June 5, 2026
Volume 04 - Issue 22
This week I’m loving
A stark reminder from Richard Mironov that Code Isn’t Product.
Many companies, and probably many of the projects you are managing, have the capacity to produce the actual product (from a code perspective) at an unprecedented pace.
But when we turn around to sell it, there’s a lot less traction than we expected.
Richard points out that customer attention isn’t scaling. The reduced time-to-market is flooding the market with products consumers must choose between; but their time available to make purchase decisions and evaluate new offerings hasn’t changed.
…this is a positioning problem. The dozen words you use to describe a new product matter more than ever. In a world with 100x more offerings, it's what will determine whether anyone even hears about yours.
This is also exposing a key gap that most companies are not addressing. Possibly, even, they’ve already fired the staff who could address it.
We are dramatically increasing the urgency of doing good discovery. Which means actually talking with customers and prospects, rather than synthetic users. A lot.
The parallel into our own world from the product world should be revealing for all project managers. As AI takes over task management, many companies may be thinking that they can just ship projects better and faster with automation instead of people. This will be a short-sighted examination of a project as just a pile of jobs to be done without a strategic lens or focus on business value. It will be an oversight about the value project managers bring in scoping and shaping project success at the idea stage.
I suspect that the patterns for us will be the same as those described by Richard for the product world. Implementation nightmares with extensive handholding and limited attention to solving problems that are well-defined. Waves of projects delivered quickly to great fanfare with no business return in sight. Pressure to accelerate delivery, speed past project charters, and ship on time will grow.
These aren’t new failure modes. They’re the same ones we’ve seen across every technology transition. AI gets us there much faster.
Project managers who insist on seeing the big picture, keeping value in their focus, and applying their toolkit beyond task management will survive this. But we’ll watch a lot of struggles and failures while we traverse it.
From the Practice
This week’s “From the Practice” segment features practical advice from Hanadi Usman on stepping into transformation projects with eyes wide open about their failure modes.
Here’s a summary of the key red flags:
Lack of decision-clarity
A failure to coordinate above the project level for strategic benefit
People are silent, not safe to surface what they can see
Outputs are more important than outcomes
Governance is creating drag not speed
Fundamentally transformation is about structure, not technology.
Dive in deeper for Hanadi’s advice on how to address the common red flags and share what you think here!
An interesting read
This week’s interesting read is a thought-provoking piece from my dear friend Amber McMillan with an important insight on mistaking agreement for alignment.
You might recognize this behavior in your organizational patterns as what feels like endless meetings discussing the same decision, reframing it, getting more input, and meanwhile failing to advance in any direction.
This comes from having an expectation that everyone will agree with you and your decision while in a leadership role. Amber reminds us that this is not only unlikely, but unnecessary.
What is far more productive is to recognize that people can disagree, and still move forward productively.
We are leading in a time where discomfort tolerance is incredibly low. Social pressure is high. Public criticism is immediate. Conflict avoidance is normalized. So many leaders have become afraid of being misunderstood, challenged, or disliked. But leadership was never meant to eliminate discomfort.
Leadership is the discipline of helping people move through discomfort without losing direction. And that requires something many organizations are struggling to reclaim: The ability to disagree without destabilizing the entire room.
A tip
This week I was preparing a submission for a talk I’m hoping to give in the fall that will be discussing Influence. At the same time, my inbox surfaced a story about the power of asking for a small favor which is sometimes termed “The Ben Franklin Effect”.
This is actually, one of my favorite “go-to” Influence moves as a project manager.
The psychological effect is a person is more likely to behave positively toward you when they have done you a favor.
The tip is - if you have a stakeholder you are hoping to have support from, think about what you can ask them to support you in. Engineer a favor you need from them and see how their support will swing behind you after they complete it.
A lesson
Your missing leadership skill might just be: intentional thinking.
This week’s lesson comes to us from Bridgit Norris who highlights something that every generalist project manager should take note of:
There is a difference between processing information and thinking. This distinction matters more in 2026 than it has at any point in the last two decades.
Processing is what happens when you consume a dashboard, respond to a Slack, absorb an AI-generated summary, scan a feed, react to a signal. It feels like thinking. It produces decisions. But it is fundamentally reactive. You are responding to what comes in.
What are you performing in your leadership because it is reactive? Are you making deliberate choices toward a strategic outcome? Or reactive choices in response to consumption of information.
And Bridgit offers a simple solution:
The leaders I have watched make the clearest decisions in the last eighteen months share one characteristic. They have a practice of deliberate input deprivation. Not a retreat. Not a digital detox. A regular, structural commitment to creating space where they are not responding to anything, and can therefore think about everything.
As an organization, I think this is a commitment to revisiting and reorienting to strategy as part of organizational rhythm.
It’s creating meetings where more questions are asked and discussed than data presented.
It is building cultures that surface valuable observations from the depths of the company frontlines.
The question is not whether you have time for it.
The question is whether you can afford what happens when you don’t.