👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of ✨ Community Wisdom ✨ a subscriber-only email, delivered every Saturday, highlighting the most helpful conversations in our members-only Slack community.

A big thank-you to this month’s community sponsor, Merge! Merge makes integrating with your customers’ software vendors easy. Add hundreds of integrations to your B2B SaaS products, with unified APIs for file storage, ticketing, CRM, ATS, HRIS, and accounting. AI companies love Merge because it delivers instant, secure access to clean customer data that powers their solutions. Stop wasting countless engineering hours staying ahead of breaking API changes and digging through a backlog of integration support tickets. Merge handles the full integration lifecycle so you can focus on what matters most: building your core product!

✨ Upcoming community meetups ✨

Upcoming community-organized meetups—click the city name to RSVP:

• Ann Arbor. April 18th. Thanks to @Kayla Mandel!

• Austin. April 16th. Thanks to @Andy Keil - Austin!

• Bhopal. April 20th. Thanks to @Divyanshu!

• Chicago. April 17th. Thanks to @Shivam Malhotra!

• Denver. April 22nd. Thanks to @Prachi Jhala!

• Houston. April 22nd. Thanks to @Joseph Mapula!

• Kansas City. April 22nd. Thanks to @Richard Enlow!

• London. April 23rd. Thanks to @Anna Popova!

• Madrid. April 29th. Thanks to @Giulia Camargo!

• Munich. April 22nd. Thanks to @Lukas Gerhardt!

• New York. April 16th. Thanks to @kaila & @Ryan Schwary!

• Sacramento. April 30th. Thanks to @Michelle C!

• San Francisco - Side bar Summit. April 23rd. Thanks to @Schaeffer!

• Seattle. April 15th. Thanks to @Rawi Nanakul & @Joshua Debner!

• Toronto. April 23rd. Thanks to @Raf V.!

• Washington, D.C. April 18th. Thanks to @Anurag!

Can’t find your city and want to host one? Just DM @Riya in our Slack. It takes 10 minutes (i.e. pick a date and location), and you get to meet awesome people from our community. Learn more here.

🎙️ New podcast episodes this week

OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter): YouTube, Apple, Spotify

Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor): YouTube, Apple, Spotify

💥 Top threads this week

1. Learning to be more concise

Q: I’ve been looking for ways to coach my team on being more concise when doing stakeholder or exec comms. I think as PMs we often want to share all the information (because we know there’s so much!) versus just a tight storyline of what folks need to know (and then be able to answer follow-up questions as needed). I am certainly guilty and have been working hard on it the past few years.

And so I’m wondering if anyone’s tackled this or seen best practices. I’m open to more traditional training or reading material but would probably prefer something a bit more fun. Almost along the lines of Toastmasters or improv games (in a remote environment). Appreciate any insight! ↗️

—Ken Romano

Joni Hoadley: One of the best things you can do is collaborate with your team to experiment with a few different communication techniques and see what lands best. Two that I often recommend are the Minto Pyramid Principle for crisp, top-down thinking, and Amazon’s 6-pager for more strategic, narrative-driven planning. I just wrote a blog post on this topic—especially how storytelling plays a big role in career growth as a PM. My article provides more context about the two communication techniques I mentioned, plus 2 additional ones. You can check it out here: https://jonihoadley.com/product-management-storytelling-career-growth/. And for what it’s worth, I’ve led a few workshops on this recently—if anyone’s interested in digging deeper, feel free to DM me!

Alex Dou: I like Smart Brevity and BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) as frameworks for getting the muscle into your team. I think you have to (1) have an opinion on the framework and (2) be the reviewer until the feedback loop gets ingrained. Maybe that means that you have to review all weekly status updates and hammer home the BLUF and Smart Brevity formats over 1 month. But then as people start doing it naturally, you can probably back off and it will spread to other artifacts. Additional thoughts:

• There’s a Smart Brevity GPT that can train your team on the skill: it’ll give you a passage, and then you have to “Smart Brevity” it.

• I’m playing around with creating a Smart Brevity linter that runs kind of like Grammarly in Gmail. Not 100% sure if people will like it, but at least it helps me.

James Conway: I reference The So What Strategy every time I have to do an exec briefing.

gary:

Wes Kao's Newsletter

How to be concise

👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, career growth, and standing out as a high-performer…

Read more

8 months ago · 284 likes · 30 comments · Wes Kao

Wen: New podcast from Lenny that reminds me of this post!

