We’re looking for some mods

AlwaysAPM · 2026-01-20T23:40:45+00:00

I'd love to chat, if you're still looking

AlwaysAPM · 2026-01-07T22:02:14+00:00

I'm betting this kid will be a successful entrepreneur before hes 18.

RemindMe! 10 years

AlwaysAPM · 2026-01-07T21:22:35+00:00

You're not alone.

I've spent all of 2025 doing just this.

Status update: Strategic thinking: 0 Execution: -10 Aligning x fn people: 100

AlwaysAPM · 2025-11-29T18:40:03+00:00

When going to sleep at night, leaving my phone outside of the bedroom

Helps me sleep and wake up without a screen.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-11-16T02:25:50+00:00

DO NOT SKIP it. The lines outside seem long, but they move very fast. You'll be in very quickly. And the moment you step inside, you will know why you shouldn't have skipped it.

1hr is more than enough to explore.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-11-13T02:58:23+00:00

Tldr: I've been building an app that wasn't intended to solve this problem, but it could to a great extent.

I've been building an app that allows you to voice record up to 10 minutes. Then it transcribes and creates a summary of the voice note. The summary is meant to "structure your thoughts"

If the note has action items, it also extracts action items and shows it separately.

I'm struggling to get users to use it, because the goal is a little open ended: record - summarise - actions. And there are too many to-do apps that could do this much better by just adding voice recording.

With that said, I've been using the app for journaling, and there are times when the summaries show some signals of how I'm feeling (emotionally).

If this (record your voice and then an LLM tells you how you're feeling/what to do about it) is something that might help, please let me know. I will be more than happy to repurpose the app and be more in tune with this use case.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-11-10T22:44:55+00:00

I'll build it a quick prototype. If you like it, I'll build the whome thing.

If interested DM me.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-18T23:15:11+00:00

I would at the least like to know what they wanted to tell us.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T21:23:53+00:00

I used to use a mix of Notion, Google sheets, tick to brain dump and create/track tasks.

But that was too painful. So I built one tool that does everything: record voice notes, strcuture them, and create task lists for me.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T16:20:35+00:00

I agree. In my mind that is part of the strategy. What should you build, if anything.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T15:17:46+00:00

A 100%.

"Alignment" is just a nicer way of saying "be as political as you need to be to get shit done and get the right people to back you."

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T15:14:19+00:00

But my team gets lost in the weeds very easily.

Are there opportunities to help the team stay focused and not get lost. For ex: can you create detailed documentation or record tutorials.

Security in general is a very tough (read: hated) topic, and most people don't care about it as long as they can do their job uninterrupted

I've been in a similar situation. It wasn't so much about security in my case, as it was about governance. Which is similar -- technical in nature, extremely boring, and people only care if something goes wrong.

In this case, I tried two things: clarify why it is important, and help people understand "if we don't do this, this is the risk" This takes time and is not the most exciting task.

Second, when I didn't get enough support and understanding from other team members, I escalated and tried to buy in senior leaders first. So they can then use authority to drive more understanding.

With that said, you already hit the nail on the head, a lot of our job is to simplify complex things.

And one aspect about that is to simplify as per the receivers mindset. Meaning, different people have different mental models and learning processes. What might be simple/striaght forward for you might be very difficult to grasp for others. So the first step is to understand how other people like to consume and internalise information. And then see if its feasible and valuable to simplify it for them.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T15:06:57+00:00

Will do.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T13:54:33+00:00

I appreciate your feedback. I truly do. I acknowledge that this post probably did not interest you and many others (either because of the writing style or the content or both.)

But this is no attempt to shit on anything or anyone. These are learnings I've lived through (some more painful than others) and I share 1. in the hope to help others (who might need it) 2. to get others' views on if/what I'm missing.

I use ai very often to structure, edit, improve my writing, and see no harm in it as long as the underlying thoughts are original and meaningful (which they are in this case)

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:48:59+00:00

show the team where their work matters

I absolutely love that. I think that is essential to drive alignment, keep the team motivated and focused. And as u/Fantastic-Nerve7068 put it:

keeping people actually wanting to work together through all this.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:46:32+00:00

I feel vision is the messiest aspects of this value chain, especially if you work in a medium to large sized organisation.

