cases
harder than a textbook. real management situations without a right answer. post your take, read the critique.
When to kill a feature vs fix it — where do you draw the line?
Decide whether to kill, fix, or keep a low-usage feature that appears important to retained users.
Metrics are flat for 3 months. When do you pivot vs push through?
How do you handle stakeholders who want everything now?
A stakeholder says their request is P0. Show how you would test whether that is true without burning the relationship.
Should PMs learn to code, or is it a distraction from the actual job?
Should PMs create wireframes, or does it constrain the UX designer?
What metrics actually matter for consumer IoT products?
the data says ship — your gut says no
your a/b test wrapped with statistically significant results: the new checkout flow increased conversion by 4.2% on a 95% confidence interval. four weeks of cle…
Which viral loop to grow a community?
User flow for user registration by 3rd party
stakeholder approved the spec — now wants to reopen everything in week 6
you ran a two-week discovery process. you wrote the PRD. you got explicit sign-off from the head of sales and the head of customer success at the kickoff review…
user research says one thing — your biggest customer says another
you ran 12 discovery interviews. 10 of 12 users said the biggest friction in their workflow is the reporting step — it takes too long, they always need to re-ex…
your launch is in three days — qa found a bug in a non-critical path
qa found a bug in the bulk export feature. it corrupts CSV output when the dataset has more than 10,000 rows. the happy path (export under 10k rows) is clean. t…
New e-commerce platform — Wish
you inherited a roadmap you disagree with — leadership expects you to execute
you joined four months ago. the roadmap was set before you arrived, built on a bet that enterprise integrations drive retention. you've now done 15 discovery ca…
design and eng are deadlocked — you need to ship in two weeks
your designer and your engineering lead have been going in circles for three weeks. the designer wants to ship a reworked navigation that requires a significant…
Designers and product managers — similarities and differences
vp changed the OKR mid-quarter and your team is demoralized
it's week 7 of 13. your team shipped a meaningful activation feature last sprint, the kind that took four weeks of hard coordination between design, eng, and da…
your top engineer wants to leave — you found out via slack
a peer's DM lands at 11 PM: "heads up, priya's been talking to recruiters. got a linkedin message from her saying she's 'exploring options'. thought you should …
Gauging market potential without a customer survey
Authorize payment first — conversion benefits?