Grant Hickman

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how product organizations make decisions when the stakes are real. Not theoretical decisions. Not roadmap grooming. Actual tradeoffs; where speed, revenue, experience, and risk all collide. What’s become clear is this: Most leverage doesn’t come from better features. It comes from tightening the loop between signal and commitment. Faster insight helps. New technology helps. But progress still depends on someone being willing to make the call. #ProductLeadership #DecisionMaking #Leadership

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💥 I just found a foundational flaw in Claude. All models, all interfaces. Repro steps below: 1. Go to Claude settings 2. Attempt to update your email address 3. If you can’t find how to do it on your own, ask Claude how to change your Claude email address 4. Validate that Claude is not hallucinating by going to https://support.claude.com and searching for “How do I change the email address associated with my account?” 5. Shake your head and think “sorry users, I know we kind of slid past this when you signed up. Hope the email you used to sign up never gets compromised or needs to change – magic links or SSO are the only option (darn it). And if it does, hope you didn’t buy an annual PRO plan because no refunds / transfers even if to the same human ✌ (grrrr…)” Perhaps this behavior is the result of conscious prioritization based on a thorough understanding of needs / trade-offs. If this behavior was an oversight, then based on prior trips on the modernization train, this could be a massive slog of tech debt. Particularly in a hyper-growth business dependent on uninterrupted & high-integrity data access / entitlements / provenance. Product people – let's use this moment to build foresight! - Don’t abdicate PM or UX from “technical” discussions about data models, identity, or access control – decisions within these domains have incredible implications - Customer onboarding & admin workflows are foundational CX, not afterthoughts - If you’re using Claude Code, invest in Git + GitHub integration for improved resilience (and much more)

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There is a real PMM muscle to build in activating multiple leadership modes, often concurrently during a single project or even in a single day. 💪🏻 Finding ways to lean into strategist, operator, activator, connector, and architect is an awesome challenge!

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Founders don’t fail because they choose wrong people. They fail because they never define the rules. Who owns product decisions? Who controls budget allocation? What happens when opinions conflict? Alignment isn’t a feeling. It’s an operating design choice. I'm curious, how early did you define structure in your startup?

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If it's not in production, it's not adding value. *save this post Let's walk through building a production-ready integration to your application in 3 minutes using Anthropic's Claude Code and Prismatic's CNI. This can be scaled to any integration sitting in your backlog right now. See the step-by-step: https://lnkd.in/gPbQaA3R

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PM career ladders are rigged. Too many levels, checklists of 20+ items.  Way more complicated than the job actually is. You think: I need to hit all of these to get promoted.  Sometimes that’s intentional – one missing checkbox being enough to justify a no. I’ve always seen ladders more simply. Those checklists aren’t requirements. They’re tools. You almost never need all of them at once. Here is my POV: - APM: Ship what’sprioritized for you.  - PM: Ship relentlessly. Start prioritizing. Create impact. - Senior PM: Be a consistent impact machine. - Lead/Staff PM: Impact extends beyond your team. Others ship because of you. - Senior Staff PM: Set a long-term POV. Multiple teams ship your vision.       - Principle/Director: Drive multiple bets. Even that’s too many levels. In reality, there are three different jobs at best: PM → Lead → Director. AI companies probably to it best. Just the PM job.  Less roles in geral. Fewer games.  Pure impact. Curious how others see this. Am I way off?

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We were stuck debating roadmap priorities. Instead of guessing, I interviewed 16 customers. Turns out, that “small” usability fix we’d deprioritized was actually blocking enterprise renewals. We built it. Renewal rate jumped 14%. Lesson: The loudest signal doesn’t always come from leadership. It usually comes from your customer. #VoiceOfCustomer #CustomerInsight #B2BSaaS

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Really appreciated this list, thanks for sharing, Lenny Rachitsky. A lot here feels especially relevant for product leaders right now. One point that stayed with me: “Goals are not strategy.” It’s easy to forget this when we’re deep in OKRs, metrics, and outcomes. Goals tell us what we want to achieve. Strategy shows up in the tradeoffs we’re willing to make, the problems we choose not to solve, and the constraints we consciously accept. I’ve seen teams execute well against goals and still lose strategic clarity because direction was never fully agreed on, only targets were. This was a good reminder that alignment on thinking has to come before alignment on numbers. Curious how others try to keep that distinction clear in their teams.

