Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

I was making a vinaigrette last Tuesday when my four-year-old asked if she could help. I handed her the whisk and she went at it. Aggressive, cheerful, completely wrong. Oil everywhere, mustard on the counter, vinegar pooling near the edge. I started to correct her technique, then stopped. She wasn’t learning to make vinaigrette. She was learning what happens when you combine things.

What separates a feature that works from a feature that feels right? That magical product taste. Every hiring manager says they want it but nobody can quite define it in a job description. We talk about it like it's a personality trait, something you either have or don't. I think that's wrong. It's an output.

We say it’s the human quality that AI can’t replicate, the last moat. Maybe. But if taste is an output, the models will get better at it too. Which is exactly why it’s worth understanding what the inputs actually are.

I’ve been building products and teams for twenty years and to this day, I always use some variation of the same question when interviewing candidates. I want to find out if they’re a product curmudgeon and an internal optimist for making things better. I look for taste. “Tell me about the worst product you’ve ever used.” “Tell me about the best product.” “How would you make it better? What would you do first?”

The stratification of answers unearths taste in short order. So what are the inputs? I think there are three.

Curiosity

You can’t develop taste in isolation. You need to use a lot of products, and not just the ones in your category or the well-known ones. You need to use bad products, too. Especially bad products.

When I was a UX designer at Google in the early days, I was using probably thirty or forty different web products a week. Not all of them were research. Most of it was just living on the internet. I remember Rdio, the music streaming app that died in 2015. It was better than Spotify in almost every way that mattered to me: the typography, the social features, the way it handled queuing. It lost anyway. But using it taught me something about the difference between a product that’s correct and a product that someone loved making. You could feel the care. I still think about Rdio’s album grid when I’m reviewing designs.

That volume built something. I started recognizing patterns before I could name them. I’d open a new tool and know within ten seconds whether the person who built it had thought carefully about the first three minutes of use. I couldn’t always tell you why. It was a feeling, like recognizing a chord change in a song even if you can’t name the key.

Volume of contact builds the library your intuition draws from. If your library is small, your intuition is shallow.

But curiosity isn’t just breadth. It’s also depth. At Betterment, I used our own product to manage my actual money. Not a test account. Real deposits, real transfers, real anxiety when the market dropped. When it’s your money, you notice the three-second delay on the portfolio page differently. That kind of friction doesn’t show up in any funnel chart. You have to live inside the product long enough to feel it.

I also signed up for every major competitor with real money and gave my entire team access to the accounts. Wealthfront, Wealthsimple, SoFi, all of them. I wanted everyone to feel what it was like to be a customer somewhere else, to notice where we were better and where we were embarrassingly behind. It was useful. It was madness come tax season.

The people whose taste goes stale are the ones who stop being curious. They found their aesthetic and their framework and their opinions, and they stopped looking. They coast on pattern recognition built years ago, and slowly, without noticing, their instincts fall behind. Curiosity is the engine. Without it, everything else decays.

But noticing what’s good isn’t the same as knowing how to make something good.

Craft

Almost everyone I know who has great product taste also makes things outside of product work. They cook, play music, build furniture, write. The specific discipline doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’ve experienced the gap between what they imagined and what they made, over and over, and they’ve learned to close it.

I enrolled in the bread course at the International Culinary Center a few years ago. COVID cancelled it before I ever walked in. But I’d already gone deep into baking on my own, and the obsession taught me something about product that no sprint retrospective ever did. In bread, you can’t fake it. The dough tells you immediately whether you paid attention during bulk fermentation. There’s no A/B test for a baguette. There’s just the crumb, and you know whether it’s right.

That sense of knowing-whether-it’s-right carries over. Once you’ve calibrated your senses in one domain, you start expecting the same level of care in others. You walk into an app and you can feel whether someone shaped it with attention or just shipped what compiled.

Katie Dill, Stripe’s head of design, put it well: things that are more beautiful increase trust. You see the painstaking detail, and it gives you assurance that they care about other details you can’t see. She’s describing what taste produces. But the thing that produces it is someone who knows what care feels like because they’ve practiced it somewhere.

Conviction

Having taste requires having a point of view. You have to be willing to say “this is bad” and “this is good” and “here’s why,” out loud, on the record, before you know how the thing performs. Taste without conviction is just observation.

But conviction alone is dangerous. I’ve watched brilliant leaders hold onto opinions long past the point where the evidence turned against them, because the opinion had become part of their identity. The fix isn’t less conviction. It’s a feedback loop. Annie Duke talks about this: making your implicit judgments explicit so you can find out when they’re wrong. Your intuition is sometimes right. But if you never surface it, you never learn when it isn’t.

