The Death of Junior PMs: How AI Is Creating a Product Management Aristocracy | The Evidence-Based Approach: How to Research B2B Personas That Actually Work

Issue #224

In today's edition, among other things:

💜 Editor’s Note - The Death of Junior PMs: How AI Is Creating a Product Management Aristocracy (by

Alex Dziewulska

)

💜 The Evidence-Based Approach: How to Research B2B Personas That Actually Work (by

Alex Dziewulska

)

💪 Interesting opportunities to work in product management

🍪 Product Bites - small portions of product knowledge

🔥 MLA week#32

Join Premium to get access to all content.

It will take you almost an hour to read this issue. Lots of content (or meat)! (For vegans - lots of tofu!).

Grab a notebook 📰 and your favorite beverage 🍵☕.

DeStaRe Foundation

Editor’s Note by Alex 💜

The Death of Junior PMs: How AI Is Creating a Product Management Aristocracy

Here’s the crisis nobody’s talking about: While product leaders burn out at record rates and complain about talent shortages, they’re systematically destroying the only pipeline that can solve both problems.

Forty-one percent of companies plans using AI to cut headcount. Entry-level product manager roles—those foundational positions where future CPOs learn to navigate ambiguity, build stakeholder trust, and develop product intuition—are vanishing. And product leaders, facing their own crushing workloads and 92% burnout rates, are making a Faustian bargain: trade junior roles for AI automation today, inherit a leadership crisis tomorrow.

This isn’t efficiency. It’s organizational suicide with a 5-year fuse.

Picture the product management profession in 2030. A small elite cohort—those who secured junior roles before the great contraction—dominate leadership positions. They possess the pattern recognition, political instincts, and hard-won wisdom that only comes from years of deliberate practice. Below them: a locked-out generation who never got that first break, now permanently disadvantaged in a profession that demands experience nobody will let them gain.

We’re not just failing to hire junior PMs. We’re creating a hereditary aristocracy where access to product leadership becomes a function of timing rather than talent.

The data already shows this stratification accelerating. Over the first quarter of 2025, 14% of S&P 500 CEOs exited their positions—the highest turnover in decades. Nearly 44% of replacements came from outside organizations, signaling catastrophic erosion of internal readiness. Meanwhile, 77% of organizations report experiencing leadership gaps, and 80% of CEOs see skill shortages as direct threats to their companies.

The cause? Companies eliminated the “middle layers” that traditionally developed leaders—the very roles that gave future executives experience with complexity, board governance, and crisis management. Sound familiar? Product management is speed-running the same playbook, and the crash at the end of this road is entirely predictable.

Let me explain the psychological trap that’s ensnaring even brilliant product leaders. Daniel Kahneman’s research on loss aversion reveals we weigh potential losses 2.25 times more heavily than equivalent gains. Faced with budget pressure and immediate workload crisis, your System 1 thinking screams: “Cut the unproven juniors, keep the productive seniors, use AI for the grunt work.”

It feels rational. It satisfies your board’s demand for efficiency. It solves today’s problem.

But behavioral economics research shows we catastrophically discount future costs when making present-day decisions. This present bias—our tendency to heavily weight immediate payoffs over future consequences—explains why leaders who intellectually understand they’re destroying their pipeline still can’t stop themselves from making the cuts.

Here’s the mechanism: You’re facing a 25% burnout rate among your existing PMs right now. That’s an immediate, visible crisis. The leadership shortage in 2029? That’s abstract, distant, easy to rationalize away. Your amygdala activates more when focusing on immediate threats than on future opportunities, systematically hijacking your strategic thinking.

Research from Ellen Langer on the illusion of control adds another layer: Simply gaining power leads to feeling personally in control over outcomes beyond your reach. Product leaders genuinely believe AI can compensate for eliminating junior roles because the act of making that decision creates false confidence in the outcome.

Let’s talk about what expertise actually requires. Anders Ericsson’s decades of research on skill acquisition demolished the romantic notion that talent explains performance. His findings are unambiguous: expertise emerges from approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice—structured activity explicitly focused on improving performance with immediate feedback and refinement.

But here’s what matters for product management: deliberate practice can’t be compressed, simulated, or shortcut. It requires making real decisions with real consequences, receiving feedback from real stakeholders and customers, and developing the pattern recognition that distinguishes mediocre product thinking from exceptional judgment.

