Tips and Tricks

18 posts

Best practices become performance traps

The Performance Paradox: Why Your Best Intentions Are Sabotaging Breakthrough Results

You know you need to innovate faster, but you feel trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions. What’s worse, these systems were built with the best intentions and stifle breakthrough innovation while keeping people feeling productive and responsible. I’ve seen this play out in my own teams, and in dozens of leaders I’ve […]

October 1, 2025·Andrea Michalek
Where passion meets performance. New categories are born.

Faster, cheaper, prettier… and still irrelevant

You don’t win by building a better product than the competition. You win by creating a space where competition doesn’t exist. That’s category creation: not improving what's already there, but building the market around a problem only you can solve. Most product leaders aren’t doing this.They’re professional optimizers. Making things faster, cheaper, prettier… and call […]

August 16, 2025·Andrea Michalek
Transform chaos into coordinated progress

Why your team feels chaotic (even when you're shipping)

You don’t need more time, you need better rhythm. Your product team has all the necessary meetings, and yet you’re always scrambling. 1:1 meetings only happen when you can find the time. Strategic thinking gets pushed aside by urgent requests. You’re shipping, sure. But it feels chaotic and disconnected from the customer. And deep down, […]

June 25, 2025·Andrea Michalek
Measure what matters, not what's easy

How I Learned to Track Breakthrough Impact

Picture this scene: And yet… You’re staring at your dashboard, wondering if any of this actually moved the needle on breakthrough impact. When I created a new category in scholarly metrics at Plum Analytics, we faced a measurement problem most product leaders never encounter: How do you track progress toward something that’s never existed before? […]

June 23, 2025·Andrea Michalek
Is your rhythm working?

5 questions that reveal what's killing your team's momentum

Today, I’m giving you diagnostic tools to assess whether your current rhythms are actually working or secretly undermining your team’s effectiveness. Is Your Rhythm Working?5 Critical Questions Most teams think they have good rhythm because they have regular meetings. But having meetings and having effective rhythm are completely different things. Use these questions to assess […]

June 14, 2025·Andrea Michalek
Frameworks are tools, not rules.

Leaders: Are You Optimizing for Process… or Progress?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of blindly following frameworks that ‘everyone’ says work. But what happens when those frameworks hold you back instead of pushing you forward? Frameworks are the training wheels of problem solving. Think about when you first learned to ride a bike. Training wheels helped you get comfortable with balance, […]

January 11, 2025·Andrea Michalek