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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—

More than a decade ago I started falling asleep to podcasts. Politics, sports, the occasional interview show. I told myself I was winning — carving out time I didn’t have during the day. Somewhere between awake and asleep. Peak multitasking.

Back then the app stopped after the episode ended. I’d probably remember the first twenty minutes. The app has “evolved” since. It auto-plays now. It never stops. There’s someone talking in my ear while I sleep, every night. My wife eventually bought me a pair of sleep earbuds, designed for the side sleeper, so the arrangement would be more comfortable.

I’m still wearing them.

Picture the week the calendar finally clears.

An AI workflow cuts the team’s documentation cycle from a week to a day. A reorg settles the same week. For about ten days, the calendar looks like what it was always supposed to look like.

A leader I work with described the feeling like this: “Coming back from Yosemite. Like a fresh laptop with no files.”

I laughed. He didn’t, really. In those ten days he’d built two things he’d been thinking about for months. He’d had a conversation he’d been meaning to have for longer than he could remember. He’d noticed a subtle friction in how his team was moving — something he couldn’t name until suddenly he could — and acted on it before it hardened into a problem.

Then the meetings came back.

“I keep wondering,” he said, “if that ten days was the most useful thing I did all quarter.”

What We Put on the Calendar

Claude said music is the space between the notes. Debussy, that is — though I have a feeling that’s not the first Claude that comes to mind these days. The line has lived a hundred lives, but Debussy used it to describe something specific: the difference between music and just filling silence. He wasn’t talking about rests or pauses. He was talking about intention. What you don’t play shapes what you do. Emptiness, handled well, is its own kind of work.

I’ve been turning that idea over lately, applying it to something I see constantly in coaching: the belief that the most important work is the work on the calendar.

It isn’t.

In coaching, we tell clients this directly. The session, fifty minutes on a Tuesday, is not where the change happens. It’s where the conversation starts. The actual work comes after: the thing you notice on Wednesday that you wouldn’t have noticed Monday, the decision you make differently because a question is still rattling around in your head, the pattern you finally see in yourself after sitting with it for three days. I can always tell when a client is doing that work between sessions. They come back different. Not better prepared. Different. Something has moved.

The session is the note. The space between is the music. The plan anticipates. The between-time discovers.

Activity Is Not Learning

A different version of this shows up in coaching all the time. Someone arrives looking to leave a job that’s stopped teaching them anything, with the kind of energy that’s its own warning sign — wanting to do everything, immediately, in volume.

One leader I worked with sent me a status update between sessions I had to read twice. He’d built an AI-powered prep pipeline for his job search — research synthesized, briefs generated, learning modules assembled, agents running while he slept. By any conventional measure, an industrial operation. It was impressive.

I asked him what he’d learned from any of it.

He paused. Then he listed the artifacts again.

“Those are activities,” I said. “I’m asking what you learned.”

It took him a minute. He’d built something that could produce at scale, and the act of producing had become its own answer. The throughput felt like progress. The harder work the search actually requires was harder to see. The part where you sit with what you actually want, why this company and not that one, what kind of leader you want to become.

Now imagine someone training for a marathon. After every long run, they can tell you exactly what they’d do differently next time. Slower opening pace. Earlier electrolytes. Different shoes for the hills. They iterate the way runners iterate — small experiments, named adjustments, an answer that gets sharper each pass.

That’s learning. The job search version was just generating.

Human Beings, Not Human Doers

The pattern is everywhere. Podcasts on the commute. Voice notes between meetings. One leader I work with told me he listens to a podcast at his kid’s softball game, just to stay productive during the downtime — and when I asked what happened in the game, he had to think about it.

I recognized the move. I do my own version every night, with the earbuds in. And in the morning on the train, when I could be looking out the window. And on the walk to drop my kid at school, when she’s quiet and I could be too. The idle moment shows up and I fill it. Not because I’m choosing to — because filling it has become the default, the path of least resistance, the thing that happens before I notice I’m doing it.

We are human beings, not human doers. I say this to clients more than any other single line, and it lands differently every time. Sometimes as a laugh. Sometimes as something heavier.