Let’s call her Marta. She was a product director I coached last year. Incredibly smart, strong opinions about everything. Her team loved her conviction until they didn’t. It wasn’t that she was wrong more than anyone else. She just never tracked when she was wrong, so she never updated. I suggested she start a decision log. Nothing elaborate, just a note every time she made a product call: what she decided, why, what she expected to happen. Every quarter, she’d review it. Three months in, she started catching her own blind spots. Her opinions didn’t get weaker. They got more accurate.

Conviction also means knowing what to remove. At Etsy, I was known for killing features. It became a Friday ritual. Most of the time nobody noticed, and what was left got better. Shopify has something called the Delete Code Club where they regularly find a million-plus lines of code to cut. That’s not cost-cutting. That’s curation.

Aparna Chennapragada, Microsoft’s CPO, made this point recently: in a world where AI makes the supply of ideas and prototypes an order of magnitude higher, the editing function is what matters most. When everyone can generate, the value shifts to the person who knows what to keep and what to kill.

Before the World Ends

If taste is learnable, then it’s also teachable. Look, maybe the models do get good enough at taste that half of this becomes moot. In the meantime, here’s what I’d do right now, whether you’re trying to sharpen your own or raise the bar for your team.

Tinker. This is the most important one. Not efficiency. Not “AI adoption.” Actual unstructured exploration where 80% of what you try fails. If you’re a leader you have to create space for your team to do this — and you need to do it too. The first two months might feel like a loss. That’s how it’s supposed to feel.

Use something new every week. Not a demo. Actually use it. Sign up, put real data in, hit the edges. Write down what you notice. Your intuition library only grows when you feed it.

Make something with your hands. Cook a meal from scratch. Build a shelf. Write something that isn’t a PRD. The point isn’t the output. It’s training yourself to feel the gap between what you intended and what you made.

Start a decision log. Every product call you make, write down what you decided and why. Review it quarterly. You’ll be shocked how quickly your blind spots reveal themselves.

Kill something. Look at your product, your roadmap, your backlog. Find the thing that’s technically fine but not actually good. Remove it. See if anyone notices. They probably won’t.

My daughter eventually got the vinaigrette mixed. It was lumpy and oversalted, and she insisted on tasting it straight from the bowl with a spoon. She made a face, thought about it, and said, “More honey.”

She was right.

You just have to keep combining things and noticing what happens when you do.

Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

Join my referral program and earn 1:1 coaching sessions by sharing Frank Takeaways with others - start with just three referrals.
—

A coaching client asked me a question last week:

“What are your thoughts on the emerging ‘full stack builder’ PM model — what do you think about it and what does it mean for product leadership?”

I started typing a response and then stopped. Deleted it. Started again. The question sounds simple but it’s actually three questions tangled together: Is this real? Is it new? And what should leaders do about it?

I’ve been turning it over for days. Here’s where I’ve landed.

The Skeptic's Take

My first instinct was skepticism. I've been in product long enough to see trends come and go. Every few years, someone announces a new model for what PMs should be. T-shaped PMs. Technical PMs. Growth PMs. Now full-stack builder PMs.

So I asked myself: is this actually different from what strong PMs have always been?

Not entirely.

When I hire PMs, I've always looked for one or two hard execution skills. Product management is a leadership discipline, and the best leaders flex to the needs of their team. The deeper skills you have, the more ways you can flex. Former engineers who can debug. Former designers who can mock up solutions. Former analysts who can dig into metrics.

The "full stack builder" is just another station. Useful? Sure. Revolutionary? I'm not convinced.

But Something Is Different

Here's where I have to check my own skepticism.

The tools have changed. Meaningfully. Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, Replit. These aren't incremental improvements. A PM can now go from idea to working prototype in an afternoon. Not a mockup. Not a spec. Working code that users can touch.

I know because I'm doing it. After my kids go to sleep, I ship real features to real products. Small SaaS tools I've built. Recipe apps. Practice management software. Not prototypes. Production code. A few years ago this would have required hiring engineers or learning to code properly. Now I can build things I couldn't have built before.

That's not nothing.

Asha Sharma put it well on Lenny's podcast recently: "It's all about the loop, not the lane." The old model was lanes. Design stays in their lane, engineering in theirs, PM in theirs. Work moves linearly through the system. The full stack builder collapses that. You own the whole loop: idea to build to user feedback to iteration. No handoffs. No tickets. No waiting for the next sprint.

When the loop gets tighter, learning gets faster. And learning is the whole point of shipping in the first place.

