In this reflective year-ahead post, I share the product mistakes I won’t repeat in 2026—drawn from my own experience and patterns I saw across 100+ coaching sessions. From discovery and strategy to influence and AI, these lessons shaped how I’m approaching product in the year ahead.

This is the final article of 2025. Using real data—not hot takes—it breaks down how product is changing in 2026, what product managers should double down on, and the skills that will matter most as AI, profitability, and top-down decision making reshape the role.

“No one tells you this before you become a PM:

The hardest part of product management isn't building features or great products.

It's the people.

Even if your strategy is clear, your roadmap tidy, and your team works in almost perfect conditions - one thing remains:

You spend most of your time managing expectations, translating between worlds, calming politics.

Stakeholder management isn't a "soft skill."

It is product work.

Without alignment, even the best strategy will rot.

I've seen PMs feel guilty because they're "not building."

But sometimes, aligning humans is building — it's creating the conditions for the product to survive, or even better, to thrive.” - Stephanie Leue

Many product leaders hit a plateau because they keep reading the same product books. The real growth comes from expanding into adjacent fields like psychology, design, marketing, and leadership. If you want sharper judgment and stronger product instincts, broaden your range beyond product-only content.

In a recent coaching session, I was asked, “What are the habits of highly effective product leaders?”

Here’s what I shared: eight habits I’ve seen time and time again in great leaders, from staying close to the work and leading by example to coaching, clarity, and radical transparency.

4 steps to building a Product Strategy:

1. Gathering Inputs

2. Building Strategic Narratives

3. Finding Leverage

4. Choices

Simple but not easy! Let’s deep dive into each 👉

Most product roadmaps I see aren’t roadmaps at all, they’re plans.

And a lot of this has to do with a lack of product strategy, because your roadmap should be a reflection of your strategy. 

Roadmaps help you visualize your strategy in a sequential manner so you can better communicate and action it.

But whilst similar, they’re still different things.

The problem is, without a strategy you’re likely to resort to prioritization by spreadsheets. Applying RICE formulas, WSJF and other scorecards where you’re really just stack-ranking a bunch of disparate ideas. There’s nothing ‘strategic’ about doing that.

What we then do is take that list and plot it along a timeline - and voilà!

We have a roadmap plan.

I worked with a VP of Product who said something that really stuck with me;

“My job isn’t to make my life easier, it’s to make my team’s life easier.”

Servant leadership in a nutshell 👏

When I reflect on my career I feel very grateful to have had some many amazing leaders and mentors over the years. Including my first job packing supermarket shelves!

Of course, it hasn’t been all rosy. I’ve had my share of bad managers and have witnessed some, honestly, terrible behaviours.

But I don’t want to fixate on the bad. Instead I want to share some of the practices I’ve picked up from the best product leaders, executives and founders. 

I hope this post is not only actionable but inspirational as well.

"While many teams work top-down, starting by defining a clear desired outcome, then mapping out the opportunity space, then considering solutions and finally running assumption test… the best teams also work bottom-up. They use their assumption tests to help them evaluate their solutions and evolve the opportunity space.” - Teresa Torres

An “Inconvenient Truth” about product is that you’re not going to nail it the first time. As a result a analytics isn’t an optional add on. It’s part of the feature!

“the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable and feasible, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it actually delivers the expected business value..” - Marty Cagan

Most teams talk about “discovery” and “delivery” like they’re separate tracks—but what happens when they run side-by-side, all the time?

In this post, I unpack what dual-track agile really looks like in practice, why continuous discovery is harder than it sounds, and how to avoid the most common traps teams fall into. If you're navigating product development at scale, this one’s for you.

As part of my discovery for the Product Discovery course I’m working on - yes going very meta here - I decided to ask a bunch of product leaders, how do they define product discovery?

I then expanded that to the 35,000+ followers I have and ended up with 40 different definitions for product discovery.

Of course this shows that if you get 10 product people in a room, the chances of us all agreeing on something is slim to none 😆 but I was genuinely curious on what themes would emerge and if there were any better ways to frame product discovery.

Product Roadmaps are NOT a plan or todo list.

If you have verbs like "discover" “design” “build”, etc on your roadmap you’ve got a ​plan not a roadmap​!

And whilst most product people get this conceptually, there’s still far too many roadmaps that look like gantt charts.

One of the worst advice I got when I was starting my product career was to "prioritize based on value"

Whilst this sounds nice and of course isn't wrong, per se.

The problem is that 'value' is ambiguous.

But as Jeff Gothelf ​says​:

“Value” is the most ambiguous word in business.

“9 Ways to Improve your OKRs”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten a lot of questions about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), including one yesterday whilst writing this post… honestly if this was published I could have just sent them the link.

So let’s avoid another call. In this post I want to equip you with the different hallmarks I look for in effective OKRs so you can self-diagnose and hopefully escape OKR theatre!

Let’s get into them

If you missed last week’s webinar with Product Ops legend, ​Antonia Landi​, don’t worry the recording is up on ​YouTube here​.

We covered a lot of ground, but one thing I didn’t expect was to go all meta and discuss “what is product management?”

I love this model for clarifying roles and responsibilities because it's light weight, simple, easy to use...and it works!

Inspired by the driver-navigator pattern from pair programming, I call it (you guess it!) 'Driver + Navigator'.

1. Who is driving?

2. and, Who is navigating?

Here's why I'm skeptical on AI.

That's not to say I don't think it's going to have a material impact on our world — I think it will — but just because something can be done with AI doesn't mean it's going to provide the same value.

Hear me out... (and I totally recognise not everyone is going to agree with me on this one!)

Here's a stat that might blow your mind;

The number of independent agents in the US has grown from 45,000 in the late 90s to more than 105,000 in early 2020, before the pandemic — that's more than a 230% increase! (reference '​The Jolt Effect​').

Coming up with a product strategy should be messy.

It's not some clean fill in the box activity.

Instead it's often big messy Miro boards, multiple white boarding sessions, synthesising loads of data, and documents plastered with comments.

And a lot of back-and-forth.

It's important to not mistake a neat Product Strategy document at the end as the thing.

I don’t like using the term “empowered” because it’s ambiguous.

Empowered to do what?

• Are you empowered to expand your product internationally

• Empowered to build a whole new business within your current org?

• Build a new brand under a parent company?

Of course, empowerment doesn’t mean “do whatever you like” but therein lies the question:

What exactly are you empowered to do?