Product Operating Model Series: Collaboration Principle
Issue #61
In today's edition, among other things:
đ Editorâs Note: The Permission Youâve Been Waiting For: A Year-End Letter to the Product Community
đ Product Operating Model Series:
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It will take you almost an hour to read this issue. Lots of content (or meat)! (For vegans - lots of tofu!).
Grab a notebook đ° and your favorite beverage đľâ.
Editorâs Note by Alex đ
The Permission Youâve Been Waiting For: A Year-End Letter to the Product Community
Hereâs the thing your boss wonât tell you about the last two weeks of December (unless you have a great boss): they donât have to mean anything.
Weâve built an entire industry around year-end reflection. The retrospectives. The goal-setting workshops. The elaborate planning rituals that promise next year will finally be the year we get it all figured out. And right now, somewhere in your inbox, thereâs probably a template for your 2026 objectives waiting to be filled.
But what if I told you that the most strategic thing you could do right now is simply... stop?
Product management has trained us to be perpetual improvement machines. Every quarter needs metrics. Every sprint needs velocity. Every year needs a transformation storyâpreferably with a compelling before-and-after narrative suitable for a conference talk.
Weâve internalized this so deeply that we canât even approach December without treating it as another optimization opportunity. What worked? What didnât? Whatâs the roadmap for becoming a better version of ourselves in 2026?
But hereâs what the research actually tells us: this constant pressure to improve, to plan, to optimizeâitâs the same cognitive trap that makes traditional roadmaps fail. Weâre applying feature-factory thinking to our own lives. Treating ourselves like products that need continuous iteration rather than humans who sometimes just need to exist.
Amy Edmondsonâs work on psychological safety extends beyond teamsâit applies to how we treat ourselves. The relentless self-improvement mandate creates the same anxiety-driven rigidity that kills innovation in organizations. When weâre constantly measuring ourselves against some idealized future state, we lose the ability to learn from the present moment.
Thereâs a concept in mindfulness practice that Iâve been sitting with lately: the idea of allowing yourself to be exactly what you are in this moment. Not the optimized version. Not the version with better habits and clearer goals. Just... this version.
If youâre exhausted right now, acknowledge that. Donât fight it. Donât make it into a problem to be solved with a January wellness initiative.
If youâre excited about next year, let yourself feel that without immediately channeling it into a 90-day action plan.
If youâre somewhere in the messy middleâuncertain, grieving, questioningâthatâs allowed too. More than allowed. Itâs human.
This isnât about abandoning strategic thinking. Itâs about recognizing that the same principles we preach about product developmentâembracing uncertainty, resisting premature commitment, leaving space for discoveryâapply to how we navigate our own lives.
Just as the best product teams have abandoned rigid roadmaps in favor of continuous learning, maybe we can abandon the rigid self-improvement roadmap for these final two weeks. Not forever. Just long enough to breathe.
I want to be honest with you, because I think the product community deserves more honesty than LinkedIn perfection.
2025 was the hardest year of my life.
I lost two family members. I lost a person I thought Iâd grow old with. My business had its share of turbulenceâsome wins, more setbacks than Iâd care to count. Somewhere along the way, I lost faith in my own purpose. The editorial conviction I bring to these pieces? There were months when I couldnât find it.
Iâm sharing this not for sympathy, but because I suspect some of you are carrying similar weight. Loss. Disappointment. The quiet terror of wondering if youâre on the right path. These arenât things we typically discuss in product management circles, where the narrative pressure is always toward growth stories and lessons learned.
But Daniel Kahnemanâs research reminds us that humans are loss-averseâwe feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains. When youâre navigating real loss, not just failed product launches but actual human loss, that weight is immense. And the productivity culture weâve built offers no framework for it.
So hereâs what Iâve learned: Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is stop trying to extract a lesson from your pain. Sometimes the insight is simply that it hurts, and thatâs enough. Sometimes the plan is to not have a plan.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how companies destroy strategic differentiation by obsessing over competitor analysis. The same pattern plays out in how we approach our careers and lives.
We scroll LinkedIn and compare ourselves to peers who seem to have it figured out. We benchmark our progress against some imaginary timeline of where we âshouldâ be. We treat other peopleâs highlight reels as roadmaps for our own journeys.
