Max Antonov

I'm a father of three from Sydney, a Product Director and a Product Coach. I write about product management and run the Product Manager community.

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5d ago

The Never List

There are two lists. One of them gets all the attention. The wishlist is the obvious one. Every team has one and it tends to grow on its own without any editing, picking up ideas from roadmap convers...
6d ago

Conway's Law for AI

Cross-functional planning used to take us 2 weeks before AI. Now AI got it to 2 hours. However, the delays seem to be exactly the same length they've always been. Conway's Law. The org that moves slow...
May 13, 2026

Shared Slipups

A leader, especially an executive, admitting they got something wrong, out loud, in front of the team, is rarer than it should be. When a mistake happens, everyone in the room already knows that somet...
May 12, 2026

The AI slot machine

A lot of what gets produced now is optimised to look like thinking rather than actually be it. AI-generated posts, meeting notes, research synthesis, decision logs, decks, updates, documents. It all g...
May 11, 2026

AI Content Paranoia

Paranoia...something I've started doing is running my own writing through AI detection tools. It's to reassure myself that it doesn't look like I used AI to write it, which is a completely different...
May 9, 2026

AI & Kessler Syndrome

There's a theory called Kessler syndrome. The core idea is that when enough debris accumulates in orbit, it causes collisions, creating more collisions and the density builds up until getting anything...
May 8, 2026

Whose Taste?

Every time someone says that a Product Manager or a Product Designer or even a leader needs to have taste, I want to ask: "Whose taste exactly?" The founder's? The current market leader's? Steve Jobs?...
May 3, 2026

5 Executive Skills People Underrate

There are executives who are so good to work with and for, and all of them have somewhat similar skills. Here are 5 underrated executive skills: Knowing how to zoom in and out One minute they are talk...
May 2, 2026

RICE Is Not a Brain

When you have a decent structure and process, it does feel like you are making progress, so PMs grab (R)ICE, HEART or whatever the latest prioritisation framework is and push ahead. A lot of decision...
May 1, 2026

Engineers Who Wait for Tickets Are Already Too Late

There are tech teams that act like their job starts when the requirements arrive. Still! This is a tech leadership gap created by a tech leader who prefers an agency model instead of a cross-functiona...
Apr 30, 2026

Toxic Bosses

Toxic bosses wreck their teams. You'll see it in how they protect their territory. The territory gets defended in small ways (a dismissal here, a reframe there) until people stop bringing things in. T...
Apr 29, 2026

Smaller Teams Are the Future of Product, Design and Engineering

The most obvious upcoming change in product, design and engineering is in team structure. Teams will get smaller. One person covers what used to take three or four, and most companies are only startin...
Apr 28, 2026

On Workshops

This meme hurts because it's true. There's a thin line between guiding people and running workshops. And to be honest, most of us have already done it. A lot of the time. Workshops are awesome. We wan...
Apr 21, 2026

"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team": Teams That Need It Most Can't Use It

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. One of my favourite books and from experience these problems don't look like problems when you're in them. Absence of trust looks like "we have a great culture here."...
Apr 1, 2026

There's a version of it at 3am with Hazel. She won't settle. Nothing you try works. You're lying there doing the maths on when the next feed is or how long you have left to sleep before you need to get up. Somewhere in the middle of it, you start to think this is just how life is now. Permanent. Like the reset button got removed.

Then morning comes. The day resets. (I know, I just said it couldn't)

Work does the same thing, sort of. A decision doesn't go your way. A relationship goes sideways and you're still not sure exactly how. Something you quietly backed stops working and there's a window where you already know it but you haven't said it out loud yet.

That happens to nearly everyone. And that's okay.

"You can't always control what happened, but you can control how long you carry it."
Mar 31, 2026

AI Product Strategy: Why AI Won't Save a Bad One

A company I spoke with last quarter had their AI strategy ready. Slides, a dedicated section, a product vision that was going to be powered by AI. The founder had clearly thought hard about it. When I...
Mar 29, 2026

Just a reminder, building the wrong thing faster still gets you nowhere.

The OG meme
Mar 28, 2026

What Annoyed You Today?

You open the fridge, look at what's in there and spend the next 10-15 minutes working out what to cook. More nights than you'd probably admit. I've (ok, my wife, not me) been doing this for about 10 y...
Mar 27, 2026

7 Priorities Is Not a Strategy

I ran a strategy audit for a company where the CEO was convinced they had a strategy but the team couldn't follow it. The deck was about 10-12 slides. Three of them were the executive summary. There w...
Mar 25, 2026

Why PMs Aren't Driving Strategy (And Why Workshops Won't Fix It)

A couple of years ago I sat in a strategy workshop where a facilitator spent about an hour walking product managers through where they sat in the market, opportunities, threats, etc. It was good conte...