I built my career on grit and strategy. But the biggest breakthroughs came when joy was in the room, and my team actually enjoyed the climb. Early in my leadership journey, I championed 3 principles: That third one? I’d completely lost sight of it. This weekend, reconnecting with old friends […]
Andrea Michalek
41 posts
If your team can’t think strategically without you, that is not a compliment. It is a warning sign. This is the essence of what I call The Context Keeper Trap, one of the most common ways capable product leaders unintentionally limit their impact. On the surface, it looks like leadership: you […]
Autopilot doesn’t look like failure. It looks like plateaued growth, endless meetings, and a calendar so full of escalations you can’t remember the last time you shaped the market instead of reacting to it. You’re not broken.You’re not failing.You’re not even underperforming. You’re hitting quarterly targets.Your team respects you.Stakeholders know […]
Beyond Incremental: The Journey Revealed A Behind-the-Scenes Look at 12 Weeks of Writing in Public For the past 12 weeks, you’ve been receiving newsletters about leadership breakthroughs, scaling yourself, and creating category-defining impact. Last week, I mentioned I was writing a book. Today, I want to show you what we’ve […]
You don’t win by building a better product than the competition. You win by creating a space where competition doesn’t exist. That’s category creation: not improving what’s already there, but building the market around a problem only you can solve. Most product leaders aren’t doing this.They’re professional optimizers. Making things […]
Most senior product leaders are one promotion away from losing the passion that made them successful. In over 100 leadership coaching sessions, I’ve seen the same shift: more meetings, less making. Here’s how to break that cycle. When I was a first-time founder learning about venture capital, I dove into […]
Ever feel like you’re doing great work but still not getting noticed? You’re not alone, and the fix isn’t a new title. It’s something deeper. I once had a mentee who wanted a promotion and a bigger team. I asked why. What about his current role wasn’t satisfying? Was it […]
Most product leaders think their job is to have answers. It’s not. Your real job is to ask better questions: the kind that unlock ideas your team hasn’t thought of yet. You’ll hear some version of ‘test your ideas’ from entrepreneurs, scientists, and product leaders alike. It can come in […]
The most valuable asset I’ve built in my career? Not a product. Not IP. Not revenue. It’s a network of people who still want to work with me again. Years ago, I posted that I want to create an environment where I’d be proud to have my family come to […]
Why some teams ship game-changing features in six weeks while others stall for six months. I’ve been obsessing over a question lately: Why do some teams move impossibly fast while others grind through endless cycles? I’ve worked with teams at every stage: early startups, high-growth scaleups, and mature product orgs. […]