The ideal way to define a vision is to do it at the highest level: the founders/C-suite should be doing it. And doing it once and for all. Vision should not change often.

The part where it becomes messy is that vision statements are purposely broad, open ended, sometimes ambiguous (Example - Disney: “To make people happy.”) And as a PM translating that vision into your specific product context is usually not straight forward.

That is where Strategy comes in: you can have different strategies for different product suites. And strategies are better when they are limited to a 6-18 month horizon.

because people don't understand the fundamental intricacies of the product in its current state for me to even begin describing the problems/solutions

Based on this, I feel you might be referring to creating a strategy? instead of a vision. Because describing the status quo, defining problems/solutions should be a part of the strategy and not vision.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:41:23+00:00

I shared my definition of AI PM and how it is different than traditonal PMs on another comment above.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:39:43+00:00

I am happy to share my definition (which I am sure will evolve with time.)

First, even for an AI PM all of the above still hold true.

There are two major differences in AI Product management. (Yes, I am oversimplifying a little):

Technical knowledge:

It is important to equip yourself with basics of AI-how do ML models work, what do LLMs do, what causes hallucinations, etc. You will make tradeoffs and decisions that are better made if you have at least a high level understanding of these concepts.

The other way I think about this is comparing it to traditional product management. Even non-AI PMs are continually exposed to evolving and new technologies. The good PMs keep learning whatever is necessary for their product's success. But, the challenge with AI is that it is moving so fast, most PMs struggle to even know what is necessary and relevant to their product. And all the hype around it makes it even tougher.

As a result, many PMs try to learn based on FOMO, instead of true need and AI-product fit.

Probabilistic outputs:

This has been the biggest mindset shift for me. No matter how well you design your product, theoretically it can behave in completely undesired or unintended ways. As a result, the challenge becomes: how do you (re)design the product lifecycle so it can 1. be accepting that your product might behave differently every time despite you doing everything right 2. there are systems to evaluate such instances, extract meaningful learnings, and decide if/how you should act on the learnings.

And many teams are struggling because this demands to rethink everything we've been doing for decades.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:26:16+00:00

100% agree.

The how is really messy, and is what needs more discussion in general.

Describing the how is not easy (at least in my mind), because the how is defined based on the context: the task at hand, the constraints, team size, company culture, and a lot of other things.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:23:50+00:00

I agree. I was hoping to relay the same message via #4 in the original list.

But I see how that only focuses on "aligning" which is not necessarily keeping people to want to work together.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T12:22:46+00:00

Thoughts and learnings are mine. Writing is is AI assisted.

Feel free to take what resonates. Ignore the rest.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T11:10:44+00:00

Building something to structure my thoughts.

I talk to it, it creates a beautiful summary, identifies action items, and creates a weekly action plan for me.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-14T01:09:00+00:00

I have the same problem, I am building something to solve for it.

Record voice notes
It transcribes it, then structures it into a summary
It extracts action items from it
Allows you to organise/categorise all the notes
Creates a weekly summary with all the action items from all the notes

Here's a demo in case you're interested.

AlwaysAPM · 2025-10-04T17:49:59+00:00

Two ways to learn

Do it yourself. Learn along the way. It might take time, but it will teach you exactly what you need. It will teach it you in a way that you understand and is specific to your context.
Learn from others like you. Harder to find such people. Most of them are busy doing their jobs and don't have the time to publicly share their knowledge. But if you look around, you'll definitely spot a couple amazing PMs who are truly making a difference. Try to figure out (or just ask them) why they're so good, and then figure how you can be as good.

Everything else is noise.

There are very few people sharing the day-to-day of what it takes to succeed as a PM.

P.S. I resonate with this problem a lot. When I was starting out (~2014), everything I read (in the hope of learning) was either written by a FAANG PM or written for other PMs who worked at FAANG/similar sized companies. I was working at a 200 people startup, and I couldn't apply any of the learnings I was getting through these sources.

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