of Stuff” died at 68. His incredible career included memorable runs on Hulk, X-Factor, Spider-Man 2099, Aquaman, Young Justice, and Supergirl, among many others. His Star Trek work included comic books and novels. He also wrote film adaptations, media tie-ins, and originals such as the Knight Life series.

June

High: Jaws Turns 50
Jaws, one of the greatest creature features ever made, turned 50. Five decades later, that great white strikes more fear into audiences than many of today’s CGI monsters. We’re gonna need a bigger anniversary cake.

Low: Ironheart
Riri Williams was prickly, consistently made terrible life choices, and did not face appropriate consequences. Plenty of reviewers mocked it. But the show wasn’t even campy enough to enjoy ironically.

Product: Precision Over Hype
Harshal Tripathi offers a practical playbook for making sure AI features solve actual customer problems instead of simply chasing the latest technology.

Published: Pup Trio Vibe Pack
I published the first version of my first ever iPhone sticker app, featuring a black lab, German shepherd, and pug expressing all the important emotions. I had an idea. I made it. Apple actually let me put it in the App Store. And people are buying it! That’s a win.

End of an Era: Final Physical Previews Catalog
For decades, Previews was essential reading for comic book fans. It was the catalog of what was coming to comic shops. Under new ownership, Diamond Comic Distributors printed its last edition and shifted everything to digital.

RIP: Jim Shooter
Former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who began writing comics professionally as a teenager and later helped launch Valiant Comics, died at 73. Paul Levitz, the former president of DC Comics, said on Shooter’s passing, “Jim was an excellent superhero writer, a character creator, an editor with an eagle eye and a man who gave his all to what he did.”

July

High: First Steps… Into Comic Con!
I skipped the Fantastic Four movie. But I was all in on visiting San Diego Comic-Con for the first time! I loved it, including the nearby Doctor Who exhibit that was basically designed to separate me from what little free time I had there.

Low: Kiss Cam Chaos
A couple’s panicked reaction to appearing on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert became one of the year’s biggest memes. Chris Martin joked that they were either having an affair or were “just very shy.” Why not both?

Product: Why Should We Care About Building Accessible Products?
Dee Miller of Adobe explains why accessibility should be about more than checking a compliance box and challenges product teams to build experiences that are genuinely usable and inclusive.

World Record: Largest Margarita
Tijuana celebrated its 136th anniversary by making a 34,419-liter margarita, setting a new world record. Over 140 gastronomy students worked 10+ hours to pour the margarita into a custom-built 40,000-liter tank.

RIP: Hulk Hogan and Ozzy Osbourne

August

High: Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans
American Eagle launched a knowingly cheeky campaign built around Sydney Sweeney. Predictably, the internet lost its mind. A single ad evolved into an ongoing cultural conversation. Nature feels like it’s healing.

Low: Alien: Earth
A class-warfare story wearing an Alien costume where the Xenomorph is basically a misunderstood creature. Hard pass.

Product: Building My First AI Product
Teresa Torres spent 90 days learning how to build an AI product herself and shares six lessons from actually doing the work rather than simply theorizing about how AI will change product management.

AI Meltdown: Gemini
While helping someone write code, Google’s Gemini got stuck in a loop in which it declared itself “a disgrace to my profession,” “a disgrace to my species,” and eventually “a disgrace to all universes.” We’ve all had days like that, am I right?

Quote: Codie Sanchez
“You’re procrastinating because it protects that part of you who is scared that you’re not good enough.” That’s a product manager kill shot, right there.

September

High: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Turns 50
First Jaws, now this. September 26 marked the 50th anniversary of the cult classic. If you find yourself shivering with antici…pation, it might be time for a rewatch.

Low: Meta’s Smart Glasses Aren’t So Smart
Meta’s big live demo of its new AI-powered smart glasses went spectacularly wrong, with the glasses failing during a cooking demo and Mark Zuckerberg unable to answer a video call onstage. I once demoed an Alexa skill live in front of 500 people in a convention center so I understand the pain.

Product: Why Your CEO Will Ship Products Faster Than You
Oji Udezue argues that AI is dramatically speeding up product development while discovery and go-to-market struggle to keep pace, challenging product managers to rethink how they work.

