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worked examples — editorial cases that show what strong PM calls look like under real constraints.
air canada — the chatbot that made a promise the airline had to keep
featuredIn February 2024, a small-claims tribunal in British Columbia ruled that Air Canada was legally on the hook for a refund policy its chatbot invented. The dollar…
airbnb — rise of a unicorn
featuredHow a couch-share idea evolved into a global category — the leadership decisions that compounded.
deepseek — the week the ai capex story broke
featuredIn January 2025, a Chinese quant fund's side project erased $589B from Nvidia's market cap in a single trading day. The real story isn't that DeepSeek beat Open…
github copilot — the first real ai product, and what five years taught us
featuredCopilot is the most successful AI product launched to date. The lessons from its five-year arc are buried under a pile of marketing claims that the underlying r…
klarna — when ai customer support was half-right
featuredKlarna's February 2024 AI announcement was a masterclass in PR — two-thirds of chats handled, 700 agents' worth of work, $40M of projected profit, all in the fi…
linear — ai as a quiet utility, not a chat assistant
featuredWhile most B2B SaaS bolted a chatbot onto the corner of its product, Linear threaded AI into the surfaces where decisions already happen — the comment thread, t…
airasia — technology as the operating system for a low-cost airline
AirAsia's "Now Everyone Can Fly" strategy wasn't just marketing. It was backed by a deliberate IT infrastructure built from 2001 that made low-cost operations v…
amazon — data science as the core of an e-commerce product machine
Amazon's recommendation engine, anticipatory shipping, and dynamic pricing are not add-on features — they are the product. A case in data science as the primary…
anthropic — research lab to product company
How Anthropic built a consumer product around a foundation model they also own — the PM decisions when the model team and the product team share the same buildi…
apple ipod — reading a market gap and building a category
Apple didn't invent the MP3 player. It read the market correctly, made one decisive integration bet, and turned a crowded hardware category into a decade-long c…
blinder — designing for depth in a swipe-left market
Blinder was a dating app that tried to match people on personality and hobbies, not photos. Its UX didn't survive first contact with users — but the research pr…
box — the culture aaron levie built
How Box scaled from a consumer file-sharing startup to an enterprise content platform — and what the cultural decisions along the way tell leaders about the rel…
circa news — when a good idea can't find a business model
Circa launched in 2012 with a genuinely novel approach to digital news — atomic, object-oriented stories. It shut down in 2015. The idea was sound. The business…
classy delicates — from affiliate site to retail, and the metrics that follow
A business school professor bought an online lingerie affiliate site for $30K and turned it into a retail operation. Six weeks after relaunch, business was almo…
cursor — the ai code editor that competed with github
How a two-year-old startup wrapped an LLM API into a defensible coding product that challenged GitHub Copilot — and what the build/wrap decision looked like fro…
evolution of dropbox — eight years of execution choices
Dropbox's product history is a lesson in what happens when a simple, beloved consumer experience meets the pressure to become an enterprise company.
facebook — data, privacy, and the tension at the core of a social network
Facebook's business depends on knowing more about you than you'd consciously share. The product that generates this intelligence is the social graph itself. A c…
fedex — pioneering internet business in global logistics
FedEx launched its website in 1994 — before most companies knew what "e-commerce" meant. How the world's leading logistics company used internet technology to b…
food tech wars — india's competitive landscape, 2015-2017
After 150+ food-tech startups folded in 2016, the Indian market was still standing — and more crowded than ever. A case on reading a competitive landscape befor…
foursquare — the right bet at the wrong time
How Foursquare pioneered location-aware discovery, then spent a decade trying to find the business that matched the technology it had already built.
google — from search engine to value creation machine
Google started as a university project called Backrub. Its path from 1998 search engine to one of the five most valuable companies in the world is a study in ho…
google ads — when innovation is a profit model, not a feature
The AdWords auction didn't just monetize search — it redefined what "product innovation" means when the product is a marketplace between attention and intent.
