Five great reads for 5/28/2025

Mastering feedback, embracing product creation, leveraging pricing, ensuring observability, and vibecoding your GTM.

What Real Feedback Sounds Like (Claire Lew) Effective leadership hinges on the courage to deliver clear, direct feedback, yet many managers falter, opting for diluted messages or avoidance. This piece offers concrete scripts for addressing common challenging situations, such as an underperforming team member or a "brilliant jerk," emphasizing that clarity, while sometimes uncomfortable, is kinder than ambiguity. The core takeaway is that real feedback isn't about harshness but about respectful, unambiguous communication that helps individuals understand their impact and areas for growth; a second crucial point is the necessity of "emotional courage" to initiate these vital conversations. By providing actionable language, the article empowers leaders to foster a culture where honest, constructive dialogue is the norm, ultimately leading to stronger teams and better outcomes. (link)

The Era of the Product Creator (Marty Cagan) The product management landscape is evolving, ushering in "The Era of the Product Creator" where the emphasis shifts to individuals actively shaping products and solving genuine customer problems. This article highlights that the role of a product creator isn't confined to a title but defined by a proactive involvement in product discovery and a commitment to tackling product risks, especially with the rise of generative AI empowering more team members. A key strategic insight is the increasing value of "high-agency" product managers who drive innovation, rather than simply manage backlogs. Furthermore, the piece suggests that this era will see a clearer distinction between those who truly create and those who perform more administrative product tasks, welcoming all who aspire to build impactful solutions. (link)

What if pricing was your best feature? (Amit Godbole) Could your pricing model be more than just a number, perhaps even your product's most compelling attribute? This article challenges product teams to treat pricing strategy as a core feature, capable of significantly impacting user acquisition and perception, much like Spotify transformed its offering through its pricing. The primary takeaway is that thoughtful pricing can alleviate major friction points in the customer journey and should be integrated into the product experience, not just tacked on. A second insight is that by reframing pricing discussions and experiments as "pricing features," teams can unlock new avenues for innovation and value delivery, making the cost feel like a seamless and fair part of the overall product value proposition. (link)

Your product can't see itself. (Mike Watson) Many product teams fly blind after launch, lacking the instrumentation to see how features truly perform or where users struggle, as illustrated by a new checkout flow that doubled support tickets due to unmonitored errors. The article argues for making observability a foundational part of product planning, not an afterthought, by asking "What would we need to measure to validate our hypothesis?" before design even begins. A key tactical takeaway is to start small by picking a critical user journey, creating a "learning map" with the tech lead to define success and failure signals, and setting up a focused dashboard. This approach transforms instrumentation from overhead into an essential tool for understanding, enabling teams to make data-driven decisions and build institutional knowledge about actual user behavior. (link)

You should play with vibecoding for GTM (Alex Shartsis) Go-to-market strategies are being revolutionized by "vibecoding" tools (like Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Replit) that empower even non-technical folks to build significant GTM leverage quickly. This article demystifies AI coding, showing how it differs from simple automation by enabling the creation of actual web products, prototypes, and lead magnets from scratch, often in hours. The primary strategic takeaway is that GTM leaders no longer need to be solely reliant on engineering teams; they can now rapidly develop tools like ROI calculators or conference scraping scripts to directly impact lead generation and sales conversations. A practical insight is to start with a specific pain point, provide clear context and instructions to AI coding agents, and iterate quickly to build valuable assets like interactive landing pages or feature prototypes, unlocking previously unattainable speed and efficiency. (link)