Felix Watson Jr.

One of the least acknowledged parts of product work is how much emotional labor it requires. We like to talk about product as if it’s mostly analytical. Frameworks. Roadmaps. Metrics. Decisions. But a huge portion of the job lives somewhere else. Product work is sitting in ambiguity longer than most roles. It’s absorbing uncertainty without spreading panic. It’s managing expectations that were never written down. It’s translating between groups who are using the same words but meaning different things. A lot of the work looks like this: Holding tension when priorities conflict. Saying “not yet” without eroding trust. Letting people feel heard without promising what can’t happen. Taking responsibility for outcomes you don’t fully control. Staying calm when everyone else wants certainty. None of that shows up on a roadmap. But it determines whether the roadmap works. Here’s the lens I use to manage this without burning out: • Name the tension explicitly instead of carrying it silently • Separate understanding from agreement so people feel heard without false promises • Write down decisions and tradeoffs to reduce emotional rework • Slow the conversation before speeding the execution • Treat clarity as a form of care, not overhead When emotional labor is handled well, it’s invisible. Things just feel calmer. Decisions feel clearer. Progress feels steadier. When it’s missing, everything feels harder than it should. Product work isn’t just about building things. It’s about holding complexity so others don’t have to. #productmanagement #workculture #leadership #emotionalintelligence #productthinking #decisionmaking

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"Because engineers had been through brainstorming and story mapping, they were able to identify the most promising direction and find a way to implement one key piece of it pretty quickly." Want to get your engineers more involved in continuous discovery? Learn how Ellen Juhlin, Senior Director of Product Management at Orion Labs, successfully brought engineers into the discovery process. Key takeaways from Ellen's experience: 🎯 Start by inviting engineers to customer interviews as listeners and note-takers 💡 Include engineers in brainstorming and solution mapping sessions 🗺️ Use assumption mapping to help engineers focus on validating ideas 🔄 Don't worry about following a linear process - iteration is key 🎯 Begin with just one or two engineers rather than the whole team 🤝 Keep engineers connected to business outcomes Check out the comments for a link to the article. ❓ What's one small step you've taken to include engineers in discovery work? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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rqlite -- and the way I develop it -- is fundamentally changing. LLMs are in the loop -- from ideation to Pull Request. https://lnkd.in/ejwXGddR

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🚀Hi all - I’m launching a newsletter (Reflections by TK) for builders and leaders in tech. I've spent over a decade operating at the intersection of product, engineering, and business. This newsletter is my attempt to slow down, reflect out loud, and synthesize my learnings on building, scaling, and leading in complex environments—with the hope it helps others in navigating their own path with more clarity and confidence. It is also an attempt to finally shape my writing dream. ✍️ The first post is about a tension many of us wrestle with: How do you scale good judgment without replacing it with undue process? In large organizations, we rely on frameworks and processes to scale good judgment and reduce risk of poor decision-making. But somewhere along the way, it’s easy to forget that these are just tools, not truths. We start optimizing for metrics instead of solving real problems, and following checklists instead of thinking from first principles. The best leaders know when to follow the lines, and when to redraw them. In this piece, I share: 🔹 Why process is necessary 🔹 How it starts to break 🔹 When to override it 🔹 How to build a culture of first principles thinking 📖 Would love for you to give it a read and let me know what resonates. How have you balanced the need for process with critical thinking in your teams? #productleadership #techstrategy #firstprinciples #decisionmaking #leadership #reflectionsbytk

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Shipping LLM-powered assistants at scale is like building a plane while flying it. Outputs are probabilistic, behavior emerges from the system, and success depends on aligning humans, processes, and leadership around uncertainty. This post shares lessons from the frontline: what changes when probabilistic systems meet deterministic organizations and how teams can learn safely while moving fast.

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Execution capacity used to scale with headcount. Throw more people at the problem, get more done. That math has changed. A small team with strong AI orchestration skills will outpace a large team without them. Every time. The new constraint is finding the right people. That's the bottleneck now.

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