2. Creating a strategy pre-PMF

Q: Hi all! Working on a product strategy deck for our small org as we’ve been all over the place in recent months as far as feature development goes. Because we’re pre-PMF, I want to be cognizant to not over-prescribe the product strategy, as we should be listening to our customers. How should one find the balance here? We don’t want to have a super-specific product strategy but also don’t want to have nothing on paper, otherwise we’ll end up in the situation we’re currently in. Any frameworks or useful experience would be helpful. Thanks! ↗️

—Roberto Mendoza

Matt Gonzales: I’ve had to build product strategy for a few orgs, of varying sizes, and in similar situations as you. I generally focus on a few key points and I don’t over-index on any particular detail because, as you allude to, it’s likely to change. For example, I might establish a broad vision of “we want to be the X for Y so people can Z,” outline a few things I think we need to accomplish to get there (e.g. “Identify our ICP,” “Solve {some} singular, important problem really well,” and “Prioritize breadth over depth”), and focus particularly on defining who we think our ICP and user/buyer personas are. The idea being that this initial strategy can serve as your hypothesis. The market, competitive, and customer research you do have can inform this first hypothesis, and then you can add or update information as you learn more. In pre-PMF, it’s tough, because you may need to be more reactive to customer asks and worry about intentional strategy later and trying to balance that with things you think might fit your strategy (now or later). Having some sort of high-level, somewhat vague strategy can help give you enough room to stretch and figure out where PMF is while still having somewhat of a north star. As you build more things and capture more customers, you’ll likely start to see your ICP and PMF emerge. An art, not a science (imo), so you just do your best with the information you have to work with.

Miroslav Pavelek: What situation you are currently in? What problem are you trying to solve by this deck?

Derrek: +1 on what @Matt Gonzales said. If you’re pre-PMF, then I think the product strategy should be focused on the fastest path to finding PMF. What’s your strategy to do that? A high-level strategy that defines how you’re going to find PMF should be a bit more evergreen for your team until you start to find PMF, at which point you’ll want to start validating that and scaling. That’s not to say your roadmap will be stable; your strategy will probably be to not have a roadmap that goes very far out, but rather something that enables you to rapidly test hypotheses to get to PMF.

Roberto Mendoza: Very helpful, @Matt Gonzales, and reinforces some of what I was already thinking. @Miroslav Pavelek, focus our org/founders on a strategy vs. being a feature factory. @Derrek, so focusing the strategy on getting to PMF, thank you.

Joshua Herzig-Marx: First off, nobody* is good at strategy! (Though @Adam Fishman wrote a great piece.) And lots of startup leaders will tell you that writing down your strategy at this stage is a bad idea. But I think it’s the perfect time. Why? Because articulating your strategy in writing provides an affordance for improving it. Make it simple. Your strategy needs three parts:

1. A vision (which should include your target customers and positioning)

2. A series of milestones to reach that vision (which looks honestly a bit like a roadmap)

3. The collection of values, rules of thumb, operating principles, etc. which allow you to make decisions quickly (pro tip: these should be reversible; an equally successful company should be able to have the opposite rule of thumb and still be successful. Saying “we’re customer-focused” isn’t a good value; it’s BS).

You can sit down and write it out, or build it by observing the daily workings and decisions of the company, or both. Maybe you have a monthly strategy review meeting. And maybe one of your values is “Product excellence: we fix every bug immediately.” And someone says, “Hey—we’re drowning in minor bugs and not advancing our core product!” You can respond, “Have we learned something new about ourselves? Should we reexamine that operating principle?”

*OK, technically not nobody, but I’d argue that good strategy is better thought of as an emergent, organizational capability rather than an individual skill.

Roberto Mendoza: Helpful, @Joshua Herzig-Marx.

Evan Michner: To all of the comments above! Agree, @Roberto Mendoza—you need some sort of vision or opinion on the what/for whom. Your “product strategy” at this stage should lay out a structured approach to finding PMF, rather than executing on a predetermined vision like you would for a more established product. And that structured approach should center on learning as fast as possible. Think of your strategy more like a hypothesis that lays out a learning plan to help fuel prioritization. Probably a paragraph or two with some bullets that includes what success looks like—which, at PMF stage, is largely measured in conviction (comprised of some quant, some qual, and some gut!). Test it by putting it in front of some of your engineering counterparts—is there enough context to help make decisions? Above all: whatever it is, write it down. Writing helps thinking, plus the artifact is out there for all! Love @Joshua Herzig-Marx’s comment about milestones. I’ve even used “learning milestones” in similar projects. Define what you need to learn about your customers and market, which would guide the tactics/work you do. Fun stuff!

