Kasra Vaziri
Product Leadership
Product Team Alignment Is the Job AI Can't Do for You
Building got cheap in 2026; agreeing on what to build didn't. Two new surveys show why product team alignment—not shipping speed—is the real constraint.
7 min read
Essays
Essays & field notes
Long thoughts and short notes on building products, leading teams, and the craft in between — plus dispatches from building Supsindex in the open.
Product Leadership
The Verification Bottleneck: AI's Real Cost to Teams
Generating a draft—code, a PRD, a design—is nearly free now. Checking whether it's any good is not. That shift should change how you run a product team.
6 min read
Product Leadership
Outcome-Based Pricing: Can You Define the Outcome?
AI agents are switching from per-seat to outcome-based pricing. But the hard part isn't deciding to charge for results — it's defining, measuring, and defending what a billable 'outcome' actually is.
7 min read
Informational
Prioritization Frameworks: A Field Guide for Builders
A practical comparison of the main prioritization frameworks — RICE, ICE, Kano, value-vs-effort, and MoSCoW — what each is good and bad at, when to reach for which, and why a score is an input to judgment, not a replacement for it.
7 min read
Product Leadership
Product Sense Is a Practice, Not a Gift You're Born With
Product sense isn't innate taste. It's a trainable practice of habits any PM can run on purpose. Here are the four reps that build it.
7 min read
Journaling
Burnout Taught Me Why a Sustainable Pace Beats Hustle
A personal reflection on hitting burnout and what it taught me about pace: hustle culture lies, and a sustainable pace beats heroic sprints over years.
6 min read
Building in Public
Building in Public
The Underrated Power of a Public Product Changelog
A public product changelog is one of the highest-ROI habits a team can build — it shows momentum, builds trust, doubles as marketing, and forces shipping discipline. Here's what good ones look like and how to run one.
7 min read
Informational
Informational
How to Write a PRD Engineers Actually Want to Read
Most PRDs die unread. A practical, problem-first guide to writing a product requirements doc engineers respect: ruthless scope, real acceptance criteria, and a living doc instead of a 30-page spec nobody reads.
7 min read
Product Leadership
1:1 Meetings Your Team Won't Dread: A Manager's Guide
The 1:1 is the highest-leverage hour you run as a manager, and most are wasted on status. Here's how to make it the report's meeting: cadence, questions to ask, and what to never do.
7 min read
Journaling
Journaling
The First-Time Manager I Wish I’d Had When I Started
A reflective essay on what good management actually looks like — the manager who protects instead of blocks, gives context instead of orders, and grows people instead of using them.
8 min read
Building in Public
Building in Public
Your First 100 Users: Win Them One by One, by Hand
Your first 100 users won't show up — you recruit them by hand. The unscalable tactics that actually work: going where users already are, warm-intro DMs, and concierge onboarding you do yourself.
7 min read
Building in Public
Building in Public: What It Costs and What It Pays
Building in public is a trade, not a gift. An honest ledger of the real payoffs (accountability, audience, feedback, distribution) and the real costs (noise, copycats, performative metrics, pressure) plus rules for doing it well.
6 min read
Product Leadership
AI Agent Guardrails: Autonomy Is a Product Decision
An AI agent got tricked into leaking private repos by an issue that said "Additionally." The lesson for product teams: how much autonomy you grant an agent isn't a security detail — it's the shape of the feature.
7 min read
Informational
How to Choose a North Star Metric That Actually Matters
A practical method for choosing a north star metric that captures real customer value instead of vanity numbers, with examples from Airbnb, Spotify, and Facebook.
7 min read
Informational
Context Engineering Has Replaced Prompt Engineering
Your AI demo works and production doesn't — and the model is rarely the problem. The real skill now is context engineering: treating the model's context window as a scarce budget you spend with intent.
7 min read
Product Leadership
Good Product Strategy Is Deciding What Not to Build
Real product strategy is focus and sacrifice. It's mostly the good ideas you choose not to build. On the cost of saying yes, why pleasing everyone is no strategy, and how to make focused bets.
6 min read
Journaling
Product Taste: Obsessing Over Details No One Notices
A CPO's field notes on product taste: why obsessing over the invisible details no one will notice is a discipline, not vanity, and how small craft compounds.
6 min read
Product Leadership
AI Gross Margins: Why Your Best Feature Loses Money
Your AI feature ships, users love it, and every interaction quietly burns compute. AI gross margins are running 20–30 points below classic SaaS — and that's a product decision, not a finance one.
6 min read
Building in Public
Launching an MVP: Why You Should Ship Before You're Ready
Perfectionism is the most expensive habit in product. The case for launching an MVP that's embarrassing but not broken, and how to scope a launchable slice.
7 min read
Informational
Jobs to Be Done: The Product Framework in Plain English
Jobs to be done, minus the jargon: the milkshake story, a modern example, switch interviews, the four forces of progress, and how teams misuse it.
7 min read
Product Leadership
Your Product Roadmap Should Be Problems, Not Features
Feature-list roadmaps over-promise outputs and lock teams into a solution before they understand the problem. Here is the case for a problem-and-outcome roadmap, how to build one with now-next-later, and how to sell it to stakeholders who want dates and features.
6 min read
Product Leadership
Per-Seat Pricing Is Dying — and It's a Product Problem
Per-seat pricing measured logins. AI does the work without them — so the better your product, the less you earn. Why how you charge is now a product decision.
6 min read
Product Leadership
AI Evals Are the New PRD for Product Teams
You can't write a spec for a system that never behaves the same way twice. The PRD is dead for AI products. The new core PM artifact is the eval — a graded test set that defines 'good' with a number.
7 min read
Product Leadership
Why 95% of AI Pilots Fail, and What the 5% Do Right
MIT found 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable ROI. Here's why AI pilots fail — and the unglamorous things the 5% that work do differently.
5 min read
Product Leadership
The Product Manager Role Is Splitting Into Two Jobs
AI is automating the PM's old job description. In 2026 the product manager role is splitting into two — and the riskiest place to stand is the middle.
7 min read
Product Leadership
Feature Adoption: Why Most of What You Ship Goes Unused
Most software features are rarely or never used. Here's what the feature adoption data really says — and how to ship less, cut more, and build what sticks.
5 min read
Product Leadership
Vibe Coding's Bill Is Coming Due for Product Teams
Vibe coding made shipping effortless. Now the maintenance bill is arriving — and it's landing on product teams. Here's what the reckoning means, and how to get ahead of it.
6 min read