But just as Apple didnât become Apple by copying competitors, you wonât become your best self by benchmarking against others. Your strategic DNAâyour unique combination of experiences, struggles, insights, and yes, even your failuresâisnât a bug to be fixed. Itâs the foundation of whatever value you uniquely create in the world.
The companies that lead their industries stopped asking âwhat are competitors building?â and started asking âwhat can we uniquely create?â The same reframe applies here: What if you stopped asking âwhere should I be by now?â and started asking âwhat can I uniquely offer from exactly where I am?â
So hereâs my editorial prescriptionâand itâs perhaps the strangest one Iâve ever offered:
For the next two weeks, give yourself permission to just be.
Be messy if youâre messy. Be uncertain if youâre uncertain. Be grieving if youâre grieving. Be hopeful if youâre hopeful. Be some chaotic combination of all of these things if thatâs whatâs true.
Donât force a narrative arc onto 2025. Donât manufacture insights you donât actually feel. Donât create a 2026 roadmap because thatâs what the year-end templates demand.
The same research that shows roadmaps fail in dynamic environments also suggests why forced reflection fails in emotionally complex moments: premature commitment to a narrative prevents genuine learning. Sometimes you need distance before meaning emerges. Sometimes meaning doesnât emerge at all, and thatâs okay too.
Richard Thalerâs work on mental accounting shows we create artificial boundariesâtreating money differently based on arbitrary categories. We do the same with time, treating December 31st as a profound boundary when itâs really just another Thursday. If youâre not ready to make sense of this year, you donât have to pretend you are.
If thereâs one thing I want you to carry into whatever comes next, itâs this: youâre not alone.
The product management community can feel isolating. Weâre often the single PM on a team, navigating ambiguity while everyone expects us to have answers. We champion user empathy while rarely receiving it ourselves. We preach psychological safety while carrying our own struggles in silence.
But behind every polished roadmap presentation is a human being whoâs probably winging it more than theyâd admit. Behind every confident product strategy is someone whoâs questioned their purpose at 2am. Behind every year-end reflection post is someone whoâs also wondering if theyâre doing any of this right.
We are all in this together. In the messy, uncertain, beautiful, heartbreaking, occasionally triumphant world of building products and building lives.
I donât know what 2026 holds. The predictive models donât work for markets, and they certainly donât work for human lives. But Iâm choosing to hold space for the possibility that it will be gentler than this year was.
Not because I have evidence for that hopeâhope isnât really an evidence-based practiceâbut because hope is what keeps us building. Building products. Building relationships. Building lives worth living.
So wherever these words find youâexhausted or energized, grieving or grateful, lost or foundâknow that youâre exactly where you need to be right now.
Let yourself be there.
And when youâre ready to start building again, the work will be waiting. So will this community. So will I.
Hereâs to finding ourselves in the uncertainty togetherâin 2026 and beyond.
Love,
Alex
Dear Product Community đ
For the holidays, weâre wishing you something rare and deeply valuable: real downtime â the kind where the backlog goes quiet, Slack stops blinking, and your brain finally gets some whitespace.
May your days be like a well-designed product: simple, useful, and genuinely joyful.
And for the New Year, weâre rooting for:
⨠a clear vision (even if the roadmap gets âvalidatedâ two sprints in),
⨠the courage to say ânoâ â to low-value features and meetings without purpose,
⨠strong discovery: conversations that change your mind in the best way,
⨠experiments that teach (including the ones that donât âwinâ but deliver learning),
⨠teams built on trust and healthy debate,
⨠and outcomes that matter â not just output.
Weâre taking a short publishing break to recharge and collect fresh ideas.
See you in our next edition in January!
Thank you for being with us.
Happy Holidays and a meaningful start to 2026! đâ¨
â The Newsletter Editorial Team đ
And open the present for you: Present
Product Operating Model Series
đ Product Operating Model Series
Collaboration: Product Operating Model Principle #4
Quick Reference Guide
Core Definition
True collaboration is a product manager, product designer, and engineers working together dailyâtypically around prototypesâto discover solutions that are simultaneously valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.
Each role defers to othersâ expertise in their domain. Conflicts resolve through
