Rhomaro Tesfai-Powell

How confident are you in your roadmap this year? Are you playing it safe, or taking real swings at opportunities that could change your product’s trajectory? Today's insight on The PM Brief, featuring John Cutler, hits this tension perfectly. He reminds us that prioritization isn’t just about how confident we feel right now. It’s about how quickly we can learn, reduce risk, and collapse uncertainty early. This is just one of many strong insights in John’s article. All 10 prioritization traps are worth a read if you’re rethinking how you plan and prioritize heading into 2026. #ProductManagement #AI #Prioritization

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Most teams don't struggle with speed anymore. They struggle with building the right things. That's exactly where my brother thrives. He's a Principal Product Designer who brings real product thinking into design. The kind of person who helps teams cut through complexity and focus on what matters. If you're building serious products and need that level of thinking, take a look at his post below.

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Great product management isn’t just about what we build — it’s about how we build it. One of the most underrated parts of a PM’s role is partnering closely with developers and architects to create a development plan. Not just hearing time and resource estimates, but digging in enough to appreciate why certain implementations are harder, why constraints exist, and what trade-offs we’re really making. The best PMs don’t need to be software engineers, but they do need enough technical fluency to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and spot when a “small change” is actually a significant shift. Equally important is respect — respecting the craft of defining the right approach, anticipating future needs, and the reality that there’s rarely only one “correct” solution. Strong PM/engineering relationships are built on trust, healthy debate, and the shared goal of delivering customer value without compromising long-term quality and maintainability. Great PMs know when to listen, when to push back, and how to navigate that space in between — where real product excellence is created.

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Career hack - know your product deeply. Understand how what you are building connects to the rest of the system, avoid building in silos, and know how changes in one area affect others. Make sure the pieces work well together, not just in isolation. Use your product every single day to stay grounded in reality. 🙏

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Is your team disagreeing on details like implementation or scoping decisions? Maybe the disagreement really stems from: * Lack of a shared strategy * Lack of shared understanding of that strategy * Misaligned goals * Different time horizons * Lack of a shared decision-making framework My first instinct is often to concentrate on explaining all of my reasoning in detail, but I'm trying to be better about zooming out and stating my assumptions and values more clearly.

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Product roles aren’t dead. They're more important than ever, especially as your company and product mature. The more product you build, the more complex the product work you have to do becomes. When you're first starting out, your product requirements can look something like "Build search," and frankly, any search is fine because any search is better than no search at all. As you build more and more product, you have to start thinking about: 1️⃣ All the existing workflows that any feature impacts and how the pieces fit together 2️⃣ Making sure that existing customers have a migration path when you make a change 3️⃣ How you're going to support the feature in the future (you probably ought to think about this the whole time, but when you’re starting out, it’s better just to move fast) Success of the work you do also looks really different. You have many fewer fully greenfield product opportunities. Instead, success often looks like moving the needle incrementally for both your existing customer base and growth areas for your business. How you think about product staffing needs to change at that point as well. I was the only product person at Starbridge for over a year, well past our first 200 customers. In December we had two amazing PMs join the team, Julia and Nicolas, which felt like it might be too much product staffing at the time. It has very quickly proven to still not be enough, given how much we have to do and how fast our engineering team ship. Even with that staffing, we were still running into bottlenecks in our ability to go deep on designing a beautiful and usable product. Last week, Eddie and Carpenco joined our design team to complement our incredible Head of Design, Serhii. Our entire product team is in New York this week, and in the last two days it feels like we've thought through product work that would have taken us a month before. It's trendy to say that product and even design roles are becoming less important in an AI-native world. I disagree: as it becomes easier to write code and, as a result, ship things, figuring out what to ship and how to build it in the right way is more important than ever.

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“If you were trying to design an ecosystem where imposter syndrome thrives… You’d probably invent product management.” Think about it... - No clear career path - Surrounded by experts - Constant ambiguity Ryan and I unpacked why that feeling of “I don’t belong here” hits PMs so often. And why it might not be a bug in the system, but a feature. We shared the stories we usually keep to ourselves. You know, those moments we questioned whether we were cut out for this. It was some nice therapy with key takeaways for what we can do to overcome the imposter syndrome monster. If you’ve ever felt like you were one meeting away from being found out. This The Product Porch Podcast episode is for you. #productmanagement #impostersyndrome

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🎧 New Episode of Practical Product Management Mentorship is powerful. Sponsorship is game-changing. In this episode, Marilyn McDonald and I talk with our former colleague and newly retired product leader Steve Jasper about the human side of product leadership. He should know...his career has spanned startups, Big Tech, and everything between. This conversation is full of wisdom, warmth, and honesty. We go deep on: ✔️ The real difference between mentorship and sponsorship ✔️ Why feedback is a form of trust (not just evaluation) ✔️ How to lead without becoming the burned-out superhero ✔️ What intentional leadership actually looks like in high-performing teams 🎥 Clip below: Steve shares how sponsorship helped shape his career—and why saying someone’s name in the right room can change everything. 🎙️ Listen now on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. 🌐 Show notes + full episode at: https://bit.ly/PPMSteveJ #ProductManagement #Leadership #Mentorship #Sponsorship #CareerGrowth #TechLeadership #PracticalProductManagement #Podcast

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PM career ladders are rigged. Too many levels, checklists of 20+ items.  Way more complicated than the job actually is. You think: I need to hit all of these to get promoted.  Sometimes that’s intentional – one missing checkbox being enough to justify a no. I’ve always seen ladders more simply. Those checklists aren’t requirements. They’re tools. You almost never need all of them at once. Here is my POV: - APM: Ship what’sprioritized for you.  - PM: Ship relentlessly. Start prioritizing. Create impact. - Senior PM: Be a consistent impact machine. - Lead/Staff PM: Impact extends beyond your team. Others ship because of you. - Senior Staff PM: Set a long-term POV. Multiple teams ship your vision.       - Principle/Director: Drive multiple bets. Even that’s too many levels. In reality, there are three different jobs at best: PM → Lead → Director. AI companies probably to it best. Just the PM job.  Less roles in geral. Fewer games.  Pure impact. Curious how others see this. Am I way off?

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