The Distance Ledger
Three entries on one page, filled in before the yes: the multiple, the named owner of the gap, and the kill condition nobody ever agrees in advance.
Newsletter
Every issue of Decision Fitness for Product Leaders.
Three entries on one page, filled in before the yes: the multiple, the named owner of the gap, and the kill condition nobody ever agrees in advance.
Generation got cheap. Finishing did not — and finishing is the product. The number your delivery system never calculates.
The demo sets an anchor nobody wrote down, and then your team spends a quarter losing an argument to it.
A working demo used to cost six weeks of somebody's life. Now it costs a weekend — and your executives are still reading it as a credential.
Three weeks, three symptoms, one disease. Everyone agreed on the strategy and walked out solving different problems. Sales got fed first while Product negotiated like
Your customer doesn't care that your teams are organized by function. They experience one product. One login, one bill, one bad moment when
Watch what happens in any product org when Sales wants something. It gets built. Maybe not well, maybe not soon, but it gets built. Now
Everyone in the room nodded. "Win the enterprise segment." It was right there on the screen, and twelve people agreed with it. Sales
A product story is three sentences. Most teams have never written even one of them. We've spent this month on the cost of
Your stakeholders don't distrust your delivery because you're slow. They distrust it because your roadmap doesn't add up to
Your PM isn't an order taker because they're weak. They're an order taker because you left them nothing to
Nobody outside your team can explain what product does. That's not their failure. It's yours. Walk down the hall and ask
Your team already knows which products on your roadmap shouldn't be there. They have no legitimate mechanism to say so. Three weeks. Three
"Vibe code, launch, and abandon" is the culture being championed right now. Build fast. Ship fast. Move on. The pitch is compelling — AI
Every zombie product has a meeting where it should have died. A room where someone has the data. Someone has the instinct. Someone has the
Maintenance is not an engineering problem. It's a leadership decision that most product organizations never make. Your roadmap hides the real cost. Your
Your dashboard isn't lying to you. Your strategy is lying to your dashboard. Most metrics tell you what's happening. They don&
Your team is shipping faster than ever and delivering less than ever. That's not a paradox. That's what happens when prototypes
The people pushing for speed are never the ones who get paged. Your CEO wants more vibe coding. Your head of sales wants features faster.
Everything your team builds has two prices. Your organization is only looking at one of them. The first price is the build. Requirements, design, sprints,
A lot of PMs admit the same thing when I work with them: they're stuck taking orders. Sales has a list. Leadership has
Most PMs I meet don't have an idea problem. They have an order-taking problem. Sales has a list. Leadership has a list.