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Deciding What's Worth Building
The product planning problem - and what comes next.
The Shift
The bottleneck moved - from the hands that build to the mind that decides. What comes next isn't management. It's steering.
By Michael Tor · March 2026
Read →Then → Now
Why AI PRDs Are an Expensive Trap
Generating 10x more documentation doesn't mean you are shipping 10x faster - it just means you are building the wrong things with absolute confidence.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Your Backlog is Just a List of Unmade Mistakes
When AI makes building cheap, a long backlog is just a list of expensive maintenance liabilities you haven't had the discipline to kill yet.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Stop Shipping Your Way Out of Thinking
When code is cheap to generate, high shipping velocity is no longer a sign of execution strength - it is a symptom of lazy upstream deciding.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Discovery is for Killing Ideas
When building becomes cheap, the real waste isn't the calendar time spent researching - it is the capital lost when teams use discovery to justify building instead of deciding what to kill.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →The 5-Week Spec Bottleneck
Writing the document was never the hard part - the calendar friction of alignment is what kills your momentum.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Stop Grooming Your Backlog
Backlog grooming is a performative ritual that hides a failure to make hard decisions upfront.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Before the Ticket: Where Alignment Actually Dies
Alignment is not a coordination problem you solve in your task tracker - it is a reasoning problem you must win before writing a single ticket.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Why Fast Shipping is Your Biggest Liability
When code is free, the most expensive mistake is executing a bad decision at terminal velocity.
By Michael Tor · July 2026
Read →Coming soon