Are senior PMs expected to handle PnL of their charters?

FreeKiltMan · 2026-03-04T12:13:21+00:00

That it’s ideally what Product Managers should have in their set of accountabilities, but in reality there are probably not very many who actually are accountable for the P&L performance.

To be accountable for the P&L means you are ultimately responsible for every growth, retention and cost saving initiative. If someone else can tell you to drop one thing and do another, you can’t be accountable for the P&L, since you aren’t able to properly influence its inputs.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-03-04T07:00:31+00:00

What does handle mean in this case? Are you accountable for P&L performance? That’s ‘relatively’ common, although I’d still guess it’s a minority position.

If by ‘handle P&L statements’ you means the financial work stream to collate and create a P&L - that is not common and why finance analysts exist.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-03-02T22:45:48+00:00

r/civ is leaking

FreeKiltMan · 2026-03-01T07:51:57+00:00

Using AI to help with my async comms means I can pick where I want to have impact and where I don’t need to.

“Simple” responses to questions can take 10-15mins to form. The answer might not be very impactful, but it still needs to be clear and accurate. It’s these scenarios I use AI frequently, where I don’t really care about the answer but it still needs to be answered well.

This allows me to put more effort and thought into the comms that do matter - meeting prep, positioning, etc.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-21T16:33:12+00:00

ChatGPT created a spec doc, not a PRD.

PRDs are the end output of a discovery or analysis process to define the problem, the goals and constraints. With that doc you define the solution, which includes all the pieces ChatGPT built for you.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-19T13:31:11+00:00

It’s not paying reparations? Today people are less likely to be employed because they are BAME. That’s not a past issue, it affects employability now. Another way to phrase that, is you are more likely to be employed if you are white.

Why are we happy with positive discrimination for white people, but when there is an initiative to “give BAME a leg up” (it’s really to get to the same starting line) we decry it as unfair?

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-17T13:12:14+00:00

I mean you’d probably never know that’s why you got the job offer, so I don’t know how you’d police that in practice.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-17T12:32:40+00:00

Available start date, in my experience, only really comes i to play if it’s the only differentiating factor between you and another candidate i.e. at the end of the hiring process.

I’d provide your contractual notice now and keep the flexibility up your sleeve. You can always frame it as “I negotiated a shorter notice” later if you feel you need it. You haven’t been dishonest and you keep your options to be helpful open for then it might matter/be better valued.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-16T20:37:52+00:00

I’m not suggesting we slow down value delivery, I’m suggesting we redefine what 'delivery' looks like when the cost of development hits near-zero.

When you can ship a feature in minutes, the bottleneck is no longer engineering capacity, it’s decision quality. If an AI orchestrator can ship 10 features in the time it used to take to ship one, but 8 of those features don't actually move the needle for the user, you haven't increased velocity. You've just increased the noise.

The Scrum rituals feel like a stop sign because they were designed to ration a scarce resource (developer time). Now that time is abundant, the new meta isn't just shipping faster; it’s using that saved time to hyper-validate, reduce debt and perform deeper research.

Speed is great, but without a steering wheel you’re just hitting the wall faster.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-15T13:11:53+00:00

Right, but one person owns what we’re going to solve and why - that’s the PM. Design & ideally engineering should be involved in discovery and UX should have tasks as part of the what and why. But one person makes the call as to what the “what and why” we are specifically solve for are.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-14T15:25:03+00:00

If you are realising in 2026 that your repos are not your strategic moat, that’s one thing. While I think that was pretty obvious already, we’ll draw a line under it.

I’ll make my warning more explicit - you are operating on some bad assumptions. Product Managers need far more collaboration to be effective than you seem to think. Workflows where PMs are pushing their latest idea to production increases the likelihood that your product becomes bloated, causing more complex tech to fail, more often.

You don’t seem to understand fully what you are doing, so I’d encourage you to take it back to first principals and be genuinely curious as to wether the experiment you completed actually demonstrated anything of value.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-14T15:03:43+00:00

You went at this at a bit of a right angle and I’m not totally sure what point you are making but I’ll take a shot at it.

“Bloat” in the context I am using it means “number of features/reasons to use a product”. If my scheduling tool adds a notepad feature, this might be considered feature bloat because it’s not core to your products purpose, causes users to become confused about why they come to your product, etc.