Junior PM roles provide precisely this deliberate practice environment:

Learning to navigate ambiguity: Junior PMs tackle smaller features where mistakes are recoverable but consequences are real. They learn how to make decisions with incomplete information—not by reading about it, but by living through the anxiety and emerging with calibrated intuition.

Developing political radar: No AI can teach a junior PM how to read the room when the VP of Sales and CTO are locked in disagreement about technical feasibility versus market timing. This skill emerges from dozens of uncomfortable meetings, pattern-matching across personalities, and building trust relationships over months.

Building product intuition: Research on expertise shows that true pattern recognition requires encountering thousands of specific instances. Junior PMs develop intuition by shipping features that nobody uses, by conducting research that changes priorities, by watching their assumptions prove spectacularly wrong. Each failure calibrates their mental models.

Practicing stakeholder management: The ability to manage up, sideways, and down—to influence without authority, to build coalitions, to navigate organizational politics—emerges from repeated practice in low-stakes scenarios. Junior PMs learn this by managing their first cross-functional projects, making their first trade-off decisions, delivering their first roadmap presentations to skeptical audiences.

AI can draft PRDs. It can analyze user feedback. It can generate competitive research. But AI cannot develop the judgment that comes from making a decision that tanks a launch, then learning to spot those warning signs in future scenarios. It cannot build the political capital that comes from delivering value to skeptical stakeholders over time. It cannot create the deep customer empathy that emerges from conducting your 100th user interview and finally developing the pattern recognition to hear what customers aren’t saying.

Claire Vo, Chief Product Officer at LaunchDarkly, observes that AI reduces task time dramatically: “Before it would take days to write feedback and requirements, now you’re taking 15 minutes to scaffold out something that is 80% good.” But she’s describing tasks for experienced PMs who already know what “good” looks like. Junior PMs need to learn what good looks like through repeated practice, feedback, and refinement—precisely the learning that gets eliminated when we automate the work.

Here’s the timeline of the catastrophe we’re engineering:

Year 1 (2025-2026): Companies celebrate efficiency gains. AI automates competitor research, PRD drafting, backlog management. Burnout decreases slightly as senior PMs shed grunt work. Hiring freezes on junior roles seem prudent given economic uncertainty.

Year 2-3 (2027-2028): Senior PMs begin leaving for better opportunities or burning out entirely under expanded responsibility. The few junior PMs hired during pre-AI years get promoted rapidly into mid-level roles—but there’s no cohort behind them. Organizations start noticing they can’t promote from within.

Year 4-5 (2029-2030): Leadership crisis hits. Directors retire or burn out, but there’s no qualified pipeline to replace them. The 30-year-olds who should have spent their twenties learning product fundamentals never got those opportunities. Companies desperately hire expensive external candidates who lack institutional knowledge and cultural fit, leading to costly mis-hires and team disruption.

Conservative estimates put the cost of a failed executive hire at three times annual salary. For a director-level role, that’s $500,000 in direct costs—not counting opportunity cost of strategic momentum. Multiply that across multiple roles over five years as baby boomers retire and you’ve got a quantifiable business risk that most organizations are systematically underestimating.

The succession planning research is unequivocal: organizations that eliminate entry-level positions destroy their leadership pipeline within 5-7 years. A study tracking employer training programs found that apprenticeships and structured on-the-job training are significantly more resilient than internships or ad-hoc learning. Yet we’re eliminating precisely these structured learning pathways in favor of “learn by osmosis” approaches that research shows fail to develop expertise.

Let me tell you about the junior PMs I’ve mentored who now can’t break into the profession. Brilliant, motivated people who’ve built side projects, completed bootcamps, networked relentlessly—and hit a wall of “2-3 years experience required” for every role. They’re watching companies claim talent shortages while refusing to create the pathways that would solve those shortages.

Research on entry-level labor market dynamics reveals a brutal catch-22: unemployment rates for recent college graduates have reached their highest level in 12 years (excluding the pandemic), hovering above the jobless rate for all American workers. A Burning Glass Institute report identifies AI’s elimination of entry-level roles in the knowledge industry and companies’ growing preference for “low-risk hiring of more experienced workers who can contribute right away” as structural factors making it harder for newcomers to crack the job market.

This creates an entire cohort who will never develop product management expertise because nobody will give them the opportunity to practice. And here’s what should keep you up at night: these locked-out individuals don’t just lose careers—they lose the potential to solve problems, create value, and push the profession forward with fresh perspectives.

The diversity implications are even more disturbing. Research on employer training programs shows that regardless of program characteristics, women and people of color are more vulnerable to losing training positions during crises. The elimination of junior roles disproportionately impacts the exact populations product management claims to want more of, further entrenching the profession’s diversity problems.

