PRODUCTHEAD: Increasing and diminishing influence

yes i product #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

---

tl;dr

The art of influence is the highest-leverage skill remaining for product leaders

AI agents require the same strategic clarity as humans do

Building fast necessitates more human selectivity and expert judgement

---

hello

Lenny’s newsletter and podcast have been all-in on AI for a while now, so listening to his recent interview with Jessica Fain was a refreshing change. In it, Jessica argues that as AI takes over technical execution, the art of influence becomes a product manager’s most valuable skill. She wants us to apply the same curiosity and empathy we have for users to the chaotic, time-poor, and continually shifting context of executive leaders.

Continuing the theme, Dave Martin puts a name to the slow erosion of influence that product leaders can experience. Regardless of high capability, a strong track record and a good strategic sense, product leaders find themselves gradually being heard and valued less and less. Dave calls this signal drift and offers suggestions for correcting things back onto course.

One approach Dave has in common with Jessica’s advice earlier is to start with the conclusion, then go deeper into the supporting evidence only if the audience needs it. This is sometimes referred to as Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF), sometimes as Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle (from her book of the same name)

Martin Eriksson builds on this by highlighting that influence must be grounded in strategic clarity, noting that AI agents require the exact same context – purpose, principles, and constraints – as human teams do in order to avoid creating an “automated mess” at machine speed.

To finish with, Jeff Gothelf explores how to quantify the increasingly vital role of human judgement, proposing a decision-making rubric that makes decision-making more transparent through an assessment of direct customer evidence and the trade-offs.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

---

---

what to think about this week

The art of influence: The single most important skill left that AI can’t replace

Jessica Fain is a product leader at Webflow and former Chief of Staff to the CPO at Slack, where she worked alongside April Underwood and many past podcast guests including Stewart Butterfield, Annie Pearl, Tamar Yehoshua, and Noah Weiss. She’s spent her career learning how executives actually make decisions—and why most people completely misunderstand the process.

[PODCAST] Treat your senior executives as if they’re your key users

[LENNY RACHITSKY & Jessica Fain / Lenny’s Podcast]

Why product leaders are losing influence

A VP Product I coached last year described the moment she knew something was wrong. “I walked into the steering committee with the clearest recommendation I’d ever made. I knew the data, I’d stress-tested the trade-offs, I had the right answer. And somehow, twenty minutes later, the CTO had restated a worse version of my point and the room was nodding along like he’d cracked it.”

When good work no longer speaks for itself

[Dave Martin / Mind the Product]

---

---

Whether You’re Organising Humans or AI Agents, Strategic Clarity is Essential

In my last post, I argued that as the cost of software approaches zero, strategy becomes the only durable advantage. But here’s what I didn’t fully explore: it’s not just your teams that need strategic clarity. It’s your AI agents too.

AI agents do not need more compute; they need strategic context and principles

[Martin Eriksson / The Decision Stack]

You Can Quantify Cost. Here Are Four Ways to Measure Judgment.

I was on stage in Helsinki earlier this week at ScanAgile 2026, giving a talk called “AI Made It Easy – Who Decides What’s Good?” It was the first time for this talk. It felt good to me – like the room was getting what I was proposing. I was in a good flow and closed strongly. Then we got to the Q&A and someone asked me a question I didn’t have a clean answer to.

The ultimate professional differentiator is expert, transparent decision-making

[Jeff Gothelf / Sense & Respond]

---

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]

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]

Navigating your product management career

Ross Webb and I have been chatting about product management career progression.

We cover topics including:

» Thinking of visibility as a strategic competency, not self-promotion

» Controlling your narrative through regular updates

» Building cross-organisational relationships deliberately

» Mapping your stakeholders’ preferred communication styles

A roundtable chat on moving into product leadership

[I Manage Products]

PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from an approaching reckoning for social media.