Product Hits: January 5, 2026

Every week, I share three great product resources from a variety of perspectives. Let's dive in!

​The curse of knowledge by Cindy Alvarez

Cindy Alvarez, Director of UX at Microsoft, explains how expertise can distort communication, causing leaders to assume shared context when none exists. She urges PMs to design communication deliberately by spelling out intent, anticipating confusion, and explaining the why so teams can actually align and act.

​Get Out of Your Own Way by Deb Liu

Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry.com, reflects on how deeply ingrained patterns can quietly limit how leaders think and act. Liu invites PMs to notice the internal stories they repeat and to intentionally choose a more expansive way to show up.

​The case against daily routines by Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, argues against the cult of productivity routines. Chen clarifies that career-defining progress comes from rare “10x work”, and therefore PMs should protect time and energy for frontier bets that can change the trajectory of a product, instead of over-investing in habits that only sustain incremental progress.

Behind the Scenes

Hey there, it’s Clement! As PMs, we talk a lot about speed: shipping faster, iterating faster, unblocking faster.

But there’s a quieter failure mode I see all the time. Teams move quickly, yet somehow end up having the same debates, making the same tradeoffs, and circling the same decisions quarter after quarter.

That’s not a speed problem. It’s a leverage problem.

When you never pause to look back, you don’t just miss lessons. You lock yourself into your current framing of the problem.

From the inside, it feels like progress. From the outside, it looks like motion without trajectory.

This is where reflection actually matters. But: the way that you implement effective reflection isn’t to establish yet another routine.

Instead, reflection is how you surface when your work has stopped compounding and started looping.

If it helps, I think about it the same way engineers think about tech debt! If you never pay a small cost to inspect the system, inefficiencies pile up silently. Eventually, everything slows down and no one can quite explain why.

Reflection is the tax you pay early so the system doesn’t decay later.

In practice, this shows up in specific moments, not as mindless rituals.

Like which ones, you might ask?

Well, like after a launch that technically succeeded but left the team drained. Or after a quarter where everything shipped, yet nothing felt decisive. Or perhaps after the third time the same argument resurfaced with different words.

Those are signals. They’re telling you that speed alone isn’t enough anymore.

We reflect so that we can create the conditions for better bets. You can’t find the 10x move if you never step back far enough to see that you’re stuck in 1.1x territory.

In other words - part of the work of product management is to change the shape of the work itself.

I’m curious where this is showing up for you right now. Where does the work feel busy, but not directional?

With love,
Clement

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