PRODUCTHEAD: Forever problems and earning your keep

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every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Understanding cultural lenses is a must when working across geographical teams

Financially viable products must earn back multiple times their ongoing costs

AI may help to solve (or exacerbate) long-standing operating problems

With digital transformation largely ‘done’ in UK public sector, the next challenge is coherence

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hello

In PRODUCTHEAD this week, Amna Khattak dives into the human complexity of global stakeholder management, demonstrating how cultural lenses help PMs decode silent disagreements and move from simply explaining a roadmap to achieving genuine alignment.

In an excerpt from his new book Money Stories, Rich Mironov provides a rule of thumb for product economics, explaining that to truly earn its keep, a product must generate significantly more revenue than the team costs to build, maintain and support it.

John Cutler investigates the “forever problems” of product development – such as cognitive load and data quality – and examines how AI might finally offer a way to escape their orbit, or conversely, risk scaling our confusion.

Finally, Scott Colfer argues that digital transformation in the UK’s public sector is largely complete, leaving leaders to navigate a landscape where the challenge is now to achieve strategic coherence in the midst of competing ways of working.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

How to Speak Fluent Stakeholder (In 5 Different Accents)

Master the dialects of silence, hesitation, and ‘sounds good’—and discover what your stakeholders are really saying across cultures and time zones.

Navigate the invisible cultural layers

[Amna Khattak / Product People]

Earning Our Keep

As CPOs or product leaders, we often have conversations with CEOs about Return On Investment (ROI). These come in two wildly different contexts, though, with completely different context and rules of engagement.

6 dollars in revenue for every dollar spent

[Rich Mironov / Product Bytes]

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10 Forever Problems (And how AI might change the game)

I’ve been obsessed lately with the idea of “forever problems.” These are the problems you were just as likely to hear about ten years ago as you are today. When you go hunting for problems, you tend to find the forever ones and can easily become fixated on solving them. Forever problems are like a muse that pulls product developers and founders in. Most never fully escape their orbit.

AI lets us revisit enduring organisational hurdles

[John Cutler / LinkedIn]

After Digital

The last two decades had a clear “Digital” ambition: Use technology to reduce manual work; Improve services and experiences through good design; Build more capability in-house; Shift from static systems to learning ones. Today, that Digital ambition has been largely fulfilled in many organisations (albeit unevenly, and painfully at times).

Leadership is now about finding coherence

[Scott Colfer / Product In Service]

recent posts

Canary in the mine: AAA game developers are unionising

Product management has had its own fair share of problems over the last few years. Nevertheless, there are early warning signs from AAA game studios that there may be another storm brewing in tech for us to weather.

Union-busting just isn’t a good look

[I Manage Products]

Startup to Scale-up Club Q&A – 13th Jan 2026

I joined Anton Kooll again, along with co-panellists Maarten Ectors, Mario Tomic and Eugenio Galioto for Startup to Scale-up Club. We covered topics including:

• recommendations for automated infrastructure monitoring;
• safe presentation of medical data in Femtech apps;
• trade-offs of cloud versus local AI deployment for agricultural technology;
• the risk of patronising, gender-based marketing in Fintech; and
• the value of building a trustworthy community over superficial personalisation.

“Do’s” and “don’ts” for startup founders

[I Manage Products]

Are developers vibe coding themselves out of a job?

And is the increasing reliance by junior developers on AI coding assistants storing up a generational skills shortage for the future – ‘professional debt’, if you will?

So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me

[I Manage Products]

PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from falling down the stairs.