So yes, something is different. The cost of building has dropped. The speed of iteration has increased. More people can participate in the build cycle than ever before.

But I keep coming back to a question: does faster building actually make better products?

The College Town Theory

There's this thing that happens in college towns. The commerce district turns over constantly. New restaurants open, old ones close. The names change. The decor changes. The menus change.

But somehow it's still a lot of bars.

The surface changes, but the underlying structure stays the same. Students want cheap drinks and late nights. The market demands what the market demands.

Product management feels similar to me right now.

The tools are new. The speed is new. The "full stack builder" framing is new. But the underlying job hasn't changed. You're still trying to figure out what problem to solve. You're still trying to design a solution that works. You're still trying to ship something that creates value for users and for the business. You're still trying to learn from what happens and do it better next time.

The loop is faster. But it's the same loop.

This matters because I see people confusing speed with progress. A PM who can ship twelve features in a quarter feels productive. But if none of those features moved the needle, what was the point? You can iterate yourself in circles.

The hard part of product management was never the building. It was knowing what to build. That hasn't changed.

What Leaders Actually Need

The question was about product leadership, so let me try to answer that directly.

If you're leading a PM team right now, here's what I'd focus on:

Hire for judgment, not just execution. Yes, it's great if your PMs can prototype. But prototyping is a skill you can teach in weeks. Judgment takes years. The ability to look at a problem and know which parts matter. The ability to make a call with incomplete information. The ability to recognize a bad idea before it's built. These are the hard things, and they're the same hard things they've always been.

I still interview for hard skills. I still want PMs who can do things beyond the core PM toolkit. But I'm more interested in how they think than what they can build. Show me a candidate who can ship a prototype in an afternoon but can't articulate why that's the right problem to solve, and I'm worried. Show me a candidate who asks uncomfortable questions about whether we should build something at all, and I'm interested.

Close the learning loop. Here's where I see full stack builders get into trouble: they ship, then immediately ship again. The build cycle is so fast that they skip the learning part. They iterate without reflecting. They optimize without questioning.

Shipping is the best way to learn. It always has been. But only if you actually learn. That means talking to users after you ship. It means asking "what did we expect to happen and what actually happened." It means having someone challenge your interpretation of the results, not just your spec before you built it.

The friction shouldn't come before the build. It should come after. Build fast, ship fast, then slow down long enough to understand what you learned. Then build again.

Teach the strategy work explicitly. Vision, strategy, roadmap. These don't emerge automatically from shipping fast. They require a different kind of thinking. Zooming out instead of zooming in. Asking "why this and not that" instead of "how do I build this." If your PMs are heads-down in execution all the time, when are they developing this muscle?

I've started asking my coaching clients a simple question: what did you learn from the last thing you shipped? Not what did you build. What did you learn. Half the time they can't answer. They've already moved on to the next thing. The strategy muscle atrophies if you don't use it, and execution can feel like progress even when you're just spinning.

Model the curiosity. The best product leaders I know are tinkering with these tools themselves. Not because they need to ship code, but because they need to understand what's possible. You can't lead a team through a shift you don't understand firsthand. You don't need to become a full stack builder yourself. But you do need to know what your team can now do that they couldn't do before.

The Question I'm Still Sitting With

Here's where I landed. The full stack builder trend is real, but it's more evolution than revolution. The tools have changed. The speed has changed. But the core discipline hasn't.

Product leadership is still about solving the right problems. Still about building teams that can execute with judgment. Still about creating clarity in ambiguity. None of which are solved by knowing how to code.

The risk isn't that PMs are building too fast. Speed is a gift. The risk is that they're shipping without learning. Iterating without reflecting. Moving on to the next thing before they've understood the last thing.

But here's the question I keep coming back to: How do we develop judgment and taste when the loop is this fast? The answer, I think, is that you develop it through the loop, not before it. You build, you ship, you learn, you get challenged on what you learned, and then you build again. The reps compound. But only if you're actually closing the loop.

The names change. The tools change. The discourse changes.

But at the end of the day, you're still trying to solve someone else's problem. That part hasn't changed. And if you lose sight of it, all the building speed in the world won't help you.

Still a lot of bars.

Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

I watch a lot of sports. Grew up playing them. They were always on in my house, a backdrop to every holiday, different teams and vintages discussed like distant relatives. Sports is drama — there is no script — and it changes year to year.

So does the scorebug.

