Six minutes into my INDUSTRY keynote, my dangle earring started banging into my microphone. Nobody in the audience could hear it, but every time I turned my head – clank.
Without stopping, I reached up, slid both earrings out, dropped them into my pocket, and kept talking.
After the talk, I found out one person out of the hundreds in the audience noticed that I touched my head.
I’m a theater kid – I know how to keep the show going when things break. But in the past, I would have spent the rest of the talk slightly rattled, and afterwards I would have fixated on the hiccup. Did anyone notice? Did it throw off my timing? Was that the moment where I lost them?
This time, I handled it and moved on. Not just externally – internally. I knew it was nothing. A speck. My delivery stayed smooth because I wasn’t carrying the weight of it.
That moment captures my 2025 vibe better than any metric I could share.
A year ago, I wasn’t sure this business was sustainable. I was hustling, hoping things would click, performing confidence while quietly anxious about whether any of it would last. This year was different. I felt like I belonged on that stage.
Finding Fit
For this reflection last year, I predicted that 2025 would be the “year of scale,” driven by course growth. It wasn’t. Reforge focused on different live courses, so my product ops program didn’t run. Maven became fill-in work between consulting gigs, not the third leg of my business I’d hoped for. I shut down the Product Ops Jobs Board.
Scale didn’t happen. But something better did: I finally started getting traction on my own product-market fit.
The big shift was positioning. I stopped selling “product operations consulting.”
People don’t wake up thinking “I have a product ops problem.” They think: “Product and engineering are at each other’s throats.” Or: “My PMs don’t have time for discovery.” Or: “GTM communications are a mess and launches keep getting botched.”
So I started leading with their problems instead of my methodology. Scaling product teams. Improving product/engineering relationships. Creating space for discovery. Fixing cross-team and GTM communication.
The work itself is landing in my sweet spot: operational challenges that tie directly to product strategy. Not just “fix our process” but “help us execute on this strategic shift.”
Revenue up 50%. Coaching went from one or two clients at a time to an average of four or five, consistently.
Why did this year work when previous years didn’t? Focus. Even when I wrote last year’s strategy, I knew courses didn’t quite align with my core work. I pursued them anyway because teaching made me happy. Classic product management mistake – too much work in progress. The less I spread my attention, the better my business got.
Fit isn’t permanent. I know it can slip away if I stop paying attention. But this year, I got to experience what it feels like when the work coming in matches the work where I deliver real value.
Un-branding the newsletter
For two years I called this newsletter “The Next Iteration” and tried to build it into its own thing – a brand separate from me. This year I dropped the name. It’s just my newsletter now. (You’ll see new visual branding soon)
That small change reflects the same lesson as everything else: stop trying to make things into something they’re not. This newsletter is me sharing what I’m learning. It doesn’t need a separate identity any more than my consulting does.
The funny thing? Once I stopped actively trying to grow it, growth came anyway – subscriber count up 66% this year. A Reddit thread where someone recommended me brought in 250+ subscribers in a week. Events I ran to promote courses (even when enrollment flopped) turned into audience growth on their own.
To everyone who joined this year: thank you for trusting me with a line in your inbox.
My top articles
I run a survey for all new newsletter subscribers asking what challenges you’re facing. The 2025 answers clustered around a few themes: strategic focus, AI integration, prioritization, and team communication.
Luckily, I was able to keep a strong writing cadence going this year. Here are the articles I wrote this year (plus a few top ones from years past) that speak directly to those struggles.
1. Gaining strategic clarity and focus
Many of you described drowning in requests that don’t move the needle, or chasing “AI all the things” without a real strategy underneath.
- Execution won’t stop. Strategy will — My INDUSTRY keynote on escaping the execution hamster wheel.
- The Product Ops Strategy Stack — How to connect high-level vision to daily work.
- What to do when your manager doesn’t have a strategy — They probably do. Here’s how to pull it out of their head.
- The uncomfortable truth about saying no — If you don’t say no, you don’t have a strategy. You have a wish list.
2. Mastering AI integration
AI came up constantly—how to actually use it, where to draw lines, and how to implement it when you’ve got data restrictions.
- Becoming the product manager they dreamed of — AI might finally let us meet those impossible PM expectations.
