Want to be a great PM? You’ve got to love LACE
Product Management is an oft-cited but ill-defined discipline: with splintering across niches (Growth, Scale, B2B/B2C, Platform, App, E-Commerce, AI, Technical, etc.) and a proliferation of next-gen product leaders with PM degrees and boot camp certificates, the practice is more fragmented than ever as it continues to grow in spite of larger tech/market contractions. Vibe coding and the democratization of tech tools have also changed how PMs operate and with whom they partner... but foundational Product Management skills scale no matter the tech stack: in the time of Claude Code, who is leading if not the PMs, and how do they lead in a way that both motivates fellow humans while prioritizing their individual skills/contributions?
I’ve honed my Product Sense through typical trials and tribulations: yelled at by executive (check), mocked until proven right (check), scaled effectively in spite of adversity (check), learned a lot along the way (~4.6 million checks). I view digital products as the human interface to outcomes: if we build X and they do Y, does it achieve Z? I also use behavioral economics to inform my decision-making and human-centered design: people respond to incentives, BehavEcon 101. With all that in mind, here is my totally unasked for .00000027 bitcoins (~.02USD at time of writing) on the core role of PMs in a high-ambiguity, high-complexity world. In honor of Women’s History Month and as a nod to a personal hero, my framework takes its name in part from the mother of computer programming and predictor of AI: Ada Lovelace.
Want to be a great PM? You’ve gotta love LACE: Lead, Align, Communicate, Execute
Lead
Decide: in high-ambiguity, high-complexity spaces, decisions are the most critical currency PMs can offer. Decisions aren’t always right: we don’t know what we don’t know and will never have perfect data. But we can and must start somewhere, with clear decisions that are well-reasoned and explained for the audience of partners/stakeholders/etc. Your job is to make bets, not wait for competitors/customers/leaders to show you exactly what to do with no risk and perfect clarity.
Delegate: Being too in the weeds about implementation or development concerns is no better than being too in the weeds about UX interaction patterns or micro-managing Sales calls: optimal Product Managers focus their time and attention where and when it’s needed while cultivating trust and partnerships across the broader team. Empowering UX, Engineering, and Sales/CSMs/PS/Support to work best means knowing when to delegate or when to decide. Our job is to remove barriers, not be experts at all things.
Prioritize: Creating clear prioritization and sequencing of work is the essential PM activity. We have to balance user needs with technical tradeoffs, maintenance vs creation, driving value faster than fast. No other team is in a position to prioritize for the product like a PM: clear goals and milestones help to build confidence within the team and across the business, with or without specific date/quarter commitments.
Proactivity & Accountability: PMs are juggling multiple chainsaws at any given time; it’s not a role for the faint of heart. But we also are here to lead, which means a high degree of proactivity and accountability: the buck stops with us. Engineering missed something? Your fault. UX didn’t deliver the UI you needed? Still your fault. Because your shoulders are strong enough to bear the burden and someone needs to for everyone to succeed. As far as your partners are concerned, it’s probably your fault anyway. Best to lean in and ensure your team has the air cover they need to feel safe; without it, innovation dies one risky or complex backlog item at a time. Mistakes are bound to happen, the blame game is not.
Align
Navigate ambiguity: There are precious few Right answers in high-complexity, high-ambiguity technology landscapes. Every decision comes with a cost and a series of unintended consequences, but doing nothing does nothing. Navigating ambiguity by creating clarity is a core PM activity – what questions do we still need to answer? How can we get those answers? How important is it to get those answers? International enterprises and small startups all fall victim to stagnation if PMs/leaders can’t navigate ambiguity. We have to start somewhere to get anywhere. Identify the risks, the known unknowns, and create safety for the team to start somewhere. Plant a flag so others can respond to it. Be willing to be wrong.
Build a coalition: Once you plant the flag, you need others to see it for it to matter. Sharing the goals, the unknowns, hypotheses, etc. is how we build trust and iterate effectively. Even if it’s early, even if it's half baked, your idea needs a coalition in order to align when the right answer isn’t obvious or easy.
