Michael Kronthal

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.

You should be researching your users more. So I got an expert to give me a masterclass in how to do it with AI: Step 0: Load Context Into Claude - 8:22 Step 1: Per-Participant Analysis - 16:12 Step 2: Verification - 26:06 Step 3: Auditing AI - 51:31

I fell down a Reddit thread about PM storytelling and honestly the advice was better than most PM books. Here's what stood out: 1. Storytelling isn't a soft skill, it's an efficiency metric. You'll know it's working when meetings get shorter, fewer people argue past each other, and decisions happen faster. If that's not happening, your story isn't working regardless of how compelling it sounds. 2. I used to bury the decision in slide 10. Then I tried opening with "This meeting is to decide X" and suddenly people stopped asking "wait, what are we deciding?" 3. I started tracking where people interrupt me. When it happens at the same moment across different audiences, that's usually a structural problem in my narrative (basically A/B testing for stories), not just difficult people. 4. You're not trying to entertain people, you're trying to get them to remember what you said. Are they repeating your framing back to you? If they're using different words to describe the problem, you haven't told the story well enough. If they're quoting you verbatim, you've created a shared mental model. 5. The book StoryBrand is mentioned, but it is missing something critical for PMs: "what's in it for me?" for internal stakeholders. The framework works for customer-facing stories but doesn't address org-political dynamics. Engineering needs to know resourcing impact, sales needs customer benefit proof, execs need financial outcomes. 6. Specific customers work better than aggregate stats. "Sarah from enterprise account X spends 3 hours every Monday doing this manually" lands harder than "many users struggle with this." Nobody asks if one person is representative. 7. I set a timer before meetings and try to say the entire pitch in 60 seconds. If I can't finish, my narrative is too complex. 8. What reads well doesn't equal what sounds good. I read my deck script out loud before meetings now. You catch awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, and unclear logic that looked fine written down. 9. Storytelling quality might be an org design problem, not a skills problem. If poor storytelling creates drag (repeated meetings, misalignment, wasted resources), why does your org allow low-quality narratives to reach exec reviews? Elite companies might have forcing functions that prevent bad stories from consuming bandwidth. 10. The runway metaphor for capability sizing: frame customers as planes (Cessna to A380), frame your product as a runway. "We're trying to land enterprise A380s but our billing system runway can only handle a regional jet." Everyone immediately visualizes big plane on small runway = crash. 11. Before/after framing helps. What's broken today, what changes if we ship this. Makes complex product changes easier to grasp. 12. If people aren't repeating your framing weeks later, your story didn't stick. The real buy-in metric is whether your metaphor becomes shorthand in planning meetings without you being there. 13. The "charisma trap" is real. Most orgs claim to value substance over style, but meeting culture rewards performance. Amazon's 6-page memo culture explicitly removes charisma as a variable by forcing written narratives. 14. Bad storytelling might just be bad strategy in disguise. If you can't explain the stakes in one sentence, maybe the stakes aren't clear. Storytelling struggle is often thinking struggle. No amount of narrative polish fixes directional uncertainty. 15. I write down what each stakeholder actually gets from this. What does the eng lead get? What does sales get? What does the exec get? If I can't answer these, I'm probably pitching product value without the org-political piece.

Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding.

The main problem with the “talk to customers” mantra in *top tier companies* is that the vast majority of your people who talk to customers are going into customer conversations for confirmation & performative heroics and not for learning & insight. So, they will cherrypick customer feedback, not actually listen to everything the customer is saying, follow certain threads for confirmation and ignore others that might point to disconfirmation, and then present their “findings” in a sexy & neat package that’s irresistible to the CEO & execs. There is no great solution to this problem, because most people, including >80% of highly intelligent people (in any company), are just wired to seek confirmation & validation. They are not wired with the desire to win in the market (even though everyone is sure they are). Now, if you must have a mantra to motivate & guide the masses in your company, make your mantra to “understand customers” rather than “talk to customers”. Talking is easy, understanding is rare. ‘Understanding’ is a much higher bar than ‘talking’, and that is precisely the kind of high bar a top-tier company must meet. And the best solution is leading from the top by yourself embodying what understanding customers truly means and holding an extremely high bar for insight that’s presented to you as the leader. As you nod along and confirm to yourself ‘I am already doing this’, consider that perhaps you aren’t, because if you were truly doing this in proportion to your ambition for your team & company, many more of your recent features and products would’ve won than has been the case. So perhaps the best place for you to start, as a leader, is to seriously consider how you yourself are falling short of the ideal that you wish for others on your team.

One of the things that seems like a huge distraction but has helped give me a pulse on the X userbase: I sit down with 2-5 users per day and go over their timeline and how they use X. And I try to do it with the most diverse set of users: moms, heads of state, scientists, artists, crypto traders. There is nothing more important than hearing people ask: • Why am I seeing this? • Why does this work that way? It’s normal for things to not work, but you need to have answers to these questions. Every decision an app developer makes has to be extremely intentional—or else who are you building for.