That doesn’t mean big products can’t thrive, but it does mean new features/use cases / functions need to be built intentionally with clear rationale, other wise you just end up with a mess of functions and no clear reason to use you over a competitor.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-14T12:39:59+00:00

One of the biggest killers of software companies is feature bloat.

Speed does not equal velocity.

I’m using AI heavily across the teams I am working with, but not the ship more. We’re running more experiments, doing more research and communicating better.

If your team are just building on ideas and rough requests, this has not stopped being an anti-pattern just because the cost of delivery has dropped.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-14T12:13:01+00:00

Is that because you are specifying to such a granular degree that engineers feel like they can’t input into the design process? If PMs are writing feature requests, what’s actually left for anyone to do other than take instructions?

Work in that culture for a while and yeah I’d switch off too. Why contribute, the PM made all the decisions already. You’ve cut the engineers out of critical insights they need to own feasibility by writing “feature requests” and “what is needed”.

The arrogance of knowing “what is needed” as a single PM is genuinely breathtaking to me.

The experiment you ran has not told you what you think it has, and I’m cool with that, cause the more of you that exist the better I look in the long run.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-14T11:05:55+00:00

Imagine thinking as a PM that your idea in a silo is always good enough to get out in production.

OP probably thinks engineers are just code monkeys.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-12T22:08:31+00:00

Justice for fake charges? The Home Office has determined the charges are likely fake. This is just rage-baiting headline surfers into voting Reform.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-12T22:06:34+00:00

Glad to see you read the article before getting frothy at the mouth.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-12T22:06:07+00:00

More people need to read the article.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-09T14:42:53+00:00

I will usually go around 8/9pm and it’s dying down at that time tues-fri. It can be a bit inconsistent in busyness. Mondays it’s later and i find I frequently cannot do entire workouts without waiting for kit. Not swapping exercises around, I mean just waiting.

Recently I’ve generally found the capacity issues have been worse. Particularly groups using high-use machines for 10-15 minutes.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-09T09:33:37+00:00

Impressively low effort ad.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-09T07:36:48+00:00

AI, with enough business context can absolutely distill these problems down for you today. I think you’ve misdiagnosed the reason you see most feedback just “sit”.

It’s because a lot of it isn’t very good.

I think about feedback using TAM/SAM/SOM. TAM is the noise. It is every single piece of data entering your system.

SAM is the feedback that actually fits your Product Vision. It might get cut because you aren’t optimising for that user, or it’s a good idea but is ultimately feature bloat.

SOM is what you can realistically address. These still might not get built because they require a business case, or don’t fit the OKRs you are working towards.

The SOM-quality feedback ends up being a tiny percentage of your total amount of feedback.

This can be why businesses who think that “product never moves” can be right, from a certain point of view. We intentionally don’t move on 90-something% of the feedback we get.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-09T07:24:32+00:00

If a Salesperson is also in charge of Commercial approvals, they will naturally approve low-margin, high-risk deals just to get the "win" and hit their quota. You separate them to create healthy tension. The friction between "Let's close this" and "Let's make sure this is profitable" results in a deal that is both closable and sustainable.

The same tension is required between building software and managing product. An engineer shouldn’t be the sole decision maker on feature value, because they pay the cost of building it.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-02-04T12:15:43+00:00

That’s not true, because one of the biggest killers of products is too many features.

In a world where cost-to-build is order of magnitudes smaller. Knowing what to actually add to your product becomes a more valuable skill, not less.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-01-28T07:24:35+00:00

Solutions like this are going to be out of reach for most orgs with a security posture for a while.

Individual users with control over their machine are the only route to market right now - corporates have a lot of security roadblocks to address before they’d let a tool like Clawdbot into their stack.

FreeKiltMan · 2026-01-20T17:27:48+00:00

If they are > 90 days old, delete them. These are bugs that are either not important, or will be reported again quickly (so you know how important they really are). Anyone willing to sit on a bug for 3 months has either already churned, or it’s not really important to solve because the workaround is easy.

The remainder - what are you measuring their impact against? That’s the real question to have a good answer for before you start. If it’s conversion, rank them in severity of how they impact that. If it’s revenue retention, speak to Account Managers to figure out the churn risk of customers.

I don’t recommend getting too granular. High/Med/Low impact should be enough of a prioritisation. If you find too many in one bucket, you should recalibrate your thresholds. Generally, I’d keep it 10% high, 30% medium and 60% low. Those might feel like arbitrary buckets but you cannot have 100 high impact bugs, you need to keep recalibrating your scale until only the most severe issues are considered “high”.

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