I’ve had the same conversation with dozens of product leaders. They know eliminating junior roles is strategically suicidal. They understand the leadership pipeline implications. They genuinely care about developing the next generation.

But they’re trapped between organizational constraints they can’t control:

Board pressure for efficiency: Executives facing quarterly earnings pressure default to cuts that improve short-term metrics while creating long-term disasters. The planning fallacy—our systematic tendency to underestimate time, costs, and risks—means they genuinely believe they can “figure out leadership development later.”

Personal bandwidth crisis: With 92% of product professionals reporting burnout experiences, leaders lack the energy to mentor juniors effectively. The collaboration overhead required to develop new talent feels impossible when you’re already drowning. Research shows that middle managers report 43% burnout rates—10% higher than executives—creating a cohort too overwhelmed to develop the next generation even when they want to.

Organizational neglect of development: Studies show that 42% of managers believe internal talent development is neglected at their organizations, and 43% say their companies hire new managers instead of developing them internally. When the system doesn’t reward development, leaders face impossible trade-offs between hitting numbers and building pipelines.

This creates a tragedy of the commons: every leader makes locally rational decisions (cut juniors, survive this quarter) that collectively destroy the profession’s future.

Some organizations are getting this right. They recognize that AI doesn’t eliminate the need for junior roles—it changes what those roles focus on.

Thoughtful AI integration: At companies doing this well, AI handles the mechanical work while junior PMs focus on the irreplaceable human skills. Instead of spending days formatting PRDs, juniors spend that time in customer interviews, building stakeholder relationships, and developing product intuition. The role becomes more human, not less necessary.

Structured development pathways: Organizations like Google maintain rotational APM programs that deliberately expose early-career PMs to diverse challenges with explicit mentorship and feedback. These programs survived AI precisely because leaders understood that technology couldn’t replace structured learning.

Clear progression ladders: Companies that maintain robust junior hiring show common patterns: clear expectations for each level, explicit skill development frameworks, protected time for mentorship, and metrics that reward leadership development alongside shipping products.

The research on succession planning is clear: organizations must invest in developing talent at every level, not just at the top. Companies that balance 60-70% focus on current execution with 30-40% investment in capability development consistently outperform those that optimize exclusively for present-day efficiency.

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: eliminating junior roles is a moral failure, not just a strategic mistake.

Every product leader benefited from someone taking a chance on them when they were inexperienced. Someone invested time mentoring them through early mistakes. Someone created the space for them to develop expertise through deliberate practice. The profession exists because previous generations accepted the responsibility of developing the next generation.

Now, facing the first technology that seems to offer an alternative, we’re abandoning that responsibility. We’re pulling up the ladder behind us and calling it innovation.

Research on organizational psychology shows that cultures which invest in development create virtuous cycles: developed employees stay longer, contribute more, and develop others in turn. Cultures that cut development create death spirals: talent leaves, remaining employees burn out, and the organization loses the capacity to grow leaders.

Product management is choosing the death spiral.

This crisis isn’t inevitable. But reversing it requires leaders to make uncomfortable near-term trade-offs for long-term sustainability:

Reframe junior roles around AI-augmented learning: Instead of eliminating juniors because AI does “their work,” restructure roles to leverage AI for mechanical tasks while focusing junior development on judgment, relationships, and strategic thinking. Make the first year of product management about building the capabilities AI can’t replicate.

Create explicit apprenticeship models: Formalize what’s currently ad-hoc. Assign every junior PM a senior mentor with protected time for development. Create structured rotation programs. Build feedback loops that accelerate learning. Research shows that formal apprenticeships are significantly more resilient and effective than informal learning.

Measure and reward development: Add “leaders developed” to performance metrics for senior PMs. Create explicit expectations that developing the next generation is part of the job, not optional. Organizations that make leadership development a measured competency see 70% lower burnout rates and substantially better succession outcomes.

Invest in junior hiring at scale: Companies need to hire junior PMs in cohorts that can learn together, not as isolated individuals expected to figure it out alone. Research on expertise development shows that learning accelerates when practitioners can compare approaches and troubleshoot together.

Make the economic case explicit: Calculate the 5-year cost of failed leadership succession versus the cost of maintaining a robust junior pipeline. When boards see $500,000 per failed executive hire multiplied across a dozen roles, the budget for junior development suddenly seems reasonable.

We’re at an inflection point that will determine what product management looks like in 2030.