Joshua Herzig-Marx: I also like milestones because it’s a reminder you need them to line up between GTM and tech.

Ken Romano: I went through this a couple of months ago. We had just solidified product-market fit but not so much that I could be 100% prescriptive on where we were headed. So a few things that helped me:

• Focus on what the company vision is (if different from the product vision).

• Outline a couple of “product pillars” that will be the heavy focus for the year. For us, there were three. One on building a habit-forming platform; another on reducing COGS; and then a third, more open-ended one, around experimentation. The last one was more of a catchall to account for things I knew we didn’t know. I also listed out examples of projects/initiatives that would fall into each pillar to help make things real for folks that are a bit more tactical.

• The most helpful thing IMO was what was left off the strategy. We’re a B2B company that has occasionally dabbled in B2C, but it is not part of our strategic future. And so by leaving that off the strategy, it said a lot ... even if what we did include wasn’t 100% solidified yet.

3. When should you incorporate your startup?

Q: Now that AI tools have made creating a POC trivial, I find myself in the unexpected position of having an app with users overnight. I still haven’t even formed an LLC because I haven’t really spent any money or made investments other than my time. My question is, should I create an LLC ASAP? Am I being dumb by procrastinating on that part because of the tax implications? ↗️

—Marisa Fagan

Ana: You can incorporate in a state with less to no tax. Or is this something only for foreign LLC owners?

Isaac Krasny: This is mostly about your desired risk tolerance, but I usually try to avoid incorporating until I need to collect payments or sign contracts. That said, and while I totally hear you on the tax stuff, if you’re just creating a sole proprietorship or simple structure without a massive number of transactions, the tax reporting is pretty straightforward. Maybe a couple hours per year.

Peter Berg: So, there are no tax implications to creating an LLC unless you have partners.

An LLC by default is a pass-through entity for taxation purposes.

You should be able to create one for ~$400 on Rocket Lawyer or a similar site.

I would incorporate it in Delaware because any lawyer you work with will understand how a Delaware LLC works.

Marisa Fagan: A quick google search told me “Since 2024, every California LLC is required to pay the first year Annual Franchise Tax of $800.” Which is just enough $ to make me pause before filing. I suppose if it’s an annual fee, I’m just delaying the inevitable if I plan to incorporate anytime this year.

Isaac Krasny: 100% not a lawyer, but you might also explore incorporating in Delaware, Wyoming, Texas. Also, those Cali fees don’t mess around—here in Vermont, it’s $150 to incorporate and $40/year annual reporting fee thereafter.

San Gunawardana: Incorporating in another state doesn’t get you out of having to pay the $800 Cal Franchise tax if you’re doing business in the state (I’ll amplify that Cal FTB is relentless).

Verdi: Yeah, but come on, let’s be real. The state government doesn’t have time or resources to do a P0 manhunt against an online entrepreneur clearing less than 5K in revenue. They have much bigger fish to fry.

At this stage, it’s a huge distraction, IMO. If you have the money to throw at this without batting an eye, by all means do it, but by your response, it seems like you don’t. So it’s a better ROI of your time chasing customers, and revenue, and once you have made sufficient revenue, use that income to square some of these things out. Getting tangled up in paperwork right before you enter the race is an excellent way to kill your momentum.

4. Building trust with customer support

Q: I lead product for a B2B2C Series A company, and in the past year we’ve grown from a team of ~5 to a team of ~50. Like many startups, the CEO is the VP Product, who is the ultimate decision-maker, but as we grow we’re experiencing pain where our CS team doesn’t think Product takes their requests seriously, as they are often not prioritized, and as we grow our CEO is in less of the day-to-day. This has turned into CS not trusting the product team; they believe we are building for the user and they are building for the client.

Of course, there is always going to be a healthy tension between CS and Product, but I am curious how others have solved for this problem.