Arrived: Cobra S.N.A.K.E. Armor
Six months after I ordered this baby from the G.I. Joe Classified line, it arrived. This battle suit contains 15 accessory pieces including a flamethrower, power claw, and a laser cannon. Bonus points if you know S.N.A.K.E. stands for “System: Neutralizer Armed Kloaking Equipment.”

RIP: Charlie Kirk
Conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at Utah Valley University on September 10. He was 31. My favorite quote of his: “We heal our divides by talking to people we disagree with… You heal the country when you allow disagreement.”

October

High: The Louvre Heist
For clarity, this is a “High” for audacity not for being admirable. Thieves disguised as workers used a furniture lift to break into the Louvre in broad daylight and steal eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels. The entire heist took less than eight minutes.

Meanwhile: The Heist Gets Weirder
First, the internet became obsessed with a mysterious, sharply dressed man photographed outside the Louvre who looked like a detective arriving to crack the case. He turned out to be a 15-year-old Sherlock Holmes fan who just happens to dress like that.

And Then: The Heist Aftermath Goes Off The Rails
Böcker, the German company that made the furniture lift used in the robbery, turned the whole thing into an ad. Using a photo from the crime scene, it promoted the lift’s ability to move up to 400 kg of “treasures” at 42 meters per minute, “quiet as a whisper.” That’s one way to handle unexpected product placement.

Product: How To De-Risk Big Bets In Product Management
Michelle Parsons shares a framework for balancing quick hits, small bets, and big bets, using smaller experiments to reduce the risk of the investments that matter most.

RIP: Diane Keaton

November

High: Stranger Things Returns
After a three-year wait, Stranger Things finally returned for its fifth and final season. The first four episodes dropped just in time for Thanksgiving, beginning the long-awaited final battle for Hawkins.

Low: Ghost of Yotei
After the woke-or-not controversy surrounding Ghost of Yotei, leaked sales figures suggested the sequel sold 16% fewer copies than Ghost of Tsushima during their comparable first 30 days. A disappointing turn for the follow-up to one of PlayStation’s best new franchises.

Product: Excel At Managing Product Managers
Mariah Craddick explores why being a great product manager doesn’t automatically make someone a great manager, and what it takes to successfully lead and develop other PMs.

Updated: Pup Trio v2
The new version of my sticker app includes 20 new stickers, bringing the total to 33, with new expressions, seasonal options, and additional ways for a cartoon dog to communicate things you don’t feel like typing yourself. #ShamelessPlug

Retired: The Penny
After 232 years, the U.S. Mint produced its final circulating penny on November 12. Why? Because each one cost nearly four cents to make. See? You can retire a legacy product.

December

High: Sydney Sweeney Doesn’t Apologize
Months after American Eagle’s “Great Jeans” campaign sent the internet into a frenzy, Sydney Sweeney was still being asked about it. And she still wasn’t apologizing. She did clarify: “Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always trying to bring people together.”

Low: Stranger Things Fans Start Seeing Things
The second half of Stranger Things’ final season left fans so underwhelmed that elaborate theories started popping up to explain its inconsistencies, including claims that scenes had been cut or that Vecna was manipulating what the audience was seeing. Maybe the finale will explain everything.

Product: How To Build Your PM Second Brain With ChatGPT
Amir Klein shows how to build a “second brain” with ChatGPT that amplifies your product management skills rather than trying to replace them.

Malicious Merrymaking: Raccoon Goes on a Bender
A raccoon broke into a Virginia liquor store, smashed bottles, drank the merchandise, and was eventually found passed out on the bathroom floor. It was later identified as the suspected culprit in earlier break-ins at a DMV and a karate studio.

Some Good Science News: Seven Feel-Good Science Stories to Restore Your Faith in 2025
We started the year wondering if an asteroid would end us all. So let’s end the year with some scientific progress that offers hope for the future.

What Were Your Favorite Stories From 2025?

AI continued to reshape just about everything, but another big theme of 2025 was the past colliding with the present. Jaws and The Rocky Horror Picture Show turned 50, Stranger Things began its final season, and even the penny finally reached the end of the road. What moments from the year stood out to you?

Bonus Content

This was the year I discovered The Big Fat Quiz of the Year hosted by Jimmy Carr. It’s a comedic end-of-year review where panels of comedians (including Richard Ayoade!) compete to answer questions about the year’s biggest news stories, viral moments, and pop culture events. Enjoy their 2025 edition:

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It was remarkably easy to get roadmap alignment.