Path one: Product management becomes a closed aristocracy. An aging cohort of practitioners who learned the craft pre-AI clings to power while a locked-out generation never gains the experience needed to lead. The profession ossifies, innovation stagnates, and companies scramble to fill leadership gaps with increasingly expensive external hires who lack the institutional knowledge to succeed.

Path two: We recognize that AI augments human judgment rather than replacing the learning required to develop it. We invest in junior PMs deliberately and systematically. We restructure roles to focus early-career development on the irreplaceable human capabilities. We accept short-term efficiency losses in service of long-term leadership sustainability.

The research couldn’t be clearer: expertise requires deliberate practice over extended periods. Leadership pipelines require systematic investment in development. Organizations that eliminate entry-level learning destroy their competitive advantage within 5-7 years.

But knowledge doesn’t drive behavior—incentives do. And right now, every incentive pushes product leaders toward the aristocracy path: quarterly pressure, burnout crisis, board demands, AI hype, and the psychological comfort of immediate efficiency gains.

So here’s my editorial stance: Any product leader who eliminates junior roles without creating alternative pathways for early-career development is committing malpractice.

You’re not making a difficult but necessary business decision. You’re abdicating the core responsibility that comes with leadership: developing the next generation. You’re trading long-term organizational health for short-term relief. You’re participating in professional gatekeeping that locks out diverse talent and ossifies the field.

And when your organization faces a leadership crisis in 2029, when you’re paying $500,000 for external hires who struggle in roles your eliminated juniors could have grown into, when you’re scrambling to fill positions with no qualified internal candidates—you’ll deserve every bit of that crisis.

Because you had the data. You had the research. You had the warning signs.

You chose convenience over responsibility anyway.

This isn’t a problem that gets solved by industry-wide initiatives or new best practices documents. This changes when individual product leaders—people reading this right now—make different decisions:

Hire that junior PM even though it’s easier to get another senior. Protect mentorship time even when quarterly targets loom. Push back on boards demanding efficiency at the cost of development. Make development metrics matter as much as shipping metrics.

The junior PM you hire today might be struggling to format PRDs in ways AI could do faster. But in five years, she’ll be the mid-level PM who can navigate the ambiguity your team desperately needs. In ten years, she’ll be the director who solves problems you can’t even imagine yet. In fifteen years, she’ll be developing the next generation of product leaders—if you give her the chance to start.

Every great product leader was once a confused junior PM making rookie mistakes. Every strategic thinker started as a tactical doer learning the basics. Every person who ever pushed product management forward began with someone taking a chance on their potential.

The question isn’t whether AI will change product management—it will. The question is whether we’ll use that change as an excuse to abandon our responsibility to the next generation, or as an opportunity to reimagine how we develop the irreplaceable human capabilities that define great product leadership.

The junior PMs of 2025 are the product leaders of 2035. Their success or failure starts with the decisions we make today.

---

💪 Product job ads from last week

Do you need support with recruitment, career change, or building your career? Schedule a free coffee chat to talk things over :)

1. Product Manager - Ampstek

2. Junior Product Manager - Altery

3. Product Manager/Product Owner - Rite NRG

4. Product Manager - SoftServe

5. Senior Product Manager - Allegro

---

🍪 Product Bites (3 bites 🍪)

🍪 The Von Restorff Effect: Why Different Always Wins

Making Features Memorable Through Strategic Contrast

We’ve all experienced it: scrolling through an endless feed of similar-looking products, and suddenly—something catches our eye. Not because it’s objectively better, but because it’s different. That’s the Von Restorff Effect in action, and it’s one of the most underutilized principles in product design.

Named after German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff, who discovered the phenomenon in 1933, the Von Restorff Effect (also known as the Isolation Effect) describes our brain’s tendency to remember distinctive items more easily than common ones. In her original experiment, participants shown a list of similar items with one standout element consistently recalled the distinctive item with significantly higher accuracy—often up to 70% better than the homogeneous items.

For product managers, this isn’t just an interesting psychological curiosity. It’s a strategic weapon in an attention economy where users are bombarded with 5,000+ marketing messages daily and have an average attention span of 8 seconds. The question isn’t whether your product is good—it’s whether it’s memorable enough to matter.

The Memory Gap: Why Good Products Disappear

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most products are forgettable by design. Not because they lack features or fail to solve problems, but because they blend into the background noise of user experience. We’ve become so obsessed with following best practices, maintaining consistency, and adhering to platform conventions that we’ve accidentally optimized for invisibility.