harvey — vertical ai for a high-stakes profession
How Harvey built legal AI that large law firms actually trust — the eval design, auditability, workflow integration, and buyer trust decisions that vertical AI …
heckyl — building a news intelligence product for traders, out of mumbai
Four ex-Merrill Lynch executives built a financial data analytics platform in India in 2010 — before big data was a mainstream category. A case in data product …
how netflix took down blockbuster
Netflix didn't win on technology or selection — it won by rethinking the business model, and then again by abandoning the business model that had just worked.
instagram — the influencer economy and product portfolio at scale
Instagram's journey from photo-sharing app to a $100B+ advertising platform is inseparable from the rise of the influencer economy. A case in product portfolio …
linkedin live — launching a platform feature under trust constraints
LinkedIn's 700M professional user base wanted live video. The product team wanted engagement. Trust and safety stood between both. A case in feature launch with…
marks and spencer — icos and the integration of retail operations
M&S had a complaints backlog and order processing problems. Their solution was ICOS — an integrated ordering system that unified online, phone, and in-store pur…
notion ai — adding intelligence without breaking trust
How Notion introduced AI writing assistance into a product where people store their most important thinking — and the onboarding, opt-in design, and data handli…
paypal — data science as the foundation of a financial trust product
PayPal processes hundreds of billions in payments annually. The product that makes this possible is invisible to most users — a real-time fraud detection engine…
perplexity — search rewritten as conversation
How Perplexity replaced a link list with a generated answer, and what the citation discipline, hallucination handling, and monetisation decisions looked like fr…
pets.com — the original right idea, wrong decade
Pets.com had a real product insight and real demand — it simply tried to build a 2010 business in 1999, with 1999 infrastructure and 2010's cost structure.
pricing strategy for swiggy — decisions inside a marketplace
How India's leading food-delivery platform navigated the pricing tension between platform take rate, restaurant margins, and consumer affordability — and what i…
replit agent — what multi-step orchestration looks like when it ships
In 2024 Replit shipped a multi-step agentic coding system that could plan, execute sub-tasks, handle failures mid-sequence, and stop itself before doing irrever…
sharechat — from whatsapp content tool to india's vernacular social platform
ShareChat started in 2015 as a way to find shareable content for WhatsApp. By 2021, Google was reportedly in talks to acquire it for $1.03 billion. The path bet…
specialty metals inc — measuring the value of a b2b website
When a small US metals distributor launched a website in 2008 with no shopping cart, measuring its value was genuinely hard. A case in B2B website KPIs and the …
starbucks — building community at scale through social media
Starbucks had 17,000 stores in 49 countries and prices higher than the market average. Social media was how they turned a commodity product into a cultural iden…
tata steel — the corus acquisition and what $12 billion buys
Tata Steel paid $12.15 billion for Corus in 2007, jumping from the 56th to the 6th largest steel producer in the world overnight. A case in M&A strategy, integr…
thieve.co — go-to-market under real constraints
How a small team launched a product into a competitive discovery market using organic channels and community trust rather than paid acquisition — and what a sen…
ticket sales inc — entering a market with entrenched competitors
TSI had seed funding, a smart bulk-purchase model, and a gap in the Broadway theatre ticket market. A case in applying product lifecycle thinking and SDLC metho…
topdox — metrics at series a, and why the wrong ones kill you
Topdox built a genuinely useful document collaboration platform out of Lisbon. It raised €1M, had real users, and shut down in 2015. The question it couldn't an…
twitter verification — when product design conflates two different jobs
Twitter's blue checkmark was meant to authenticate identity. It became a celebrity perk. When both meanings collided in 2017, the product team had no coherent a…
urban company — rebuilding trust after covid disrupted home services
Urban Company survived COVID but emerged into a world where users' expectations had fundamentally shifted. Safety was no longer a differentiator — it was table …
vedantu — defining the product at an inflection point
When Vedantu raised its Series A in 2017, the hardest question wasn't how to scale — it was what, exactly, the product was. A case in product portfolio clarity …