executive vs product-thinker

Topic: A personal year-end reckoning with a difficult year
Axis varied: voice
A: Executive B: Product Thinker

What to notice

Both examples address the same topic and (by default) share every axis other than voice. The only deliberate variable is which voice the writing was rendered through. Read both and ask: where does the framing change? Where does the vocabulary change? What does the reader take away from A that they would not take away from B, and vice versa? The voice swap is the entire cause of those differences.

A: executive

The year delivered two significant failures, and I am not going to describe them as growth opportunities. A project I had staked twelve months of effort on closed without the outcome I had bet on. A relationship that had been genuinely important to me changed in ways I did not choose. I am writing this to account for both clearly, not to resolve them into a more comfortable story.

The project failure was in significant part mine. I had seen signals of drift early and chosen to hold position rather than adapt. That decision was explicit. I owned it in the room and I defended it when it was questioned. It was wrong. Looking back, I was optimizing for the outcome I wanted rather than the one the situation was actually offering, and I held that position well past the point where the evidence supported it.

The relationship is harder to account for. Marcus and I built something that mattered, and then we did not. What I know is that we communicated well when things were stable and poorly when the stakes were highest. The gap between what I said and what I meant grew until it cost us more to close than we could agree to pay. I do not have a clean read on how much of that was circumstances and how much was accumulated failure on both sides. I am not pretending to.

What I am choosing to carry forward: a shorter timeline for naming a problem before it compounds, and a genuine skepticism of positions I find myself defending primarily because I invested in them. The next question I am actually sitting with is what I am prioritizing now - not as recovery, but as a real recalibration of what I am willing to bet on.

I do not know yet whether I am getting that right. That is the honest signal.

B: product-thinker

The problem I was solving last year was not the one I named at the start. That gap is where most of the year went.

The project - call it Meridian - was supposed to help a small team of independent researchers coordinate their work without drowning in a ticket tracker nobody updated and a chat tool that buried decisions under reaction emojis. The job to be done was clear: “I want to know what’s happening without attending every meeting.” We had alignment on the problem. What I got wrong was the user.

I had built for the researcher I interviewed three years ago, not the one who existed now. The friction I was solving had shifted, and I had not gone back to check my assumptions. When the pilot ended without adoption, I wanted to explain it as a resourcing problem, a timing problem. The post-mortem I avoided until months later was plainer: I had shipped a solution to a problem the current user no longer had.

That reckoning coincided with a harder one. A friendship with someone I had worked alongside for seven years changed in ways neither of us chose well. What I want to say is that I handled it gracefully. What is true is that I framed every conversation as a product problem - here is the friction, here is the fix - when the job she was trying to do was not to resolve a process gap but to feel heard without a solution following right behind.

Both failures share a shape. I led with what before I understood why. I had answers before I confirmed the question.

What I am choosing to carry forward is not a lesson about resilience. It is a question I have started asking at the beginning rather than after the fact: whose problem is this, and am I still talking to the right version of the person who has it?