10 Essential skills for product managers in the AI era
What should PMs be really learning today Have you been asked to add AI to your product? I recently taught a class of about 40 product managers. I started by saying: “If you think your job is to figure out where to add AI to your product, you’re still missing the point.” Same blank stares. […]
Value Proposition vs. Positioning
A PM should know the difference Recently, during a product strategy class session, someone raised a question: “What’s the difference between value proposition and positioning? Are they not the same? Why not just use value proposition?” It’s a good question that gets to the heart of go-to-market strategy. While these terms are often used interchangeably, […]
Beyond Vitamins and Painkillers: The 4-Layer Product Urgency Spectrum
How to Build Your GTM Strategy Around the Product Urgency Spectrum The “vitamin vs painkiller” framework has become gospel in product management circles. The conventional wisdom is simple: build painkillers, not vitamins. Painkillers solve urgent problems that people will pay for immediately, while vitamins are nice-to-have supplements that are easily skipped. But this binary thinking […]
The Value of AI: Why Critical Thinking Matters More Than Ever
What I am learning as I use Gen AI This article is written in July 2025. If you are reading this in 2026 or later, then this article will sound a bit outdated. ——–In 1991, I was building early versions of ERP and CRM software for my clients in India. The code base was C++ […]
The Art & Science of Products
How great products don’t just work well — they help people work better Hi PMs and Founders. Recently I was in a prospect discussion who wanted to give Ziply a try. I was excited to showcase the features and how they might be able to benefit. I thought I had done my part. Then the […]
The Best Thing AI Did: It Broke Product Management
From idea to deployed app in 30 minutes – this isn’t science fiction anymore. The last time I did production code was in 1996. But that may change now. This week, I built a social media advocacy reach calculator using Lovable, an AI-powered development platform. What would have traditionally taken weeks of back-and-forth with engineering, […]
The Power of Story Telling for founders and PM
A Product Leader’s Guide to Story Telling Once at an event, I stood before a room full of founders and PMs. I was going to talk about Ziply and give a demo. Instead of diving into my product or the demo, I opened with something unexpected: “I was laid off two years ago.” The room […]
Building for Experience: The Overlooked Discipline in B2B Product Management
Customer experience is a differentiator and PMs are responsible for it Recently, I was teaching a PM class and one of the questions asked was how to manage the product for an already established and mature company. I suggested looking to avenues to grow the product to adjacent areas, capabilities, markets, segments. If you are […]
The Hard Truth: Most Customer Problems Can Wait
Solve the Pain That Gets Budget, Not Just Attention Solve customer pain points. Focus on the problem. Love the problem, not your solution. Have you heard this before? Of course, our job as a PM or founder is to solve customer pain points. If you have taken courses or read books, they all start with […]
The Minimum Sellable Product
Think beyond MVP: What’s your MSP? Let’s talk product strategy. Specifically for an early startup like mine. You’ve probably heard of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and maybe even RAT (Riskiest Assumption Test). These are all about validation—finding out what to build, who to build it for, and whether they’ll pay for it. But once you […]