A scorebug is the graphic overlay on a broadcast that displays the score, the clock, the teams. It seems simple, but someone designs it. Someone decides what information matters most in this moment. During the Olympics, scorebugs feature flags — nationality is the story. This year’s NFL broadcasts prominently feature team mascots over names — identity a…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

The yellow school bus pulled up to the farm at 11:23 AM. I know because I’d been checking my watch. My daughter’s first field trip, and the bus was running late — over an hour behind schedule. We’d have just enough time before loading back up.

A little over an hour later, as we loaded back onto the bus, I asked her what her favorite part was so far.

“The bus ride!” she said, bouncing as we walked back.

Not the chickens, pigs, or goats she’d fed. The bus. The same yellow bus that smelled faintly of diesel and had seats that bounced too hard over every bump.

I started to feel that familiar parental impulse to redi…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

Join my referral program and earn 1:1 coaching sessions by sharing Frank Takeaways with others - start with just three referrals.
—

I had the dream again last night. I’m standing in front of a panel of three people with notepads. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving. They’re asking me questions about a project I shipped six months ago, and I’m answering them, one by one, trying to prove I thought it through. Why did you prioritize that feature? What about this edge case? Did you consider the alternative approach? My answers sound reasonable in my head, but when they come out of my mouth, they feel thin. I can see it in their faces — I’m not convincing them. I wake up with my heart racing, sheets twisted, that familiar tightness in…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

The woman on stage was talking about hermit crabs when I heard something that made me sit up:

"I would actually agitate them more. Today I'm the ocean, and today the ocean is dirty and mean!"

I'd never have been at this Pop-Up Magazine show if my former manager hadn't insisted. I was half-listening to Mary Akers explain how she'd accidentally become the world's most successful hermit crab breeder when that word — agitate — hit me like a wave.

That's when I understood what I'd been doing wrong as a leader for years.

After writing about where to position yourself (The Proximity Trap) and why to persist (The Good S…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

My sister and I would pass them around the backseat like sacred scrolls. Those spiral-bound AAA TripTiks, with their narrow strips of highlighted highway and hand-circled rest stops. This was 1990s, and we were driving from Maryland to Disney World. No GPS. No smartphones. Just these custom-made guidebooks that showed you one thing: how to get from here to there, with just enough detail to make the journey interesting.

The binding cracked when you folded back each page. In the margins, the AAA agent had written cryptic notes in blue ballpoint: "Good BBQ here" or "Clean restrooms" or "Skip - tourist trap." Eac…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Memorial Day flips the calendar to summer and reminds every product leader that Q2 is already half-gone. Roadmaps are red-lined, OKRs rewritten, and somewhere between backlog-grooming and booking this summer’s Airbnbs you’re wondering how a big bet promised in January will stay fresh until December.

Last Saturday, I was the human pack-mule: bike trailer full of kids, picnic gear over one shoulder, SPF 50 wedged under my chin, and my phone chirping its 10% battery warning. Did I pack the portable charger? A gust of wind sends both kids scattering, leaving me corralling toddlers instead of checking supplies. Fi…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

Join my referral program and earn 1:1 coaching sessions by sharing Frank Takeaways with others - start with just three referrals.
—

You're at an izakaya restaurant in Manhattan, staring down at the overly complicated tablet ordering system. Dozens of dishes, countless modifications, nested menus that lead to more menus. You're hungry, overwhelmed, and increasingly annoyed. You just want dinner, not a design puzzle.

When you finally need help, you discover that even requesting human assistance requires navigating to a sub-menu where you literally add "server" to your cart and select quantity. "Just give me the next step," you mutter, before flagging down an actual human, relieved to bypass the digital absurdity.

That night stuck with you be…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

Join my referral program and earn 1:1 coaching sessions by sharing Frank Takeaways with others - start with just three referrals.
—

Among product circles — especially the self-anointed Twitter/X PM Elites — there's a quiet hierarchy: "pure" PMs, guardians of taste and user empathy, look down on those who get close to Sales, rolling their eyes at "feature factories" and "customer requests." To them, working with Sales means compromising vision — building what sells rather than what's "right."

This isn't just arrogant; it's lazy. Because craft without adoption isn't craft — it's just theory. Ignoring feedback from Sales doesn't protect quality — it avoids the messy reality of shipping products people genuinely want. When I was designer at G…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Note: This one's a bit more personal. Less takeaway, more reflection. Felt right to share it anyway.

A year ago this month, I left Slack.

I left for all the reasons I knew I eventually would, reasons clear to me even before I joined. It happened a little sooner than I expected, but the timing felt right despite the uncertainty ahead. I learned. I grew. I worked alongside some of the smartest, kindest people I've ever known. It was a career highlight in a very fortunate, very lucky run.

