Product Management

I just finished The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury—a solid deep-dive into the history, psychology, and applicability of optimism. The social science is clear: overall, optimists tend to achieve better outcomes. Why? Because they act. Optimists move toward a positive vision of the future, and in doing so, often stumble upon unexpected opportunities. Pessimists, by contrast, lean toward fatalism and inaction — and the world rarely arranges itself in exactly the way they’d like, anyway. ...

As I dive deeper into poketto.me, I keep running into an increasingly tricky question: How much time should I spend exploring new features — and how much actually building them? Having worked as a Product Owner, Manager, and Director, envisioning exciting new features comes naturally. And with poketto.me, the possibilities seem endless: 🎧 Personalized podcasts 🗞️ AI-curated newsfeeds 📝 Automatic summaries 📬 Individualized daily digests 🖊️ Highlights, annotations, organization tools 🔍 Full-text search and even personal knowledge management (PKM) ...

Despite what the “God of Prompt” (sic!) or any other self-proclaimed “AI expert” is trying to tell you, none of the current AI models will replace a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar product strategy project. First of all, the people making these claims are, most likely, just trying to sell you their overpriced list of “magic” prompts — and hoping for endorsement from the big AI companies or a retweet from Elon Musk. But giving the AI tools the benefit of the doubt, I tried using Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude to iterate on a commercial strategy for poketto.me. The results were… disappointing. Here are the main issues: ...

Back in my corporate days, I didn’t always give feedback the attention it deserves. But building poketto.me as a solo endeavour has reminded me just how crucial it really is. Working alone has its perks: you can move fast, make bold decisions, and follow your own vision. But it also comes with pitfalls: ➡️ You get blindsided by your own past choices ➡️ You can waste time iterating on suboptimal ideas ➡️ You miss what’s obvious to others ...

When I started setting up the cloud infrastructure for poketto.me, I didn’t give much thought to costs. I thought it was such a small project that it just wouldn’t matter. I launched a #CloudSQL (MySQL) database with pretty much the default settings and was quite happy with it – until I checked the billing dashboard a couple of days later and realised that I was already spending almost €4 per day on the database alone. 120 euros per month just for a few MySQL tables? That couldn’t be right. ...