The Vetting Function Nobody Owns

What a Senate campaign in Maine can teach you about proxy metrics, buyer/user splits, and shipping without QA, yeah, Product Management is a lifestyle

The Fiberglass Plant and the Photomask Writer

Everyone's calling the AI buildout 'industrial.' A fiberglass plant and a photomask shop are both industrial — and only one of them can fund itself.

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 5: "The Reckoning"

AI isn't disrupting product management as a category. It's disrupting the execution layer of it specifically. If you've been telling yourself you're on the strategic side of that line, this post is about whether that's true.

The Role That Hollowed Itself Out: A Eulogy for Product Management

The title survived. The ceremonies survived. The Jira boards are still getting groomed. What didn't survive: the function that made product management worth having in the first place. A diagnosis.

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Post 4: The Ticket Queue Is Not a Career

Part 4: The promise bifurcated, and many were sold a bill of goods. For most, the grind of the feature factory was lived experience

The Deskilling Machine: How We Hollowed Out Product Management — and What AI Is About to Do to Everything Else

Or, this is the removal of the Cargo Cult technocrats, hired to work, but not to have a purpose. You surely have come across these drones.

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 3: Golden Handcuffs and Hunger Games

We've been tracing an argument across this series. Post 1 went back to the industrial-era construction of the white-collar professional identity. Post 2 followed that architecture into Silicon Valley, where it got turbocharged with founder mythology and libertarian individualism. Today we get to the mechanisms that

Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 2: The Valley Mythology Machine

Having set the table in the first installment of this, let's talk about how the California environment paved the way for an anti-organising mindset

Ubermensch in a Cubicle Farm pt. 1: The Collar Color Was Never Quite What It Seemed

Tech in general is very resistant to organizing. As we enter the AI age, it seems like this missed opportunity will haunt the industry. A look at how this began (a series)

The Farm League, the Judas Goat, and the Bill That Always Comes Due

Or: how the AI ecosystem is running the oldest con in tech, and why so many product managers are apparently fine with that

Who Killed the Product Manager?

(or: how we quietly dismantled the one role that understood the whole business)

The True Religion of American Pricing Psychology

What a gallon of gas can teach you about anchoring, asymmetry, and the stubborn math of consumer behavior