Reads & Listens

People I follow and the specific pieces that changed how I think. Not a comprehensive list — just what actually stuck.

Peter Yang

PM and creator. Former product leader at Roblox, Reddit, Amazon, Meta.

"Proof of work over credentials. Nobody cares about your FAANG pedigree. Hire high agency people who have built great side projects." This is how I think about hiring too — and it's how I approach my own career.
"Become the user. Less than 10% of PMs dogfood their product weekly." An uncomfortable read because it's true. The best discovery is just using your own product badly.
Small teams ship faster. A team of 4-6 empowered builders will out-execute a 50-person org. The key word is empowered.

IC PM who uses AI and productivity systems to get more done with fewer resources. Early at Patreon, Riverside, Wix, AppsFlyer.

"DMs are the devil." Any time someone sends a DM, the instinct should be to ask them to repost in a public channel. The team with vibrant public threads is half a day ahead of the one with a PM bottleneck in DMs.
Do the action item live in the meeting, while screensharing. Stops the post-meeting task pile completely and builds an "I've got this" reputation without extra effort.
Product scrapbooking — a running Notion database of feedback, signals, and ideas organised by swim lane. By the time an initiative gets prioritised, you've already done the discovery.

Weekly conversations with the best product people in the world. One of the few podcasts I actually finish every episode of.

"Go in to learn, not to convince." The entire frame of an exec meeting should be a discovery call, not a pitch. Once I shifted to this, my stakeholder conversations became noticeably better.
When someone says something that seems wrong: "That's interesting — what led you to believe that?" Disarms defensiveness and surfaces the real model behind the objection.
"What are the outcomes you're most afraid of?" The best risk conversations start from fear, not from plans. Executives are almost always optimising to avoid a specific downside.

"Why the best interviews function like discovery calls." The moment you treat a job search like an enterprise sales process, your whole posture changes.
Information and timing create power. The person who asks more questions controls the negotiation — not the one who anchors first.
"What's the chance there's a little more here?" One sentence, no confrontation. Jacob sees 40% average movement when negotiations are run this way.

"Sell growth, not savings." When pitching product work internally, frame it around what it unlocks — not what it costs or reduces. Executives fund growth.
Showing premium features to free users at Grammarly doubled upgrades to paid. The hidden multiplier was in plain sight — they just hadn't looked.
Resurrected users drive 80% of growth in mature products. Almost nobody is measuring this. The reactivation opportunity is almost always bigger than the acquisition opportunity.

Updated as I find things worth sharing. If something here resonated with you too, I'd like to hear about it.