Product Operating Model Series: Monitoring

Issue #237

Destare Foundation, Alex Dziewulska, Katarzyna Dahlke, and 3 others

Feb 17, 2026

∙ Paid

In today's edition, among other things:

💜 Editor’s Note: I lost someone recently. Not to death — to the job.
💜 Product Operating Model Series: Monitoring

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Grab a notebook 📰 and your favorite beverage 🍵☕.
DeStaRe Foundation

Editor’s Note by Alex 💜

I lost someone recently. Not to death — to the job.

Watched a product leader I respect dissolve into a role so completely that when the company restructured, there was nothing left underneath. No hobbies they hadn’t abandoned. No friendships they hadn’t neglected because “this quarter is critical.” No sense of self that existed outside a Slack status and a title on LinkedIn.

They didn’t get fired. They got promoted. And they still disappeared.

This isn’t an editorial about work-life balance. That phrase was invented by people who’ve never had to choose between a child’s school play and a stakeholder review. Balance implies equilibrium. What I’m talking about is survival.

Your job is how you make money. Full stop.

I know that stings. We’ve built an entire professional identity culture around the idea that work should be purpose, passion, community, legacy. Silicon Valley sold us the myth that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life — and then handed us unlimited PTO we’re too afraid to use and Slack channels that ping at midnight.

Product management is especially good at this particular trap. We sit at the intersection of everything. Business strategy, customer empathy, technical decisions, design thinking, stakeholder management. It’s intoxicating. It feels important because it touches everything. And touching everything makes it easy to convince yourself that without you, everything falls apart.

It doesn’t. I’ve managed teams of 90 people. I’ve watched entire departments restructure overnight. The machine keeps running. Sometimes it runs differently. Sometimes it runs better. The only thing that doesn’t recover easily is the person who gave everything to a system that will reorganize them into a different org chart by Tuesday.

Stakeholders will always be anxious. That’s the job description, not yours.

A VP who needs certainty about Q3 numbers will need certainty about Q4 numbers after that. The anxiety doesn’t end when you deliver the roadmap — it migrates to the next deliverable. You are not the solution to someone else’s structural anxiety. You are a professional doing professional work.

Clients will be hard. Colleagues will disappoint you. Someone will take credit for your thinking. Someone will undermine your research in a meeting because they didn’t read it. Someone will send a passive-aggressive email at 6:47 PM on a Friday knowing full well you’ll spend the weekend composing a response in your head.

I know this because I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been the person sending that email, convinced I was just being “direct.” I’ve been the person losing sleep over someone else’s insecurity dressed up as feedback.

Here’s what years on the job taught me that no framework ever will: other people’s behavior is almost never about you. The VP who killed your proposal is fighting their own fight three levels up. The colleague who didn’t show up for your launch is dealing with something you can’t see. The client who went cold has a board meeting next week and forgot you exist — not out of malice, but because their attention is a finite resource and you’re not the crisis today.

That’s not an excuse for bad behavior. It’s context. And context is what keeps you from absorbing other people’s chaos as your own.

Some days it’s hard not to take it personally.

I’d be dishonest if I said I don’t. The message that implies incompetence. The meeting where you’re talked over. The feedback that’s really just someone reasserting dominance. I feel it. I process it. Sometimes I process it loudly, in Polish, where the vocabulary for expressing frustration is richer than English could ever hope to match.

But I’ve noticed something after 46 years. Up to today, I have survived every single bad day. Every reorganization. Every political knife fight. Every project that failed despite my best work. Every boss who confused authority with intelligence. Every moment where I questioned whether I was good enough, smart enough, resilient enough.

The answer was always yes. Not because I’m exceptional — because that’s what humans do. We survive the day and wake up the next one.

The bad quarter ends. The difficult stakeholder moves to another company. The impossible deadline passes — met or not, it passes. The colleague who made your life miserable gets promoted sideways into irrelevance. The client who ghosted you comes back eighteen months later asking if you’re available.

Everything passes. Including the things that feel permanent at 2 AM when you’re drafting a response you’ll delete in the morning.

What doesn’t pass — what stays — is the damage you do to yourself while trying to prove you belong to a system that was never designed to care about you personally. Corporations optimize for outcomes, not for your wellbeing. That’s not cynicism. That’s architecture. Understanding the architecture is what keeps you from bleeding out trying to change it with your bare hands.

Christina Maslach’s burnout research identified something that matters here: burnout isn’t about working too hard. It’s about working hard on things that feel meaningless, in environments where you have no control, while getting insufficient recognition. The hours aren’t the problem. The emptiness is.

Which is why “work less” is useless advice. Work differently. Work on things where your contribution is visible to you, even if nobody else notices. Work with people who see you. And when the work doesn’t provide that — because sometimes it won’t — have something else.

Find your tribe.

Not your network. Your tribe. People who know what you look like when you’re not performing competence. People who remember your name isn’t followed by a job title.

It might be family — the people who watched you become whoever you became and still love the version you were before the career started. It might be friends who share a hobby that has nothing to do with product management, strategy, or shipping. It might be three people in a group chat who send each other stupid memes at midnight.

It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It matters that it exists. That somewhere in your life, there’s a space where you’re not optimizing for anything. Where being present is the entire point.

I have mine. Some of them don’t know what product management is. Some of them couldn’t care less about my newsletter numbers or client pipeline. They care about whether I’m eating. Whether I slept. Whether the cat is doing that funny thing again. That’s not small. That’s the foundation everything else stands on.