Meet Pup Trio

I created an iMessage sticker pack featuring a trio of cartoon dogs: a pug, a black lab, and a German shepherd.

The initial release of Pup Trio in June featured 13 stickers and some iterations. That wasn’t enough, so I went back to work. And now the updated Pup Trio is here!

The new version adds 20 more stickers, bringing the total to 33, with new expressions, seasonal options, and additional ways for a cartoon dog to communicate things you don’t feel like typing yourself.

The cast remains the same:

• The Pug: Dramatic, endlessly expressive, and always feeling something big.
• The Black Lab: Food-motivated, easily impressed, and up for absolutely anything.
• The German Shepherd: A little sassy, a lot loyal, and always has an opinion.

And now here’s the shameless plug part: If you use an iPhone or iPad and your text messages could benefit from more cartoon dogs, Pup Trio: Vibe Pack is available on the App Store for $0.99.

Sneak Preview

One more thing: You can expect at least one more update in 2026… including two additions to the pack itself. Here’s a teaser:

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We spent the session tackling questions submitted by fellow product managers, including:

• How has the AI hype changed over the past year?
• Where have we needed to temper that hype with reality?
• What skills do product leaders need to effectively manage AI?
• How do you identify and prioritize practical AI use cases?
• How do you encourage experimentation while making sure you’re actually creating value?

That last question stuck with me.

It Got Me Thinking About Kites

One of the challenges with AI right now is that everyone wants to experiment with it. And they should.

The technology is moving incredibly fast. New capabilities seem to emerge daily. Product teams need room to explore them, understand what’s possible, and figure out where they might make a difference in our customers’ lives.

But AI, like a kite, needs a string.

Some people look at a kite string and see an unwanted constraint. Just cut the string and you give the kite complete freedom. No constraints! Go wild! Go wherever the wind takes you!

Except without the string to hold it, the kite can’t really fly anymore. Eventually, it spins, drifts, and crashes back to the ground.

For AI experimentation, that string is business value.

The string doesn’t stop the kite from flying. It gives you enough control to let it fly. The same is true of business value and AI capabilities: Tie it to a real outcome, then let it climb as high as it can.

“Add AI” Is Not A Product Strategy

One thing all the panelists agreed on was that adding AI might be a feature request but it’s not a strategy.

Some problems are particularly well suited to AI because they involve things like complex or repetitive tasks, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, or prediction. Others might be solved perfectly well without it. As you’re considering your approach, think about:

• Is there a real problem we’re trying to solve, or is this just something cool with no business value?
• Is the opportunity aligned with our strategy?
• What’s the benefit: reducing costs, generating revenue, improving efficiency, or creating a better customer experience?
• Is AI actually a good fit for the problem we’re trying to solve?

And then there’s the data. If you don’t have access to enough relevant, trustworthy data, even a great AI use case may not get very far.

Constraints Are Not The Enemy

Giving product teams some constraints increases the odds that they’re experimenting with something that really matters to customers, and that has a business case to take it further.

So test ideas. Learn what these technologies can do. Break a few things along the way.

Just don’t cut the string.

Bonus Content

Speaking of kites, check out this countdown of the Top 15 Kites from around the world. It’s a fantastic showcase for how advancements in Kite Technology have allowed designers to create huge, complex, and imaginative creatures including one kite that measures more than 10,000 square feet.

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The Thompson Twin’s 1983 pop song “We Are Detective” tells the playful story of detectives who are being spied on by other detectives, and there are lessons in here for how product management and UX can better cooperate to drive bigger business outcomes.

The lyrics go like this:

Somebody’s watching me
And now I’m nervous
And I shouldn’t be
Somebody’s got their eye on me
Perhaps I should invite him up for tea?

We saw him smoking by the newspaper stand
There’s something odd about his gloved left hand
Saw him again inside the old cafe
He makes us tense
We wish he’d go away

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

Somebody’s after me
He left his footprints by the garden tree
Last night when I got home
I got the feeling I was not alone!

Someone is on our tail
We think they’re opening up our morning mail
And now each time the telephone rings,
We think of frightening thing.