There are things in place already, i.e. quarterly planning with CS input, weekly product recaps shared with the team, bi-weekly sprint planning, bi-weekly feedback review, etc. It feels as if we are communicating a ton but nothing actually resonates or lands. ↗️

—Devon Viragh

Miroslav Pavelek: I’ve never heard anyone from Sales or CS say, “Thanks to Product, my targets are easier now—go ahead and increase them.” So it’s natural for them to push back. That said, here are a few more serious areas to dig into:

1. Business impact & prioritization

2. How does your roadmap look? Are you prioritizing based on expected business outcomes, or is it more gut feel/stakeholder-driven?

3. When you don’t pick up CS requests, is it because you know your priorities have higher business impact—or are you just keeping the lights on?

4. Are you evaluating CS requests in terms of business impact too? Can either team (Product or CS) quantify lost deals, churn risk, or upsell potential tied to these unmet requests?

5. Vision & ICP alignment

6. Is the whole company aligned on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? With your fast growth, are you regularly revisiting your strategy and 6/12/24-month vision?

7. If CS feels like they’re building for “the client” and you’re building for “the user,” that might point to a misalignment in ICP or go-to-market strategy.

8. Incentives & OKRs

9. What are CS targets tied to? What are yours?

10. Are your incentives aligned—or are you pulling in different directions?

11. Do you have any shared goals or metrics (like NPS, retention, expansion revenue) that both teams can rally around?

David Jorjani: Miroslav said it and I’ll reiterate the part I wanted to highlight. In a growing startup, resources are limited, and likely product and Eng are the bottleneck in many teams, so before a strong product leader, it becomes a battle of forces in a way. In my experience (I’ve led product at seed -> Series A twice), connecting the dots to the bigger goals and the bigger pains and conveying the bigger team/company goals becomes essential. Also, after a certain point, someone will need to bring the CEO in as well because we need to maintain the product and customers we have, as opposed to purely chase new ones. It is a delicate balance and requires a lot of tactful communication and influence from the new central hub, which usually is the product leader or the ops leader.

Evan Goldin: Encourage the CEO to connect with support often. I’m CEO of a similar-size org, and I’m still responding to support tickets directly, to help feel the pain. Be warned of the flip side, that it drives CS nuts sometimes to have me in the inbox.

Tony Haenn: I stepped into a VP of Product role at a B2B SaaS where the CS team felt very similarly about the product team. In addition to the communication processes you laid out, I’d also suggest having regular 1:1s with the Head of CS and each CS person. It doesn’t have to be weekly; monthly for Head of CS and quarterly for each CS person was what I did. I also encouraged my PMs to do the same with the CS team. It was the relationship-building along with the communication that helped repair the relationship between the teams. The only other communication thing we did was a quarterly “voice of the customer,” where the customer success, sales and customer support teams all had an hour to present on what they were hearing from the market. Product just sat and listened. For those teams, it gave them an outlet where they drove the agenda and the content. This helped them feel like they had more agency and input, vs. a product-led meeting where they provide input. The last thing I did was emphasize to the Product team that we cared about revenue. We measured other things and built for the user. But at the end of the day, if it’s not selling, it’s not a good product. I think that emphasis helped influence how some of the PMs engaged with the CS team (and sales team).

5. Reviewing design works

Q: For companies or startups with less than 100 people, and less than total 5 designers building less than 5 products in the same platform, how are the outputs of your designers reviewed before they get implemented by the engineers? Is it through cross-functional meetings? Or is there someone reviewing them, like how engineers have PR? ↗️

Rachel Hechter: For little things, the designs just get attached to the tickets and discussed during refinement. For anything more substantial, the designer hosts design reviews with the PM and lead engineer (and others as needed). But we’re very small, and there is no “head of design” who needs to review their reports’ designs.

Krishna AG: We do product team reviews, a quick cross-functional review and test it with 2-3 customers who are particularly thoughtful.

gary: Designers host design alignment meetings with the PM, engineer(s), QA involved for overall design quality, and the design lead would give timely feedback async. Sometimes he joins the design alignment meetings for minor fixes or enhancements, and it’s discussed in a ticket’s comment thread.

