What is a Product Trio - and why our company is named after it
PM + Designer + Engineer working together, not in sequence. Most teams run a relay race - spec to design to build, handing off at every step. The trio eliminates the handoffs, covers all four product risks, and builds things worth building.
Building got faster. Deciding did not.
My takeaways from Atlassian's State of Product 2027: 89% of teams use AI for another function's work, yet engineers still join after ideation on 82% of them.
AI didn't replace our Product Trio. It turned us into an Atomic Team
Guest post by Tomasz Tomaszewski. A year of Product Builders shipping end to end, metrics that barely moved, and why the Product Builder is a capability, not a team operating model.
How to reduce onboarding drop-off without weakening KYC
At elyps, 8 in 10 sign-ups left right before identity verification. Every check stayed. What changed was when users met it.
What a good trial-to-paid conversion rate looks like
8-12% is good for a free trial, 15-25% great. The benchmarks, and two cases where the benchmark said fine and the data said leak.
When you measure AI usage, you get usage
Duolingo, Amazon and Meta all stopped rewarding AI usage this year. Measure what the usage was supposed to change: which product metric moved, and why.
Before you reorganize, find out how your teams decide
A reorg changes who sits where. Five checks to see whether your real problem is how goals are set and who decides what gets built.
Coaching or a workshop: which one fixes your problem?
A workshop closes a method gap in two days. Coaching closes a judgment gap over months. How to tell which one your team has.
Onboarding audit or activation sprint: which one should you buy?
Plenty of sign-ups, too few paying customers. What an audit and a sprint each produce, and the question that decides between them.
When the roundtable became a workshop: the 3W Loop at Product Peak Wrocław
The plan was a 20-minute talk and a roundtable. Last-minute changes turned it into workshop groups running the 3W Loop live: Where with analytics, Why with interviews, Whether with scoped experiments.
A working product on day one is not progress
Steve Blank's students showed up with working AI-built products on day one, and it nearly burned his class down. Why phantom progress freezes ideas, and five signals that tell a learning team from a shipping one.
Most workshops are theater. Design yours to end in a test
A workshop cannot do discovery for you. How to design one that still changes something: pre-work a week before, don't anchor the room with your own answer, and a test someone runs the next day.
How to improve user activation: find the behavior that predicts a paying customer
Checklists and product tours rarely move activation. What took Deviniti's trial-to-paid conversion from 26% to 59% was one week-three behavior nobody had noticed. The five steps, from ruling out retention to the guardrails that stop a good-looking test from shipping a bad result.
Feedback is a skill, not a personality trait
Petra Wille's WaysConf talk on coaching product leaders: share the strategy 21 times, give feedback as situation, behavior and impact, stay on your side of the net, and be a shaper, not a victim.
Two days at WaysConf 2026, and the gap between knowing and doing
My 3W Loop workshop, Marty Cagan on the AI productivity paradox, and why most companies still run on a project model even when everyone knows the vocabulary.
We ran the whole 3W Loop in one morning with 28 people
A 150-minute masterclass at WaysConf 2026, run on the participants' own metrics rather than a tidy case study. The five exercises, why the case study stops halfway, why you star the explanation you don't believe, and the one thing no workshop can produce for you.
Faster is not better: notes from Marty Cagan's talk at WaysConf
AI made product teams faster and the results didn't follow. Notes from Cagan's WaysConf 2026 talk and panel: the AI productivity paradox, build to learn versus build to earn, his admission about Inspired, and why teams are getting smaller.
When anyone can build, understanding users is the edge
AI is commoditizing software the way YouTube commoditized video. The best equipment stopped winning. Why the gap in user understanding will grow as the technical gap shrinks.
Are you a Product Builder or a Product Architect?
Product management has no agreed job description, so seniority gets decided by vibes. Ravi Mehta's 12 competencies across four areas are the closest thing to a real definition, and they split most PMs into two recognizable shapes. How to read your own chart, what to fix first, and why the team version matters more than the individual one.