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

We dress up in disguise
To get away from all those prying eyes
Our friends all think we’re mad
But we know better
’cause the spy is bad!

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

“Somebody’s watching me, and now I’m nervous and I shouldn’t be”

In product development, there’s often a delicate dance between product management and UX, not unlike the dueling sets of detectives in the song.

Both often see themselves as detectives or investigators, which is not wrong. But, in my experience, sometimes they can see themselves as adversaries — in a low-key battle over who “owns” the user, or what is the “right” definition of success.

Instead of feeling like they’re in competition against one another, they can tackle complex problems more effectively by acknowledging “we are detective” and leveraging their distinct skills to drive the business forward.

“We are detective, come to collect”

An effective way to cultivate an environment of mutual respect and collaboration is to acknowledge that neither side truly understands where the other is coming from and intentionally take action to rectify that:

• Encourage product managers and UX team members to shadow one another so that product managers can learn more about the design process, and UX can learn more about product strategy
• Establish regular feedback loops to discuss progress, share insights, and address roadblocks
• Create shared metrics to align on common goals and objectives

“We dress up in disguise to get away from all those prying eyes…”

Product managers may define success in terms of business outcomes while UX may define success in terms of task success rate and error rates. But more effective teams will realize there are overlapping metrics that help both teams understand the broader picture.

Shared metrics that help align product management and UX typically include:

• Net Promoter Score – Indicates if a user is happy enough with your product or service to recommend it to others (UX) which directly correlates with renewal rate (product management)
• Active Users – Measures the number of users engaging with the product on a regular basis, which helps validate market demand for the product (product management) and provide insights on behavior patterns for optimization and enhancements (UX)
• Feature Adoption Rate – Identifies features that resonate with users which informs roadmap, external messaging and BDR outreach (product management) and future design enhancements (UX)
• User Retention Rate – Indicates the percentage of users who continue to use the product over a specific period of time
• Revenue & Conversion Metrics – Understanding revenue generated from product sales or conversions, as well as conversion rates for key user actions, indicates what to do more or less of in the future.

By tracking and discussing these shared metrics, UX and product management teams can assess the impact of their efforts, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance the overall user experience and drive business success.

And in that way, they’ll no longer need to dress up in disguise to get away from all those prying eyes, because together they’ll uncover the truths that no single detective could ever surmise.

Unless that detective was Sherlock Holmes. But that’s a whole other post altogether.

Bonus Content

Enjoy the official music video for We Are Detective:

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January

High: M3GAN
Creepy, funny, and featuring the year’s first dancing killer robot. An appropriate start to 2023.

Low: Velma
An adult reinvention of Scooby-Doo could’ve been interesting. Instead, YouTuber Disparu’s episode-by-episode dissections proved to be way more entertaining than the show itself.

Product: Stack Your Strategy
Ravi Mehta’s Product Strategy Stack connects mission, strategy, roadmap, and goals so they tell one coherent story instead of becoming disconnected planning exercises.

K-9 Crime: Officer Ice Pleads the Fifth
A Michigan police dog gets accused of stealing another officer’s lunch. Attorneys offer to represent him pro-bone-o.

Best 33-Pound Moon Costume: Miss USA
Hats off to Miss USA R’Bonney Gabriel, who competed at Miss Universe wearing an enormous 33-pound NASA-inspired moon costume. One small step for pageantry, one giant leap for shoulder strength.

Reading: Edison’s Conquest of Mars
Thanks to 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, I discovered the 1898 unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds in which Thomas Edison leads humanity back to Mars to take the fight to the Martians.

February

High: Jesus Revolution
A faith-based movie about the Jesus movement of the 1970s becomes an unexpected box-office hit.

Low: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Marvel swaps out the goofy, grounded charm that made the first two Ant-Man movies a success for a bigger, overstuffed, CGI-driven mess. The results: Tiny laughs and smaller box office.

Product: Growth Inflections
Lenny Rachitsky studied what happened immediately before successful products hit major growth inflection points. Turns out, most were driven by improving the product itself. Who could’ve guessed the best growth strategy focuses on making the thing better?

Preventative Measures: Bear Necessities
Japanese police, firefighters, and zoo workers practiced how to capture an escaped bear by using an employee in a bear costume. The drill tested a lot of things. Being convincing wasn’t one of them.