And still, I found myself longing for a third vision quest in eight years — with short stints between each.

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Remember that feeling of senioritis? That sweet spot after exams but before graduation. The weight's lifted. You're looser, bolder. Like you could probably dunk or at least convince yourself to try.

In the working world, there's a version of this too: when you've announced you're leaving but haven't left yet. The air feels different. Colleagues knock on your door to talk. You have some of the best conversations of your tenure. The vibes are good.

But not every ending is a celebration.

The more senior you get, the more you realize: most roles don't end with a standing ovation. They end with a quiet shift of atte…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

I recently caught up with a friend, reminiscing about a past PM job and the day we got pulled into a conference room. It’s hard to remember the details — the meeting was anything but specific or uncommon. Someone had scheduled a “PM sync.” No agenda. No objective. Just a vague sense we should “connect.”

We were all reasonably experienced, knowing what we were doing and, at the same time, still figuring it out. Some of us ran businesses. Some of us ran platforms. Some focused primarily on the consumer experience in-between. The wildest part? Not one of us could tell you why we were there or what we were meant…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Fifteen minutes into a recent coaching session, a product lead at a Series A startup leaned forward and lowered her voice:

"Everything feels off. Am I crazy?"

She wasn't crazy. She'd just seen — or maybe better said, felt — greatness before. And now she was feeling its absence without quite knowing how to name it. This is the strange terrain you enter after experiencing higher standards. Nothing's broken — it's just that the contrast is gone.

More than a decade ago, Joe Kraus wrote a piece that I keep revisiting. The title said it all: "If You Don't Think You Need It, You Haven't Seen Greatness."

His point was…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

The first time I wrote code, it wasn't for a computer — it was for a calculator. It was my introduction to the endless debate about technology and human potential. Stop me if this sounds familiar.

I still remember my AP Calculus (hold your applause) teacher allowing us to bring one index card with notes to tests. "Can we write on both sides?" Penmanship had never been more important. Little did I know that those index cards were just the beginning.

Soon our teacher allowed an even more powerful test companion: the crowning ed-tech device of the 1990s — the graphing calculator. The TI-82 was standard, the TI-…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

The crowd at DC's 9:30 Club was drenched in sweat, voices hoarse from singing on a cold Sunday night in early 2005, where a light snow had fallen outside.

Arcade Fire had just played the final notes of "Rebellion (Lies)." The roadies moved toward the stage, but nobody else moved. Instead, the stomping began: first from the back, then rippling forward until the entire venue pulsed with a collective demand: more.

This wasn’t just any concert. It was Arcade Fire’s only show at the legendary 9:30 Club, just months after the release of Funeral. They were on the verge of blowing up. Next time they’d play in DC, it w…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Bad managers turn simple requests into bureaucratic nightmares, hoard information, and vanish from meetings only to resurface when credit is due. They dismiss thoughtful proposals with "Let's take this offline" and make inexplicable decisions that leave you questioning your sanity.

Bad management is like the weather — unpredictable, sometimes disastrous, and mostly out of your control. Some managers rain chaos. Others bring the heat but no direction. And every now and then, you get one who's a perfect climate for growth. But don't be an orchid: the professional who can only thrive under ideal conditions.

The A…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

For most of my life, I thought writing was for other people: the ones who read voraciously and who kept journals. After all, I spent much of my early career as a designer who thought in sketches and systems, not sentences. But leadership changed that. I struggled to translate my thinking into writing until AI gave me the bridge I didn't know I needed.

As an undergrad at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business (Goooo Dawgs, sic 'em!), I never had to write long papers. Class was all about case studies, group projects, and presentations so I never built the habit of writing to wrestle with complex …

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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—

Some of the most important work you'll ever do won't be recognized in your tenure. In fact, its full impact might not be realized until long after you've left. What if the progress you fight for today is only fully realized by people you'll never meet?

"We can do better than 91 percent, but 91 percent is not a failure. It's progress," Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said. "And government is about the increments by which you move toward goals you desire."

If you've worked with me for any length of time, chances are you've heard me say it. At least once, probably multiple times. I don’t need much — just the smal…

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Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.

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Every company eventually turns to job ladders as their organizational salvation. It's tech's favorite band-aid — whipped out the moment growth slows, anxiety rises, or structure feels needed.

In my years leading product teams and now as a coach, I've watched this pattern repeat endlessly. Yes, you'll eventually need job ladders — they serve a purpose. But first, we need to understand why we reach for them so quickly, and what we're really trying to solve.

Jockeying for Position

When employees ask for job ladders, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Think about it: when was the last time you or your reports asked fo…

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