Delight, hard to copy, margin-enhancing
Discovery without a strategy is a scavenger hunt with no list - you search all day and never know when you're done. Gibson Biddle's DHM model gives you three questions to test a bet against, and a bet has to clear all three. Why most strategies only answer the first one.
What is the 3W Loop? Where, Why, Whether
Three questions, asked in order, each with its own instrument: product analytics for where it hurts, story-based interviews for why it happens, a scoped experiment for whether the fix works. The four rules, what each step leaves behind, and one loop run end to end on a real onboarding problem.
You have the data and the interviews. You asked them in the wrong order.
A dashboard, a research repo with sixty interviews, and four features nobody uses. Why without Where, Where without Why, Whether without either - the three shapes this takes, why capable teams do it anyway, and four checks that tell you which question is actually open.
Interview first, or go straight to the test?
The argument every product team has, settled with three checks: is the fix cheap and reversible, does everyone name the same mechanism, would you run the test anyway. Worked both ways on two real products, plus the two ways getting it wrong costs you.
A test you cannot fail is a demo
Write down the result that would stop you shipping, before the test runs. If you cannot, it is a demo with a control group. The five tells, the four-line test card, and the real reason teams leave the last line blank.
Stop building MVPs. Build a prototype that answers one question.
Two of the three words in "Minimum Viable Product" point the wrong way. Product tells you to build a product, viable tells you to grow the scope until it stands up. Here is what to build instead, how to pick it from the assumption rather than the roadmap, and the point where you genuinely should build the real thing.
Big problems rarely need big solutions
The two most valuable changes I shipped last year were a button and a default toggle. Both took days, and both beat the three-month project next to them on the roadmap. How to find the small version of your biggest problem, and how to tell when the rebuild really is the answer.
Stuck in the messy middle of a product transformation
You have OKRs. You have something called a trio. Leadership talks about outcomes and still asks for features by name and date. The four tells, the three moves that make it worse, and why one visible team beats an org-wide push.
Founders, your first product hire keeps failing because you won't let go
The hire was fine. The handover never happened. The three tensions that start on day one, what letting go actually means, and the one-question test for whether you have a product team or a founder with assistants.
Interview your churned users, not just the ones who stayed
They already decided, so they have no reason to be polite. Why the dropdown kills the honesty, the open question that got Groove 8x more answers, and the three questions to ask about the day they canceled.
Data-informed beats data-driven
Data-driven means the number makes the decision. Data-informed means the data points and you decide. Bezos's 70% rule, why the difference is accountability, and the question that replaces "are we sure?"
You have a PMF score. That is the easy part.
The Sean Ellis survey returns one number and three segments, and almost everyone reads the number and throws away the segments. How Superhuman went from 22% to 58%, what our own 49% at UX Pilot changed, and why you politely ignore the users who would not miss you.
Stop overthinking the idea. Design the experiment.
Three weeks of debate produces no information that day one did not already have. Six steps that turn an argument into a test, the step every team skips, and how to pick a method that could actually change your mind.
"That looks good in theory, but won't work in practice"
The most common objection to changing how a product organization works is not an argument, it is an exit from the conversation. What it protects, and the one-team bet that tests it cheaply.
What good retention actually looks like for B2B products
Around 60% of users still active at six months is good for SMB and mid-market SaaS, 80% is great. The benchmarks, why user and revenue retention disagree, and what to do when yours is under the line.
How strong is your evidence? Score the idea before you argue about it
Most product arguments are really arguments about evidence strength, and nobody names it. The Confidence Meter puts the disagreement back where it belongs.
The three things every product team needs direct access to
Customers, product data, and business stakeholders. Miss one and the team can look busy without ever being right on purpose.
When stakeholders start asking for features again, show your work
Reverting to old habits is a trust problem, not a process failure. Defending your autonomy loses it. Showing the reasoning wins it back.
How to hire a fractional Head of Product
The brief is the hire. What to write in it, how to vet for stage instead of logos, and what to agree before you sign.
What does a Product Manager actually do?
The backlog, the roadmap, the spec, the standup. All tools. None of them the job.
How to balance discovery and delivery
There is no fixed ratio. Split on the risk in front of you, not on the calendar.
