Field Notes
The only PM blog written by someone who still ships code every week. Failed experiments included. Agent recipes you can fork.
Featured reads
Hand-picked by Falk, not an algorithm
The Product Builder Was Never About Coding
LinkedIn replaced its APM program with Product Builder and framed it as generalists. The real shift is collapsing the distance between deciding and making.
Stop Calling Yourself an AI PM
The PM role is fragmenting into AI-native, growth, monetization, platform, and GTM labels. Most of it hedges an org-design decision. Name the outcome you own.
The PRD Was Already Dead. Slack Proved It in Public.
Slack is running tiny cross-functional squads that prototype continuously instead of committing to fixed roadmaps. The org-chart version of the PRD collapse.
Airtable Sold for 2.7x ARR. That Number Is the Whole Lesson.
Airtable didn't fail. It has roughly $480M ARR growing over 20%. What collapsed was the story investors were paying for. Here is what actually happened, why the AI pivot didn't save the multiple, and what I am doing differently because of it.
Twelve Builders, Twelve Products, Zero Landings
The 2026 CPO Insights Report says product managers disappear by 2030 and product builders take their place. The role is real. The framing points at building, at exactly the moment building stopped being the constraint.
What Anthropic's Dianne Penn Taught Me About the Frontier
Anthropic's Dianne Penn on evals as the new PRD, catching discontinuous capability jumps, and why product judgment matters more than ever in the AI era.
How I Build Eval Rubrics
A product leader asked for eval rubric resources. Here is the method I actually use: grade thirty outputs first, tie every dimension to downside exposure, and go binary.
The PM Does Not Make Decisions. Make Sure They Get Made.
The PM's job was never to make decisions, it was to make sure decisions get made. In the AI era, when agents build in a day, that job becomes the whole game.
AI Can't Understand the User. That User Is Disappearing.
The best defense of the human PM is that AI can't understand the user. But that user is a departmental role, and agents are dissolving the departments.
Writing for Machines Is the New Writing for Executives
Half your readers are now agents. Writing that executes faithfully is its own craft: specs as eval sets, prompt hygiene, GEO basics, and the cold-read test.
Is This Product Bet Group Stage or Knockout? Reversible vs. Irreversible
The World Cup is two tournaments bolted together. Knowing whether a product decision is group stage or knockout is the same question as downside exposure.
Stage Wins or the Yellow Jersey: You Don't Win the Tour by Winning Stages
The rider with the most stage wins almost never wins the Tour. A model for AI product management: cumulative outcome over heroics, on a team you never see.
Judgment Reps: How PMs Train Decision Quality Deliberately
Judgment is trainable, but only with reps and a scorecard. The decision log, calibration habit, premortems, and a 4-week plan to train PM decision quality.
Stop Calling Yourself an AI PM
The PM role is fragmenting into AI-native, growth, monetization, platform, and GTM labels. Most of it hedges an org-design decision. Name the outcome you own.
The Product Builder Was Never About Coding
LinkedIn replaced its APM program with Product Builder and framed it as generalists. The real shift is collapsing the distance between deciding and making.
Comment With a Frame: The Only Move That Compounds
Applause adds nothing and dunking loses the room. Concede the strongest objection, then add a frame the thread did not have. Two exchanges show how.
The QBR Deck Template That Forces Decisions, Not Applause
A 9-slide QBR deck template: scoreboard vs plan, decision review, kills, next-quarter bets with confidence and reversibility. Outline plus PowerPoint.
Financial Fluency for PMs: Own the Margin Before It Owns You
Financial fluency is now a PM job requirement. The five numbers to know cold, the finance working session agenda, and a 4-week plan to own your margin.
The PRD Was Already Dead. Slack Proved It in Public.
Slack is running tiny cross-functional squads that prototype continuously instead of committing to fixed roadmaps. The org-chart version of the PRD collapse.
Stop Picking Winners. Design the Tournament.
Cheap prototyping did not kill product judgment. It moved the decision from picking the winner to seeding the bracket of what gets prototyped at all.
The Resume Is Dead. Here Is What Replaced It.
If you hire PMs off resumes in 2026, you screen for prompting skill, not product skill. What still correlates: published thinking a model cannot compress.