A product management new year’s resolution
The one that actually works
Whether you’re a founder, PM, designer, or engineer, make next year about a small shift in how you think about building your product.
Ship something tangible faster than you ship opinions.
Over time, you’ll realize this matters more than being smarter, more experienced, or better at slides.
Stop waiting until you’re confident about users
You can read recipes, watch videos, and imagine flavors all day. But you build confidence by serving food and watching what comes back empty.
Confidence won’t come before exposure. It will eventually come from real experience.
Step by step:
Write your biggest assumption in one sentence.
“We believe users will ___, because ___.”Decide what would prove you wrong this week.
Put the smallest possible thing in front of users that creates a real reaction. No survey fantasy.
Watch what they do. Don’t ask what they would do. They don’t know either.
If you don’t put something in front of users, you’re not learning.
Don’t overcomplicate it to protect yourself
You overplan your trip to avoid uncertainty. Every possible restaurant, every possible scenario…
But the trip only becomes real once you arrive. You adjust based on weather, mood, and energy.
Overthinking edge cases is comforting because it feels like real work.
“But what about…?” is often your fear, dressed as “perfection”. It’s just a way to postpone making the call.
Unless you are:
breaking something core
harming trust or safety
shipping a really bad experience
you can ship something incomplete. Not a half baked product. Just one that doesn’t try to cover every case or please everyone.
Most of your cases are tied to assumptions you haven’t proved yet.
Step by step:
Define the one core user journey you are validating.
Forget everything that is not required for that journey to happen.
Ship to a small group. A beta, a waitlist, just one segment.
Fix what reality breaks first. Ignore imaginary breakage.
You don’t need a complete product yet.
You need a complete loop. Build, ship, observe, adjust.
Choose one bet, then build a shipping rhythm
You’ve probably failed at least once by trying to overhaul everything at once. New diet, new routine, new goals. You’ve also probably noticed you only succeed when you do one small thing consistently.
Likewise, most roadmaps fail because they try to change everything at once to make it perfect. Don’t try that. It never works. It’s another fantasy people use to feel better about their planning.
Do one thing. Weekly, or whatever rhythm works for you. Just don’t make it quarterly.
Step by step:
Pick one metric that matters. Activation, retention, revenue. Or whatever makes sense for your product.
Pick one lever you believe drives it.
Make one change per cycle to test that lever.
Note what you learned in one sentence. What backed up your assumption, what proved you wrong.
Repeat.
By February you probably won’t be more confident. But you’ll be less delusional. And that’s the whole product game.