Building got 10x cheaper. Building the right thing didn't.
AI collapsed the cost of shipping and left the cost of being wrong exactly where it was.
AI made everyone think they can do everyone else's job
PMs design, designers ship, engineers own product. Tasks moved. Accountability didn't.
The best PMs make PRDs invisible
The spec was never the point. Alignment was, and the document stopped being the best way to get it.
"We don't have time for customer interviews"
Nine interviews, five hours of calls, and a change that would never have won a prioritization meeting.
Stop copying your competitors' roadmap
Competitor ships, you panic, you build, users ignore it. What competitor research is actually for.
Problem-Solution Fit in 5 steps
Beachhead, research, value proposition, assumption tests, MVP. The sequence to run before you write code.
Iterate on WHO, not what
Your product might be fine. Your audience might be wrong. The pivot most founders never consider.
The fake door test
Find out if anyone wants the feature before you spend a sprint building it.
10 product management lies we all tell
"Users asked for this." Three users, two years ago, one was the CEO's cousin.
Velocity isn't the point. The 4 product risks that sink launches.
Teams ship fast and still fail - because they efficiently build the wrong thing. The four risks to kill before you code.
The Product Death Cycle: why "what do you want?" kills your product
You launch a feature, nobody uses it, you ask what's missing, you build that too. David Bland's Product Death Cycle, and the 3-step way out.
Product Managers, you are not the mini-CEO of Product
It sounds like a compliment. Believing it is what gets PMs into trouble. What a PM actually has authority over.
Don't hire a Big Tech PM for your 0-to-1 startup
Scaling from 1 to 10 and building from 0 to 1 are different jobs wearing the same job title. What to hire for instead.
The startup tool stack I actually recommend
25 tools, tested across 4 products and dozens of startups I've coached. What each one costs, and whether you actually need it yet.
What a fractional Head of Product actually does (and when you need one)
Senior product leadership without the six-figure hire. What "fractional" means, how it differs from a consultant, and when it's the right call.
“Product Owner” isn't a job. It's a Scrum role - and the difference is costing you.
Half of all "Product Owner" ads are really asking for a backlog administrator. The difference between grooming tickets and managing product risk.
Product outcomes vs. business outcomes: why a revenue target backfires
"Increase revenue" is the wrong goal for a product team - they can't move it directly. Give them the user behavior that drives it instead.
Build a culture of experimentation in 4 steps (start absurdly small)
Everyone says "experiment more." Almost nobody makes it stick. The path from one scrappy test to a company that de-risks decisions by default.
Delivery team, feature team, or product team? Only one ships value.
Cagan says there are three kinds of "product" team - and two of them aren't. How to tell which you are, and how to move right.
Metrics for 0 → 1 products: what to measure before you have numbers
Metrics do matter at 0 → 1 - but they play three very different roles. Confuse them and you'll optimize the wrong thing with false confidence.
Your best idea has a 1-in-3 chance of working. Here's how the best teams find the other two.
Brainstorm, build, ship, repeat - and still miss. The Opportunity Solution Tree turns "let's build this and see" into a system that connects every feature back to a customer problem and a measurable outcome.
Talk to five customers this week - before you build anything else
The cheapest way to de-risk a roadmap costs you one hour and zero engineers. Why most teams skip it, and the interview habit that fixes it.
Not all features add value - but every feature adds cost
If your team measures success by how much you ship, you're running a feature factory. Here's how to swap output for outcomes without losing momentum.
Product-market fit isn't a vibe. It's a hypothesis you can test.
Founders throw "PMF" around like everyone agrees what it means. They don't. Here's a definition you can actually act on - and how to know you're close.
How I went from Operations Manager to Head of Product (and how you can too)
I failed a startup, pivoted into ops, and talked my way into a product role nobody handed me. The four paths in, and the one that actually worked for me.
If everything is a priority, nothing is
A product strategy isn't a longer roadmap. It's a short list of bets - and a much longer list of the things you've chosen not to do. How to write one that says no.
Discover what to build before you code it
80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. Here's why - and how Product Discovery changes those odds.