My Daily Emails

List member Alex from Boston wrote with a leadership challenge many founders face: “You mentioned ‘productive pessimism‘ in planning, and it really resonated. But how do you get your team on

There’s a collective intake of breath when Shark Tank contestants proclaim that over 80% of their sales come from Amazon. It’s not the good kind of gasp. The sharks recognize what many

Hormel Foods — the company behind SPAM, Skippy peanut butter, and Dinty Moore stew — is using AI to figure out which peppers will make you sweat. And be delighted

Longtime list member Carlos from Miami wrote me about a challenge many premium brands face: “Amazon is driving us to lower our prices to stay competitive with knockoffs, but we’ve built

I once worked with a B2B client whose organizational structure provided me a schooling in how not to operate. Their company wasn’t a unified entity but a collection of competing

The Rolex Submariner costs US $9,150. Not because the ceramics, steel, and mechanisms justify that price. Not because Rolex performed some magical positioning alchemy that convinced customers to value precision timekeeping at

A while ago I came across this product tagline (I paraphrase slightly): “Delivering transformative enablement via cross-platform process optimization.” That’s not the Curse of Knowledge. That’s just vagueness. The Curse of

Sometimes the smartest business decision is giving your worst customer exactly what they want. This goes against every entrepreneurial instinct, right? We’re taught to stand firm on principles, maintain boundaries,

The most valuable people in product work are seldom generalists who know a little about everything. They’re specialists who deeply understand how their expertise connects to business outcomes. Take my

I had one of THOSE calls yesterday. You know the type — where you can practically hear the sad trombone playing in the background as the caller unveils a parade