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Every PMM team needs to do this now! Get access to the source code repo. Here is why: 1. Ask questions in Claude or Cursor 2. Uncover how the product works 3. Answer technical and high level questions quick 4. Format outputs by audience 5. Even draw flow diagrams Now there is never a new question you can’t answer in minutes. No need to ask a PM. No need to wait.

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I lined up a call with a top executive to talk through their A/B testing learnings. Then it went completely off course… Them: “Yeah I ran a bunch of tests this quarter. Nothing works. Headline tests, section tests, button tests. None of it moved the needle. Not a focus area any more”. I listened and took it all in. I had all these notes. All this data to compare against their test results. These follow up questions lined up to get into the “why it won”. But none of it worked for them. It wasn't even that the variants "lost", they just were the same. They didn't matter. We still had a nice chat, but after I got to analyzing his situation. I realized the experience of this exec is actually exceptionally common. Optimizely published data saying that 90% of A/B tests "lose" (as in the variant doesn’t show any statistical difference so they stay with the control). A big part of the problem stems from how we approach testing. 1. Do we really understand where our traffic comes from and how that impacts positioning? If your traffic comes from paid retargeting ads or if it comes from dark social, what resonates will be very different. 2. Do we design A/B tests with a specific, unified problem we are trying to solve for? Many brands just do a dozen homepage hero headline variants and try and see what wins. But the question always has to be what problem are you solving for? Everything should ladder up to that. 3. Are you testing things that are meaningful? A big gap I found from my chat with that executive was a lack of “meaningful testing”. This means you try 10 copy variants but none of them a) introduce new information or b) provide new direct value. I am teaming up with the incredible team from GrowthX AI this Thursday (9AM PST) to do a workshop, where we will get deep into how to better convert your web traffic in 2026. Not only will we look at specific A/B tests from dozens of the top brands in the world, but we will address what to test, and how to think about your website in an age of AI discovery.

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Let’s talk about failed experiments… one of these page layouts got zero conversions in two weeks. I promise the punchline of this post is not “I love failure because it means we learned.” It’s more like – I love testing because I have a pipeline target, and every conversion counts. I don’t have a dedicated person for conversion rate optimization, but I do have a team full of curious marketers and a really good CMS. The two things we do to maximize ROI in the experiments we’re running: 🔍 Ask the right questions: Start with “what are we trying to learn” instead of “what are we going to test” to keep the focus on KPIs and not throwing spaghetti at the wall 📣 Share the results: We do monthly look-backs with our full marketing team to review results and make action plans The main things I care about learning right now: 1. We’ve got refreshed messaging pillars — which headlines resonate the best with our audience? 2. We tightened up our brand colors — which treatment of those colors gets the best engagement?  3. We’re trying out new PPC landing page layouts — are they driving more conversions? We have point three to thank for that zero-conversion result I mentioned. The layout on the right is the one marketers have seen a million times (text on the left, above-the-fold form on the right). The layout on the left is the refreshed one we thought would be more engaging. But test results proved otherwise, and there’s not really a sound defense for a 0 on the scoreboard. And that’s why I love experimentation. Had we just made the layout change and stuck with it, we would’ve lost $1.05M in pipeline. We do our best to keep egos out of results, but catch me saying “they just have bad taste” whenever something we swore would be a winner loses. (If my team is reading this, I don’t think I’ll ever get over the dark mode imagery test results.) If you’re wondering if experimentation like this is something you can do inside Brightspot — something wicked this way comes 🔮. Stay tuned.

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