Jason McCoy: Plus-1 to what @gary said. Ideally, the design lead walks the PM and tech lead (plus frontend/backend engineers) through the final spec to review the UX and discuss all implementation details. This meeting should happen a week or two before the sprint cycle kicks off so that there’s time to triage any gaps/concerns. Furthermore, it’s important that a tech lead has been involved throughout the design phase, helping to give feedback on architectural implications, data structures, and UI patterns on the client side. This helps minimize surprises later in the design phase when you’re working to transition the project to implementation.

gary: Need to share more context. My team builds products for a highly regulated space, so the design lead is more focused on ensuring the designers are productive, efficient and capable. There are tons of implementation details that are not sustainable for the design lead to keep an eye on or walk through them with the cross-functional team because of better context and better visibility on the big picture. The design lead is more focused on system coherence, cross-product impact, and high-level UX/UI inconsistencies. To sum it up:

• capability/context/process—design lead

• day-to-day output and implementation details—review with cross-functional peers

6. Moving from product management to product design

Q: Do any of you have experience transitioning to a Product Manager role from a Product Designer role?

I’ve been a designer for 10 years now, but I constantly find myself doing a lot of the product manager role. With the rise of AI, it has become even more prominent. I am now able to prototype solutions on the go and work more closely with developers on implementing various parts of the project.

I feel like everyone in the industry would become a product manager of sorts, and I’m feeling the role of designer deteriorating rapidly. But still, I find it hard to just transition to Product Manager, since my resume for the past 10 years is either saying a product designer or a founding designer (this position could be a window to it, as I see it, since as a founding designer I was doing a lot of the product management role).

Would be interested to hear your stories of transitioning, or if any of you can point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it. ↗️

—Maxym Nesmashny

Erika Klics: @Maxym Nesmashny, there are so many different “flavors” of Product Manager:

• Technical

• Business-savvy

• More like Project Managers

• Folks who specialize in certain industries or business models

• Or even design-driven, like you

I’ve seen companies look for all of these flavors in the past. My best advice is to find the points in your career when you acted like a PM and define that story for yourself so that when the right company is looking for your flavor, you’ll be ready to nail their process.

Miroslav Pavelek: If you find yourself constantly doing the PM role—make it official. Ask in your company if you can officially do both roles (Product Designer + Product Manager) for some feature/initiative/product/project. That way:

• You will see all angles of Product Management (e.g. sadly, PM is not only about finding the correct solution but quite often also about reporting, stakeholder management,...)

• It will help you have some credentials behind your switch if you wanted to join a new company. Your story can be really cool—“I was a designer, but thanks to AI, I was able to also do the PM job at the same time, and I would like focus on PM more in the future.”

• You may be something like a unicorn for a really “niche” companies. Imagine there is a startup with founders + engineer(s) and they need help both on Product Management and Product Design. They will be looking for two people (one person now, a second one e.g. in 6 months). You could be 100 % there—joining the company as designer + manager, then after further growth just keeping the manager job (and leading other designers). But you won’t find adverts for jobs like these.

Derrek: I made the switch from design into PM a bit over 13 years ago. I came from a marketing/interactive design background with some experience doing product design. I’ve also mentored designers, QAs, and others that have made the switch into or out of product management. My personal path was taking on a role at a small startup that needed a product designer/product manager. The hiring manager was a former client of mine and that helped me get in the door. The great thing about small startups is that they need people to do a lot of different things, and so you can quickly gain a huge range of experiences. They are also often more flexible on titles, which can help you negotiate a split title or a transition of your title over time. Getting that first official PM title will open up doors for you later. If you’re in a good place with your current company, I recommend formally discussing it with your manager and fellow PM colleagues. Usually there is a PM leader willing to mentor someone into the role that is motivated, but you’ll need support from your current manager.

James Conway: Some excellent advice here. What I would add: you are not your job title.

• Imagine that on your CV you removed the word ‘designer’ from your job title, stating you were part of the ‘product’ function...

• You then look to ensure that each of your experience bullet points (I am a big fan of the ‘xyz bullet point format’) is aligned to the product management job description you are applying for.

• @John Conneely has a great resource on owning your story

John Conneely: Obligatory link to more context and the GPT bot.

🤓 Top finds

1. Scarcity and Abundance in 2025 via Rishi

2. High Agency via Itotia Waiyaki

3. Your Startup Doesn’t Need to Be a Unicorn via LX Cast

4. The mental tyranny of AI writing via Anuj Adhiya

5. Vibe coding and the junior developer dilemma via Joshua Herzig-Marx

😂 Meme of the week

Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏

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