Fireside Product Management

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I met Albino Sanchez in the bleachers at a high school JV football game. While our sons battled it out on the field for Palo Alto High School, we found ourselves deep in conversation about something far removed from touchdowns and tackles: why some product leaders thrive while others crash and burn in seemingly similar companies. Albino doesn’t fit the typical Silicon Valley mold. Born and raised...

TLDR: It was Claude :-)When I set out to compare ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and ChatPRD for writing Product Requirement Documents, I figured they’d all be roughly equivalent. Maybe some subtle variations in tone or structure, but nothing earth-shattering. They’re all built on similar transformer architectures, trained on massive datasets, and marketed as capable of handling complex business wr...

Every few years, the world of product management goes through a phase shift. When I started at Microsoft in the early 2000s, we shipped Office in boxes. Product cycles were long, engineering was expensive, and user research moved at the speed of snail mail. Fast forward a decade and the cloud era reset the speed at which we build, measure, and learn. Then mobile reshaped everything we thought we k...

The Interview That Sparked This Essay Joe Corkery and I worked together at Google years ago, and he has since gone on to build a venture-backed company tackling a real and systemic problem in healthcare communication. This essay is my attempt to synthesize that conversation. It is written for early and mid career PMs in Silicon Valley who want to get sharper at product judgment, market discovery,...

I didn’t plan to make a video today. I’d just wrapped a client call, remembered that OpenAI had released Atlas , and decided to record a quick unboxing for my Fireside PM community. I’d heard mixed things—some people raving about it, others underwhelmed—but I made a deliberate choice not to read any reviews beforehand. I wanted to go in blind, the way an actual user would. Within 30 minutes, I had...

Introduction One of the great joys of hosting my Fireside PM podcast is the opportunity to reconnect with people I’ve known for years and go deep into the mechanics of business building. Recently, I sat down with Jason Stoffer, partner at Maveron Capital, a venture firm with a laser focus on consumer companies. Jason and I go way back to my Seattle days, so this was both a reunion and an education...

When I sit down with product leaders who’ve spent decades shaping how Silicon Valley builds products, I’m always struck by how their career arcs echo the very lessons they now teach. Michael Margolis is no exception. Michael started his career as an anthropologist, stumbled into educational software in the late 90s, helped scale Gmail during its formative years, and eventually became one of the fi...

From Chaos to Clarity: How AI is Rewriting the Playbook for Product Managers Lessons from my conversation with ex-Google PM Assaf Reifer on building tools that tame the noise, sharpen priorities, and give PMs back their most valuable resource: focus. When I think back on my time at Google, one of the highlights was building and scaling teams with incredibly talented product managers. Some of those...

When Jess Gilmartin talks, I listen. If you've been in Silicon Valley long enough, you might have heard of Jess. She's been a full-time CMO, a founder, a startup whisperer, and most recently, one of the sharpest advisors to CEOs I know when it comes to hiring marketing leadership that actually works. In our recent Fireside PM conversation, we went deep on the do's and don'ts of hiring a CMO. While...

We’re back with a Startup Spotlight episode on the Fireside PM podcast. It’s not every day you get to speak with someone who’s straddled the worlds of architecture, gaming, AI, and robotics—and managed to turn those disparate threads into a startup tackling one of the most important problems in our robotic future. Steven Ren, the co-founder and CEO of Palatial , joined me from Lower Manhattan to s...

Twenty-five years ago, Tim DeSieno and I were two outsiders on the tropical island of Singapore, me trying to build a startup, him fresh out of a restructuring law practice. We reconnected recently on the Fireside PM podcast, and what followed was one of the most illuminating conversations I've had this year. Tim's career arc is anything but conventional: from decades in global debt restructuring...

“We Are Not in Kansas (or Creatorland) Anymore” When I kicked off this Fireside PM interview with Ben Grubbs, I knew we’d cover the creator economy. What I didn’t expect was how much of it would end up being an MBA seminar for product managers. Ben isn’t just another ex-YouTube guy with creator war stories. He’s seen the evolution of the online video ecosystem from its scrappy, quirky beginnings t...

