Anna interviews the product, engineering and design leaders behind software people love, and turns each conversation into decisions you can reuse. Plus a twice-weekly news digest and ten awards for product craft.
Spotlight = long-form interviews with product leaders · News = the week's signal for product teams · Awards = The Lab Ring, ten awards for product craft.
Hover or tap a black facet on the shape, or a button above, to see the concept it carries.
What this shape means: One body that morphs through the life of a product: lumpy in discovery (full of unknowns), a squared-off block in delivery (scoped and shippable), a rising spire in growth (value that compounds). Drag to rotate. Slide to change stage.
Hover or tap a black facet on the shape, or a button above, to see the concept it carries.
What this shape means: A cloud of random points, the week's noise, resolves into one clean waveform: the few stories that matter for product people. That is the News desk's job. Drag to rotate. Slide to change stage.
Curated and compressed. Every link goes to the original source, every number was checked.
Mind the Product defines the Forward Deployed PM: employed by a vendor, embedded in a customer's organisation, paired with a Forward Deployed Engineer. The pattern traces to Palantir around 2010. The pull is AI: value appears only once a model is wired into a customer's data, workflows and people.
The CRA covers hardware and software products with digital elements sold in the EU. Full obligations apply from December 2027, but the first reporting requirements began in September 2026. Products must meet 13 requirements, including secure defaults, being updatable when a flaw is found, and letting customers delete or move their data.
Andy Peatling argues the product-centric view, where every task must route through your app, has an expiry date once agents work across all of a person's tools. A person-centric product opens its capabilities to any agent and still brings its UI components, expertise, data moat and follow-through.
Season 1 interviews are being recorded now. Each one is split into context, decision, trade-off and lesson.
Hover or tap a black facet on the shape, or a button above, to see the concept it carries.
What this shape means: One white beam goes in, a spectrum comes out. Spotlight works the same way: one conversation with a product leader, split into the parts you can learn from. Drag to rotate. Slide to change stage.
Hover or tap a black facet on the shape, or a button above, to see the concept it carries.
What this shape means: Raw ore is cut into a gem and set inside the Lab Ring. Each facet is one thing the jury judges, and only a product with every facet cut wins. Drag to rotate. Slide to change stage.
No entry fees and no badges for sale. Anyone can nominate a product or a team; nobody can nominate themselves.
“Most advanced, yet acceptable.” Great products are a familiar shape pushed one step past comfort.
Hekkert, Snelders & van Wieringen, British Journal of Psychology, 2003. The idea ProductLab is built on.