Create connections: As a PM, you’re often privy to conversations/information that your team is not. You also stumble onto new data and insights all the time: a tech partner’s press release, a new piece of feedback from a customer, a Linkedin post that changes your mind, etc. Making connections and sharing insight helps gain alignment in ambiguity: the more your partners/team can see with your eyes, the more effective they can be in delivering the vision. The why matters immensely, even if no one asks for it out loud. Help the team see what you see.
Communicate
Early and often: In a world where being perfect matters less than being transparent, communicate early and often. Share the roadmap, share the open questions. Show the warts. Your team and partners need to know how you’re thinking even when it’s premature. Products are made better by constant pressure-testing of ideas. Waiting for perfect means putting pressure on partners later and prevents real collaboration: people thrive on autonomy in working towards a clear goal; the path to clarity doesn’t need to be fully paved for partners to benefit from being told where we think we’re going. Training, Product Marketing, Sales/PS/CSMs, Support, etc. are all made better by early and often transparent communication. Your partners don’t need perfect, they need partnership.
Intentional messaging: Creating artifacts to effectively communicate means being intentional with messaging. Roadmaps are points in time, not blood pacts. Say that when you share it vs not sharing it at all. Including Support, Sales/PS/CSMs and other non-UX/Eng functions strengthens the product by pressure-testing the communications before they go to customers. Think about what your audience needs to know and package the content for their purposes, on their terms. Effective communication depends on us meeting people where they are: we can’t expect them to voluntarily add effort to their busy days on our behalf. Do we want them to expect that of us? Make understanding you easier than ignoring you.
Inclusion by default: We work in a fast-paced global environment where not everyone has the same context, language skills, cultural touchstones, etc. Creating written content (slides, confluence, etc.) is a critical step for inclusion as conversations can be hard for people to follow and our job is to make it easy if we can. We’re also busy humans with limited capacity for memory: writing things down helps everyone stay aligned. Even if a quick call is easier than documenting, with the age of AI there’s no reason not to have an artifact of the conversation somewhere for reference. This is especially important for long, collaborative conversations: nobody wants to admit they’re falling behind or missing context. Don’t make them.
Praise is free: it costs literally nothing to make your team and partners feel heard and appreciated. Acknowledge and praise their expertise; it takes a village to build great products. Acknowledge and praise their criticisms; no product can scale without them. It seems small but expressing authentic appreciation for other people is critical in building strong teams/partnerships/etc. There are no prizes for displacing other disciplines or perspectives. Diversity is not just a word on the wall.
Execute
Commitment > control: if you’ve built trust and a culture of empowerment on your team, the last step is showing you lead with commitment over control. Let the team make key choices and back them: nobody learns if the PM owns implementation and treats Engineering partners like a feature factory, or if UX/UXR get left out of the conversation entirely. Your team should know you have their back and are committed to their success as much as the product’s success. Humans need to feel safe in the group; we don’t breed safety by shortcutting trust and empowerment.
Set a high bar: whether the bar is moving quickly, releasing frequently, or building something net-new, set a high bar. Your partners and customers won’t trust you and your team if they think your standards are low. Even when you’re making a conscious trade off like Okay vs Great, explain the decision. Is it a temporary measure to get feedback quickly, or are we okay with this type of bug because it’s a corner case? What is a corner case? How do we assess risk and mitigate it in order to call it a corner case in the first place?
Lead by example: being responsive to your partners and team is the single biggest predictor of execution success in the long run in my experience. If PMs don’t prioritize answering questions or making decisions, the team will always have that as an excuse. Culture comes from the top: high-performing teams don’t come from reactivity or settling for less. Your customers deserve responsiveness and your colleagues need it to thrive.
Ruthlessly prioritize your own time: being intentional about how you spend your time is critical. Don’t just go to every meeting, don’t jump to every shiny new thing. Be intentional. Setting your team up for success means choosing them and scale over every ask that comes your way. Define which balls are rubber (will bounce) and which are glass (will break). Sometimes, we do need to lean in on technical decisions or UI considerations; prioritizing when that’s needed vs assuming it always is will free up time for everyone.
You now have a framework and the thinking behind it: LACE. Lead, Align, Communicate, Execute. That’s what I believe it takes to be an optimal PM in 2026.