If you had asked me five years ago whether product managers would need to worry about AI-generated job applicants or remote interviews with operatives from North Korea, I would've laughed you out of the room. But here we are. I recently sat down with Shannon Anderson, longtime recruiter and talent scout at Madrona Ventures, for an episode of the Fireside PM podcast. What started as a reaction to a...

Hey Team, In the latest episode of the Fireside PM podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with Jake McKee—one of the early advocates of modern community strategy in tech. Jake’s résumé is legit: he’s helped companies like Lego, Apple, and Southwest Airlines transform how they engage their most passionate users—not just as customers, but as collaborators. We covered a ton of ground, and I left the...

I rarely read career books cover to cover. But when I listened to Search in Plain Sight by Somer Hackley, I was hooked. It wasn’t a blog post padded into a book—this was the real deal. Structured, thorough, and full of insights that I wish I had twenty years ago. Naturally, I invited Somer onto the Fireside PM podcast to dig deeper. What followed was a masterclass on how executive search firms act...

Early to mid-career product managers in Silicon Valley often dream of landing the perfect job—high comp, strong team, great product, and a clear path for impact. But what if I told you that sometimes the smartest move is walking away? That was the case for Elizabeth Hague, a seasoned marketing leader with two successful exits under her belt. She recently turned down a VP of Marketing role that cam...

Earlier on the Fireside PM podcast, I sat down with Carl Wu , a veteran product leader who built and launched an AI-first product from scratch—targeting one of the most conservative and risk-averse professions out there: immigration law. Carl's story isn't just a case study in GenAI product development. It's a case study in how technical intuition, product fundamentals, and real-world empathy for...

All right, what's going on, team? We are back on the Fireside PM podcast, and today I want to share some hard-earned insights on applying to tech startup accelerators. I just finished reviewing over 80 applications for UC Berkeley SkyDeck and Stanford GSB's summer entrepreneurship programs, and I have a ton of thoughts on what makes applications stand out—and what sends them straight to the 'no' p...

I recently had a fascinating conversation with Rodolfo, a Senior Product Manager at Spotify and a good friend from my days mentoring at Harvard Business School. Rodolfo shared a powerful insight into nailing product management interviews, particularly valuable for anyone early to mid-career in Silicon Valley or looking to break into tech. His experience underscores something I frequently coach my...

AI is transforming product management, but not everyone is using it effectively. Too many product managers treat AI as a glorified autocomplete—something that speeds up basic tasks but doesn’t fundamentally change their workflow. But after my conversation with Mustafa Kapatiya, a former Google executive and AI consultant, I walked away convinced that the best PMs aren’t just using AI—they’re redef...

Hiring a Great Product Leader Is Harder Than You Think Team, we’re back on the Fireside PM podcast, and today, I want to talk about a topic that keeps coming up: why even experienced executives struggle to hire strong product leaders. If you’re a CEO or CPO at a mid-to-late-stage company and you need to hire a killer Director or VP of Product, this post is for you. You go through the hiring proces...

Alright, team—we are back on the Fireside PM podcast, and this time, I had the privilege of speaking with Dave Lu , a veteran in tech and one of the most influential voices in the AAPI founder ecosystem. Dave’s career spans Yahoo, Apple, eBay, startups, and venture capital , and in our conversation, he shared his journey and insights on breaking barriers, fostering a strong AAPI network, and navig...

Hey Fireside PM crew, I had a fantastic conversation in this week’s podcast with PJ, a seasoned Director of Product Management and product transformation consultant. PJ shared valuable insights from his journey, starting as a tech-focused developer, moving into product ownership at American Express, working with clients across industries at BCG, and now leading product transformations at EPAM. Her...

Hey team, Last week on Fireside PM , I had the pleasure of reconnecting with an old Google colleague, Chris Vander May. We first crossed paths at the Kirkland office nearly 18 years ago, and since then, Chris has had an incredible career spanning Amazon, Google, Meta, and now his own AI-driven startup, Product Partner AI. Chris has seen it all—from launching the first version of Google Meet to lea...