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There's a question that shows up constantly in PM interviews and in H-planning conversations: "How do you set goals for your team?" Most people answer it by describing SMART goals or OKRs. That's the wrong level. Those are frameworks for documenting goals. They're not a diagnostic for figuring out what the target should actually be in the first place. This post walks you through a diagnostic framework - the inputs and thought process for setting targets once your north star i

The most common career stall I see in senior leaders has nothing to do with performance. It has to do with visibility. Here is a pattern I see constantly in executive coaching: a leader who is clearly operating at the next level, with bigger thinking, broader influence, and better judgment than their title would suggest, who is not getting the recognition, the promotion, or the comp that reflects where they actually are. When I dig in, the problem is almost never capability.

Most leaders are sprinting to close the AI knowledge gap. That is the wrong race. Here is something worth sitting with: every one of your competitors is sending their teams to the same AI trainings, reading the same AI newsletters, and deploying Copilot on the same schedule. If the race is "who learns AI fastest," you are not going to win by much. And even if you do, it is a race to a commodity. The leaders who will separate themselves in the next three years are not the most

When a team is slow, the instinct is to train them, tool them up, or reorganize them. All three are usually wrong. I have worked with enough product organizations in the last year to notice a pattern that holds almost every time. A director or VP comes in frustrated. Delivery is slow. Requirements are fuzzy. Escalations keep landing on their desk when they should not. Engineering is complaining. And leadership is starting to ask questions. The reflex answer is usually one of

“I can’t stand incompetent people” That’s what my brilliant MAANG client told me. I then turned to ask them what incompetence means to her. They told me that when they push back on a request from external stakeholders, the explanations they receives are irrational, and often, the other party brings their manager to their next meeting, to babysit and make sure their requests are granted. When they points out to data, or try to understand the impact or rationale, the responses

What made you exceptional at your current level can quietly become what holds you back at the next one: Your attention to detail becomes micromanagement, and suddenly your team stops thinking for themselves and everything runs through you. Your bias for action means you keep solving problems instead of framing them, and leadership never sees you as someone who sets direction. Your reliability makes you the person everyone depends on, which makes you very comfortable to keep e

"I have the data. I have the benchmarks. I don't understand why they won't move." That's what a PM I work with told me after months of pushing for a change he was convinced would unlock significant impact. he was working on ranking for a marketplace, and had identified a gap in the information architecture that required changes to how the app's surfaces were designed. The opportunity was real. Not just for user experience, but for what it could teach them about how their mark