Frameworks
Ideas I reach for often enough that they earned a name. Each one comes out of a specific failure I watched happen, and links back to the essay that works it out in full. Borrow them freely.
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The Ownership Gap
The distance between a tool existing and someone being accountable for it, which is settled by an org chart rather than by a roadmap and shows up in incident response long before it shows up in a budget.
Worked out in: Your company is about to stop buying SaaS. That's a PM problem.
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Spec-to-Code vs. Spec-to-Context
Two different gaps between a written spec and a shipped feature. AI is closing the first one, which is turning intent into working code. It cannot close the second, which is the undocumented architectural and organizational reality that determines what the intent actually costs.
Worked out in: I wrote a one-paragraph feature. The estimate came back at a month.
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Requirement Realization Rate
The share of what a product manager planned that ships as it was intended. Some of the loss is healthy, because discovery invalidates assumptions. The rest is translation cost, and it has been treated as a fixed cost of the job for about twenty years.
Worked out in: I wrote a one-paragraph feature. The estimate came back at a month.
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The Negotiated/Derived Boundary
The line beneath use cases where a product spec stops being negotiated with anyone outside the team and starts being derived: features from use cases, requirements from features, acceptance criteria from requirements. Most product dysfunction is a category error about which side of it something sits on.
Worked out in: Software has abstraction layers. Your spec should have them too.