In a practical example of brain fry, Petra Wille recalls some of her personal experience during coaching:

The product leaders and CPOs I coach tell me their people are completely fried before lunch—after a morning of generating content and reviewing outputs in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, they’re just done. Adapting to this new type of work doesn’t make them more productive because they’re out of energy and brainpower by noon.

So conversations about how we actually work—what a sustainable rhythm looks like for humans in this new setup—still needs to happen.

This has become a pretty common complaint/concern among people I talk to, and it gets me too. I’ve been sitting on posting this link because I wanted to include some kind of proposal but… I got nothing. Just agreement with Petra that we really really need to figure out how to work in this new world in a way that avoids mass burnout.

Yes, it’s a clickbaity title, but if you read this as an essay about what to care about at work, it has some good reminders like this:

“Care less” is directionally right, but let’s get more specific. The real shift is learning to place your care deliberately — to get good at telling the difference between what’s strategically important and what’s just noisy. A lot of what happens inside companies is frustrating without being important. Reacting to a messy call that you personally wouldn’t have made as if it’s a strategic risk is what drains you. So is holding on to every detail as if it’s existential. Not everything deserves to be treated with equal importance. A gut check that helps: Will this matter in a year? If not, it probably doesn’t deserve much energy now. What’s the worst-case scenario? Often, it’s not that bad.

This post on org design really resonated.

Most companies today are using AI the way you’d use a faster horse — to make the existing structure run a little better. The companies that pull ahead will be the ones willing to ask a harder question: what would we build if we were designing this organization from scratch, today, knowing what AI can do?

We have to seriously rethink the SDLC, design it from scratch in the context of how our own organizations work. It’s not about a global “right” process any more. The question now becomes “How can the humans in our team, at our company, at this point in time, work best together to serve our customers?”

Jason Knight wrote about a fascinating disconnect between how B2B product leaders rate themselves and how their teams see them. The data from his survey is striking:

Across the board, B2B Product Leaders think they’re doing pretty well in all of these areas, but B2B IC PMs are not convinced. The difference is stark, and they can’t both be right.

The survey measured six core responsibilities—setting strategy, aligning teams, enabling prioritization, fostering ownership, removing blockers, and investing in people. In every category, leaders rated themselves significantly higher than their ICs rated them. Jason offers three possible explanations: leaders are doing poorly and don’t know it, leaders are doing well but not communicating it, or ICs have unreasonable expectations. He concludes:

Product Leaders need to do a much better job of setting expectations within their teams and communicating with them openly and well. IC Product Managers need to do a much better job of understanding the constraints of their business context and, indeed, the business they work for.

I keep coming back to the iceberg effect he mentions—where only some of the work someone does is visible. This cuts both ways. Leaders underestimate how opaque their work is to their teams, and ICs underestimate the constraints leaders are working within. The gap isn’t just about performance; it’s about mutual understanding.

I like this alternative to the “Disagree and Commit” saying:

“Disagree and let’s see” allows you to stay aligned with the team without forcing you to pretend you had conviction you didn’t have. It lets you walk into a room with your team and be honest:

“Here’s the path that was chosen. It wasn’t my first pick, but here’s the experiment we’re running, and here’s what we’re trying to learn.”

That’s a much more authentic stance for most leaders than repeating something with a tight smile and hoping no one notices your doubt.

Source: “Disagree and Let’s See” →

Some tough love here about what it means to have “executive presence”.

When someone tells you that you need more business sense, or that you’re not ready for more scope, or that you need to level up, this is typically what they’re trying to communicate. That you’re more concerned with how work happens than with what work should happen in the first place.

Source: The price of admission →

A great list of things to keep in mind when communicating via writing. The article is focused on “managing up” but these principles are relevant in a much broader context as well.

What questions does your manager usually ask? Answer those questions yourself. If you take anything away from this article, make it this. Every manager has their own idiosyncrasies, worldview, values, etc. That’s why the best thing to do is to pattern match. Consider what they’ve asked you in the past, when talking to you or others. Try to give context through that lens.

Source: How I give the right amount of context (in any situation) →

Yep this tracks.

Researchers at Gartner have observed that high-performing employees react to a return-to-office mandate as a trust issue, resulting in a 16% lower intent to stay. “High-performing employees are more easily able to pursue opportunities at organizations that offer hybrid or fully remote policies,” said Caitlin Duffy, a director in the Gartner HR Practice. “Losing high performers to attrition costs organizations in terms of productivity, difficulty in backfilling the role, and the overall loss of high-quality talent available to fill critical positions.”

Source: The hidden cost of RTO: Why forcing choice is detrimental to your business →

I almost skipped this Michael Lopp piece, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s one of his best in a long time, especially if you’re a manager. Reframing the act of working with AI as “making the robots dance” is so good. But there’s more to it than that. Just read it, ok?

Robots don’t lie. Lying requires intent to deceive, and when a robot provides you with plausible-sounding, but incorrect statements, it’s either following its programming or making an error. Or both. Humans lie. They boast, they are tragically optimistic, they exaggerate, they forget, I could go on for a long, long while. It’s a list of foibles that make them familiar… that makes them human. What do I do as a leader to work with these troublesome humans? Well, here’s a short, essential list:

• I speak clearly and specifically, so my intent is clear.
• I frame conversations with context so everyone understands my ideas.
• I understand errors are part of the process and work to build tools to prevent them.
• I debate and plan big ideas before I begin.

Source: Every Single Human. Like. Always. →