Take care of yourselves. The stakeholders will still be anxious on Monday. But you’ll be there. Like you always are. Like you always have been.

It will pass. You won’t.

Love, Alex 💜

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Learn a new discovery framework with our team

Free 4-hour workshop for the Product Art × DeStaRe community: Lean Inception

You’ve probably been there: ideas everywhere, backlog growing, stakeholders pushing… and the team still isn’t fully aligned on what problem we’re solving, for whom, and why now.

This workshop is a practical introduction to Lean Inception — a lightweight discovery framework that helps teams quickly build shared understanding, align on outcomes, and turn fuzzy directions into a clear, testable plan.

✅ Free | ⏱️ 4 hours | 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Small groups | 🎥 Recording | 📩 Weekly micro-lessons after the event

What we’ll cover

1) 1h theory: What is Lean Inception (and why it works)

We’ll walk through:

What Lean Inception is (and what it is not)

Where it fits in discovery (before delivery, before “solutions mode”)

How it reduces risk: alignment, assumptions, scope, priorities

How teams use it in real-life product work (especially in messy org setups)

2) 3h hands-on workshop: Lean Inception in small groups

You’ll work in a group and go through a Lean Inception flow in practice, step-by-step.
Expect:
structured facilitation
concrete artifacts (not “workshop theatre”)
discussions that lead to decisions
short iterations + visible progress

3) Microlearning after the event (weekly)

To help you actually keep using it (not just enjoy the session and forget):
short weekly micro-lessons (tips, prompts, tiny exercises)
“how to apply in your current product” angle
small nudges to build the habit

4) Recording

Can’t stay for the full session or want to revisit the framework later? You’ll get access to the recording (only for participants)

Who this workshop is for
This will work especially well if you are:
a Product Manager / Product Owner / Product Designer / Researcher / Agile specialist

leading discovery (or asked to) and you want a repeatable structure
tired of misalignment, “too many opinions,” and vague requirements
curious how to facilitate discovery with less chaos and more clarity

No prior Lean Inception experience needed.

What you’ll leave with (practical outcomes)

By the end you’ll have:
a clear understanding of the Lean Inception flow and its purpose
experience applying it (not just hearing about it)
a set of discovery outputs you can reuse in your work (problem framing, priorities, assumptions to test)
a better feel for how to facilitate alignment without overproducing artifacts

How to prepare (simple)
To get the most value:
join from a device where you can actively collaborate (laptop recommended)
bring a real product/topic if you want to apply it directly (optional)
be ready to speak up — small groups work best when everyone participates

Limited seats / small groups
We keep groups small to ensure everyone gets hands-on practice.

Bonus: templates + board
You’ll receive a ready-to-use Lean Inception board/template after the session
Bonus: 30-min optional Q&A / office hours
Quick follow-up session a week later to help people apply it to their context.

Meet other product folks, compare approaches, and learn how others run discovery in practice.
This is not a webinar — expect collaboration.
If you want a discovery framework that helps you align fast, reduce risk, and move from opinions to decisions, join us.

👉 Sign up to secure your spot (free for newsletter Product Art Subscribers).

Link: Click here!

AI in Product Work: Practical, Not Theater

Michał Reda is running another cohort of AI Product Empowered Practitioner™ in March—a 7-week program for product managers, owners, designers, and analysts who want to actually use AI in daily product work, not just talk about it.

This isn’t another mass AI bootcamp with 500 people watching slides.

Here’s what makes it different:

Real work, not theory: You work on one actual case study—an existing Polish market product with real and synthetic product data. The workshops are live, hands-on, in small groups (20-25 people). You leave with workflows you can implement the next day.

Actual tools, not demos: Full access to premium tools—ChatGPT Pro, Miro AI, PostHog, Loveable, Claude, and more. You work with them during the program, not watch someone else use them.

Flexibility: Each module offers two live workshop times—you choose when it fits your schedule.

Small cohort: Maximum 60 participants. Individual attention actually possible. No hiding in a crowd of hundreds.

Five focus areas: Discovery, delivery, analytics, and the practical AI workflows that connect them.

The first cohort in November 2025 hit product-market fit. Participants reported concrete value: understanding LLM mechanics, building domain context, specific implementations. Sebastian Jelonek: “Treats AI like a partner, massive time savings.” Łukasz Pawłowski: “Concrete tools for daily work, solid practical approach.” Łukasz Chomiuk: “Many super practical tasks, examples, AI tools I started using immediately.”

This is Level 1. Michał’s building Level 2 (AI Product Development Practitioner) for first half 2026 and Level 3 (AI Product Leader) for second half. He’s assembling a team of practitioner-trainers for the next stages.

If you want to work smarter with AI—not just attend another bootcamp where you watch someone talk about it—check the program details.

Registrations open now. Max 60 participants.

Program details and registration: https://productpro.pl/strona-glowna/ai-empowered-product-practitioner/

This is marathon work, not sprint hype. If you’re ready for practical skill development over seven weeks, this might be worth your time.

📝 Product Operating Model Series

Monitoring: Product Operating Model Principle #15

Quick Reference Guide

Core Definition

Monitoring (also known as observability) is the continuous, multi-level practice of detecting and responding to issues in your product — ideally before customers ever encounter a problem.

It is the natural companion to instrumentation (Principle 14): instrumentation embeds sensors; monitoring watches what those sensors report.