Insight delivered in a session rarely does the work by itself. The integration happens after — in the shower, on a walk, in the quiet before sleep when something clicks. It just requires space.

Most of us aren’t leaving any.

What AI Is Quietly Surfacing

The situation has changed, and I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with it.

AI is very good at producing artifacts. Roadmaps, strategies, specs, summaries — outputs that used to require hours of focused work can now be generated in minutes. For a lot of leaders, this is landing as relief. Less time in the document, more time for the work.

My podcast app did this first, on a smaller scale. It used to stop. Now it doesn’t. Nobody asked me whether I wanted more — the natural stopping point just disappeared.

I’m not sure the space is opening up the way we think it is.

When it costs almost nothing to produce a roadmap, you produce more roadmaps. When the artifact is cheap, the instinct is to fill the recovered time with more artifacts. More plans, more structured output, more things that feel like progress because they exist and can be shared.

I asked the same leader what he did with the other four days.

“I built a better template for the next documentation cycle,” he said.

The space didn’t open. He just filled it differently.

This is a second-order effect. AI isn’t automatically buying us more between-time. It’s handing us more capacity that our instincts immediately convert back into output. If the problem is that we mistake the artifact for the work, making artifacts cheaper doesn’t solve the problem. It accelerates it.

What AI Can’t Do

A founder I coach was acquired recently by one of those wildly popular, fast-growing AI-native companies. He told me how they define a PM’s job — the whole job, not the listed responsibilities. Can this person pitch an idea that gets the entire company excited? That’s it. If the idea is compelling enough, prioritization and scoping get solved by motivated people. The PM’s job isn’t to manage the artifacts. It’s to generate the conviction that makes them move.

When AI can produce the deck and the spec and the summary of the summary, what’s left is the thing AI can’t generate: the conviction that comes from someone having sat with a problem long enough to know it cold.

I asked another client recently how he makes big decisions. He thought about it and described a process I keep coming back to. It starts as a feeling, he said. Sometimes a kind of low-grade unease, sometimes excitement. It builds for weeks. Occasionally it shows up in dreams. From that signal, eventually, a direction emerges — clear enough that he can name it. Then come the questions. The research. The probing conversations. The slow accumulation of certainty. By the time he commits, he isn’t deciding. He’s recognizing.

That’s the shape of conviction. It starts in the body. It takes time. It can’t be skipped. AI can compress every step that comes after the recognition — research, drafts, options, frameworks. But it can’t compress the part where you have to sit with the unease long enough to know what it’s telling you. That’s the irreducible part. That’s the part that lives in the between.

AI can produce the deck and prototype. It cannot produce the person who can stand up and defend it.

What to Do Instead

A warning, though. Reflection isn’t always pleasant. When you stop filling the gap, the gap is where the discomfort has been hiding. Naming what’s missing tends to make the frustration worse before it makes it better. That’s progress. It’s also why the in-between is uncomfortable enough that we’ll happily fill it with another roadmap.

The way out isn’t a better roadmap. It’s a different question.

The one I ask most isn’t what happened? — that’s too easy to answer with reportage, with a list of meetings and tasks. It’s what changed? What’s different about how you’re seeing this compared to two weeks ago? That question surfaces work that was happening in the background. And it’s almost always where the most useful part of a session comes from. Not the prepared agenda. The thing that shifted in the between.

The Fresh Laptop

He came back a few weeks later and told me he’d started protecting the first hour of his Thursday mornings. Nothing on the calendar. No agenda. Just a cup of coffee and whatever he was actually thinking about.

“It feels indulgent,” he said.

“Does it feel useful?”

He thought about it. “More than most of my meetings.”

The space between doesn’t announce itself as important. It doesn’t produce a deliverable you can show someone. It doesn’t make the roadmap. It just quietly does most of the work.

Miles Davis could fill every silence. He had the chops for it. He chose not to, because he understood the silence was load-bearing. What you leave out shapes what you put in.

The space isn’t emptiness. It’s structure.

—
Note: Stories from coaching sessions are used with permission and identifying details have been changed.

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.

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—

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.

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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 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.

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—

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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