- Why your brain is the biggest bottleneck in AI — The cognitive biases making “free” AI expensive.
- What AI can’t—and shouldn’t—do — Where I draw the line (spoiler: it shouldn’t do your user research).
3. Improving prioritization and making trade-offs
Prioritization pain showed up in different flavors: scope creep, drowning in customer requests, struggling to say no.
- Stop scoring everything — Filter ideas with strategy before you waste time on RICE scores.
- Everything you need to know to run a premortem — Prioritize risks before they become surprises.
4. Enhancing communication and team alignment
Friction between teams. Dependencies that slow everything down. Portfolios with 150+ products and no clear ownership.
- RACI charts are stifling collaboration — Why I refuse to make them and what to do instead.
- Stop talking about your impact. Spotlight theirs. — Build alignment by celebrating others, not yourself.
- Leading Through Layoff Fear — How to redirect anxious energy back toward impact.
5. Building business cases and driving outcomes
Using data to make decisions, pitching to leadership, building stories that land.
- The business case spectrum — Right-size your analysis to get the next “yes.”
- Building business cases leadership can’t ignore — Financial analysis meets strategic storytelling.
- Beyond release management: Feature flags for product discovery — Use flags to validate demand early, not just manage releases.
- Your competitors are telling you their strategy — What pricing pages reveal about strategic bets.
Writing was one of the things that worked this year. Courses were not.
I didn’t find scale in courses
I love teaching courses. I believe firmly in interactive pedagogy – if you can get all the value from a recording, then I shouldn’t be teaching it live. The magic happens when participants are doing things, getting feedback, learning from each other. That’s when real learning sticks.
But this belief creates a business model problem.
Interactive courses don’t scale easily. The value comes from my feedback, which means I can only have so many people in each cohort. Scheduling is hard when everyone needs to attend together. Budgets for professional development are tight. And the number one predictor of course enrollment? The size of your existing audience – which, for a niche-within-a-niche like product ops, limits the addressable market.
So when Reforge shifted toward larger courses and my product ops program didn’t run, I wasn’t surprised. I hit the same wall trying to fill my Maven courses.
The hard truth: courses aren’t becoming the third leg of my business anytime soon. Scaling them back – I’m still not ready to say “drop” – opened space for finding fit this year. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do.
The jobs board solved the wrong problem
Not everything found fit this year. I shut down the Product Ops Jobs Board.
I launched it in late 2023 to connect product ops job seekers with hiring managers. The idea seemed obvious – job seekers needed visibility, hiring managers needed qualified candidates. I offered it as a free service.
263 job seekers signed up over two years. But hiring managers? Almost no traction. When I reached out, I heard the same thing repeatedly: they were already inundated with resumes. Their problem wasn’t finding more candidates – it was sorting through the ones they already had.
I was solving the wrong side of the problem. Classic product lesson, applied to my own business.
Shutting it down felt like I was abandoning the jobseekers, but keeping it running wasn’t helping anyone. Sometimes fit means recognizing what isn’t working and letting it go.
Getting fit (pun intended)
I always take a moment in these end-of-year reflections to share a little bit of life outside of work.
I started powerlifting this year. It began as physical therapy for chronic back problems, but turns out it’s also just something that feels good and is fun. My neighbor across the street has a little gym setup in their garage, and I make use of it about once a week.
That neighbor gym is part of something bigger. We’ve built real community on our street – happy hours and brunches almost every month, rotating who hosts. My kids will run across the street and ring doorbells for playdates. It sounds small, but having a group of friends who just come by to say hi because they see you outside has changed how I experience daily life.
When you work for yourself, from home, the risk of isolation is real. Local community has become my antidote.
What’s next
I want to deepen my impact in 2026 – help more people than I can reach through my current business models (but maybe not courses). I don’t know what that looks like yet. A year ago, that uncertainty would have made me anxious.
But here’s what I’ve learned: I can’t figure out “what’s next” while running at full capacity. Discovery requires space, and the only way I can find even stronger fit is through focus. I found fit this year by letting go of things I loved. I’m not going to find the next level by cramming my calendar full again.
So I’m leaving room…for something. Protecting space to think. Trusting that the clarity will come – the same way I trusted, six minutes into that keynote, that a loose earring wasn’t going to derail anything that mattered.