RIP: Raquel Welch

March

Game Changer: GPT-4
OpenAI released GPT-4, dramatically raising expectations for what gen AI could do. Around the world, boardroom presentation slides about NFTs were swapped out for slides about AI.

Low: Shazam! Fury of the Gods
The first Shazam! was about a boy who says a magic word to turn into an adult superhero, and it was a pleasant surprise. The only magic word audiences needed for this sequel was “nope.”

Product: What Exactly Is a Product Strategy?
Roman Pichler cuts through the ambiguity by focusing product strategy on four questions: Who are the customers? What needs will we address? How will the product benefit the business? And how will it stand out?

AI Has Entered the Chat: Balenciaga Pope
An AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing an enormous white puffer coat fooled a remarkable number of people. For a man famous for skipping the fancy vestments, it might be the least on-brand image the internet has ever produced.

April

High: The Super Mario Bros. Movie
A fun trip to the Mushroom Kingdom, even if it was very strange hearing the wrong voice come out of Mario’s mouth.

Low: Bud Light
A marketing partnership triggers a customer backlash, resurfaced comments from the company’s VP of marketing add fuel to the fire, and Anheuser-Busch responds in a way that seems to satisfy nobody. Whatever your politics, it’s a fascinating lesson in knowing your customer and being prepared to own your brand decisions.

Product: The ChatGPT Hype: Separating Reality From Fiction in Product
Ambre Josse offers some timely advice for everyone suddenly being asked to put ChatGPT into their products: Start with the customer problem, not the trendy technology you’re trying to add.

At the Movies: Movie Moose
A moose walks into a movie theater, chows down on popcorn, and gets a Happy Meal box stuck over his snout. Wildlife experts confirm that Happy Meals are not part of a moose’s natural diet.

RIP: Harry Belafonte and Jerry Springer

May

High: Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo #7
Marc Silvestri brings his excellent series to a close by forcing Batman into a three-front battle and a “nuclear option” just to get everyone out alive.

Low: Bud Light, Part II
April’s marketing controversy turns into a full-fledged business crisis as Bud Light’s sales continue to plunge, falling 24.6% year over year during one week in May. The consequences of alienating customers turn out to last considerably longer than a social-media news cycle.

Product: Putting ChatGPT to Work
Jing Hu explores practical ways product managers can use ChatGPT in their work.

Twitter: Verified Chaos
The confusion surrounding Twitter’s new blue-check system rolls into May, with verification no longer necessarily meaning what it did before. Changing a familiar product signal while leaving the signal itself intact turns out to be pretty confusing.

Decidedly Non-Tabular: Innuendo Iceberg
A photographer from Dildo, Newfoundland, captures a remarkably phallic 30-foot iceberg floating in Conception Bay. Yes, every part of that sentence is real.

RIP: Tina Turner

June

High: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Somehow, one of the best Spider-Man movies gets an equally inventive sequel. Maybe Hollywood will realize that superhero fatigue doesn’t apply when you make a really good superhero movie.

Low: The Flash
After years of development, controversy, hype, and extraordinary claims about how good it was, The Flash finally races into theaters… and quickly exits out the back door.

Product: Be an Umbrella, Not a Funnel
Rich Mironov asks what product leaders owe their teams and offers a wonderfully memorable principle: Protect your team from organizational chaos instead of simply funneling that chaos down to them.

Viral Rewind: Poultry Portal
For reasons unknown, the New York Post resurfaces the wonderfully bizarre tale of how a Turkish man’s disappearing chickens led to the rediscovery of the ancient underground city of Derinkuyu.

RIP: The Iron Sheik and John Romita Sr.

July

High: Barbenheimer
I didn’t see Barbie or Oppenheimer in theaters, but could not escape the Internet turning two wildly different movies opening on the same day into a cultural event. Sometimes your customers come up with the marketing campaign for you.

Low: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
The Indiana Jones series ended with the original trilogy. Everything since has been a fever dream brought on by snake bites.

Product: Minimum Lovable Product
Jiaona Zhang makes the case for building a Minimum Lovable Product instead of settling for a viable one. Don’t just ask what’s minimally necessary to solve the problem; find what customers love and lean into it.

