Start Here: A Field Guide to Mastering Product
Mastering Product is where I share what I have learned from 20+ years building, scaling, and leading product teams across companies like Booking.com, Eneco, Foodics, Tamatem, 7awi, and other startups. It is written for product people who want practical judgment, not just more theory.
My promise: if you read this newsletter, you will get field-tested product thinking you can use in roadmap reviews, discovery work, stakeholder conversations, AI product decisions, career moves, and leadership moments.
I will not pretend product management is a clean set of templates. It is a messy craft between customers, business models, technology, incentives, teams, and timing. Mastering Product exists to help you navigate that mess with more clarity.
If you are new here, don’t start with the latest post.
Start with the path that matches where you are right now.
If you’re a junior PM
Start with Product Management Basics Guide. - Make sure to scroll down to download the guide.
This is the foundation. If you are early in your PM journey, switching into product, or still trying to understand what great product managers actually do, this is the best entry point.
It covers the core responsibilities: understanding customers, defining problems, working with design and engineering, prioritizing, communicating clearly, and measuring whether the work mattered.
Read this before you get lost in advanced strategy, AI, or leadership content.
Fundamentals compound.
If you’re going senior
Read Product Management Interview Preparation Guide. Link to download the full guide towards the end of the linked page.
Going senior is not just about doing more work. It is about showing better judgment under ambiguity.
Senior PMs are expected to frame problems clearly, make trade-offs, influence without authority, and connect product decisions to business outcomes.
This guide is useful even if you are not actively interviewing. Strong interview preparation forces you to sharpen the stories, decisions, metrics, failures, and product instincts that define your career.
If you’re moving into AI products
Read The AI-Powered Discovery Sprint: How to Validate Product Ideas Before You Build. You can also check my Github for useful open source tools I am releasing.
AI makes it easier than ever to prototype, generate, summarize, and ship. That is useful - and dangerous.
The biggest risk in AI product work is not that teams cannot build something. It is that they build something impressive around a weak problem.
This post gives you a practical way to use AI to accelerate discovery without outsourcing judgment. Use it when your team is excited about an AI feature but has not yet proven the workflow is broken, valuable, and worth solving.
If you’re leading product orgs
Read The CPO Coaching Gap: Leading in the Era of AI-Accelerated Delivery.
AI is changing the speed of product delivery. Teams can now generate prototypes, PRDs, user stories, research summaries, and technical specs faster than ever.
But speed creates a new leadership problem:
Who is coaching the judgment behind all that output?
This post is for product leaders, heads of product, group PMs, and CPOs who need to raise the quality of thinking across the organization - not just increase the volume of artifacts.
If you want frameworks I actually used at Booking.com
The Revenue-Centric Product Strategy. is one example.
Some frameworks look great in a workshop and disappear the next day. The ones worth keeping help teams make better decisions repeatedly.
This post is about connecting product work to revenue, customer behavior, and measurable business impact.
It reflects a lesson I learned deeply at Booking.com: strong product teams do not just ship features; they understand the economic engine of the product and learn how to improve it.
Want to go deeper?
I am also building a free tools microsite for product managers:
https://tools.masteringproducthq.com/
Use it to explore practical templates, calculators, AI prompts, and frameworks you can apply immediately.
Mastering Product is not here to make product management sound easy.
It is here to help you get better at the real work.