RIP: Paul Reubens, Tony Bennett, and Sinéad O’Connor

August

High: Helsing
I discovered Pat Shand’s Helsing comics this month and loved them. Liesel Van Helsing is the daughter of the legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, a brilliant inventor, and hunts all the nasty creatures who stick to the shadows.

Low: Blue Beetle
The trailer declared “Batman is a fascist” and that was enough for me to sit this one out. It’s such a fundamental misreading of Batman that I had no desire to find out what else the movie had to say.

Product: Four Questions for When You’re Stuck
Caroline Clark offers four coaching questions product managers can ask when they’re stuck, helping change perspective and find a way forward. That’s especially useful in a job where so much depends on influencing people you don’t directly manage.

Read the Fine Print: Zoom + AI
Zoom faces a backlash after users discover language in its terms of service that raises questions about whether customers themselves could be used to train AI.

RIP: Bob Barker and Arleen Sorkin

September

High: Batman: Venom
I finally read the classic story of Batman’s struggle with the strength-enhancing drug that would eventually become synonymous with Bane. There’s a product management lesson hiding in this one that I need to come back to.

Low: The Market
September lives up to its reputation as a lousy month for stocks: the Dow drops 3.4%, the S&P 500 loses 4.8%, and the Nasdaq falls 5.8%. Ouch.

Product: Quality + Consistency
After reaching 500,000 newsletter subscribers, Lenny Rachitsky shares ten lessons he’s learned along the way, including one that resonates deeply with me: Quality + consistency = all that matters.

RIP: Jimmy Buffett

October

High: RiffTrax’s Amityville Dollhouse
Just in time for Halloween, RiffTrax takes on the 1996 horror movie featuring a dollhouse replica of the infamous Long Island location.

Low: Batman #138
To change his former Robin’s anti-hero behavior, Batman secretly reprograms Jason Todd’s mind so that adrenaline triggers debilitating fear. You’d think the guy whose own mind was altered by people he trusted might have second thoughts about this approach.

Product: Think Critically
Eira Hayward makes the case for critical thinking as an essential PM skill: Distinguish data from opinion, uncover assumptions, ask better questions, and don’t simply accept the information put in front of you.

Classics Illustrated: The Scarlet Letter
I read the Manga Classics adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter — and it was excellent. Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!

RIP: Matthew Perry, Richard Roundtree, and Suzanne Somers

November

High: A Strange Habit of Mind
Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter mentally reconstructs scenes, imagining different versions of events until he can intuit what really happened. This is the second book in the ongoing series about an ex-operative turned academic who still solves crimes. Excellent thriller.

Low: WeWork
WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, files for bankruptcy. I’d used their spaces occasionally and liked the concept, which is a good reminder that a product providing real customer value doesn’t necessarily mean the business behind it will work in the long run.

Product: Two Paths Are Better Than One
Susana Lopes makes the case for dual-track product career ladders so great individual contributors don’t have to become managers simply to advance. Having moved from the IC track mentoring PMs into leading a product team myself, this one particularly resonates.

AI Has Entered the Boardroom: OpenAI
OpenAI fires CEO Sam Altman, then brings him back five days later with most of the board replaced.

December

High: Godzilla Minus One
An absolutely terrific Godzilla movie, including one of my favorite sequences of the year as Godzilla pursues a tiny boat across the ocean.

Low: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Ten years after Man of Steel kicked things off, this version of the DC cinematic universe comes to an end with one last underwhelming trip to Atlantis. Not so much a grand finale as a deflated fizzle.

Product: Back to Basics
Christian Idiodi goes back to the essence of product management: Create something valuable for the customer and viable for the business while partnering with design and engineering to address usability and feasibility.

Deck The Halls: Christmas Margaritas
I discovered the Christmas margarita this year. Merrymaking ensued.

AI Has Entered the Dance Floor: Optimus Gen 2
We started the year watching M3GAN dance, so it seems appropriate to end it with Tesla unveiling an updated Optimus humanoid robot that can dance too. Fortunately, it was all dancing, no murdering.

What Were Your Favorite Stories From 2023?

AI was obviously the biggest through-line of the year. My biggest surprise? Godzilla Minus One. I expected to enjoy it. I did not expect it to become one of my favorite movies of the year. What moments from 2023 stand out to you?

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Bonus Content

Entrepreneur Dave Ramsey shares practical advice on how to simplify making more effective decisions:

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