Consider the typical SaaS onboarding flow. According to research by Userpilot, 75% of SaaS products use nearly identical onboarding patterns: a welcome screen, a feature tour, some tooltips, and a “Get Started” button. Users don’t remember these experiences because there’s nothing to remember. They’ve seen this exact flow dozens of times before.

The Von Restorff Effect explains why Slack’s launch was so memorable in a crowded communication tool market. While competitors focused on features (threads! channels! integrations!), Slack made their loading messages distinctively playful: “Connecting you to the hive mind” and “Reticulating splines.” This seemingly trivial design choice created a 30% increase in positive first-session feedback and became one of their most talked-about features.

The memory gap manifests in three critical areas:

Feature adoption: Users can’t adopt features they don’t remember exist. Research from Pendo shows that 80% of features in the average SaaS product are rarely or never used, largely because users simply forget they’re there.

Brand recall: When users need your product category, will they remember you? A Harvard Business School study found that distinctive brand elements increase unaided recall by 97%.

Competitive positioning: In markets where products offer similar functionality, memorability becomes the primary differentiator. Users choose what they remember, not necessarily what’s objectively best.

The Architecture of Distinctiveness

Creating memorable product experiences isn’t about being weird for weird’s sake. It’s about strategic contrast—understanding when and how to break patterns in ways that enhance rather than confuse the user experience.

The Context-Contrast Principle

Distinctiveness only works in context. A bright red button isn’t distinctive if all your buttons are different colors—it’s just noise. The Von Restorff Effect requires a baseline of consistency against which contrast can emerge.

Mailchimp mastered this principle. Their interface maintains conventional design patterns throughout most of the user journey, but breaks convention at critical moments. After sending a campaign, instead of a generic “Success” message, users encounter a high-five animation from Freddie (their chimp mascot). This single moment of distinctiveness has become their most recognized feature, generating millions of social media shares and creating a 23% increase in repeat campaign sends.

The formula is simple but powerful:

1. Establish consistency (80% of the experience)

2. Identify critical moments (the 20% that matters most)

3. Insert strategic distinction (memorable contrast at key points)

The Four Vectors of Distinction

Product teams can create Von Restorff moments across four primary dimensions:

Visual Distinction: The most obvious but often poorly executed. Duolingo’s owl mascot doesn’t just appear randomly—it shows up at specific moments of learning achievement, creating visual contrast that reinforces psychological reward. Their distinctive green notification style has a 28% higher open rate than industry-standard notifications.

Verbal Distinction: Language creates powerful differentiation. While most error messages say “Something went wrong,” GitHub’s 404 page features their Star Wars-themed “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” message, transforming a frustrating moment into a memorable brand interaction.

Temporal Distinction: Disrupting expected timing patterns. Headspace introduces a 10-second silence before their meditation sessions begin—a pause that feels distinctly different from typical app experiences and creates a mental transition that increases session completion by 34%.

Behavioral Distinction: Breaking interaction conventions. Tinder’s swipe gesture wasn’t just innovative—it was distinctively different from the tap-and-click patterns dominating mobile apps in 2012, creating a memorable interaction model that defined an entire product category.

The Implementation Framework

Applying the Von Restorff Effect requires methodical thinking about where distinction creates value versus where it creates confusion.

Step 1: Map Your Consistency Baseline

Before you can break patterns, you need to establish them. Audit your product experience:

• Which interactions follow industry standards?

• Where do users expect conventional behavior?

• What patterns have you established as your product’s “normal”?

Notion provides an excellent example. Their core editing experience follows familiar text editor conventions, establishing a baseline of expectation. This consistency gives them permission to be distinctive in their block-based architecture—a contrast that’s memorable precisely because the surrounding experience is conventionally familiar.

Step 2: Identify High-Value Moments

Not all product moments deserve distinctiveness. Focus on:

Conversion points: Where users make decisions (upgrade, invite, share) Achievement moments: When users succeed or complete important tasks Error states: Where frustration might occur Empty states: Before users have generated content Milestone markers: Anniversaries, achievements, thresholds

Spotify’s “Wrapped” feature demonstrates perfect moment selection. Rather than creating distinction throughout the year, they concentrate it in a single, annual moment that generates 60 million social shares and has become a cultural phenomenon.

Step 3: Design Distinction with Purpose

Every distinctive element should serve a functional purpose beyond mere novelty:

• Directional: Guides users toward important actions

• Emotional: Creates positive association at critical moments

• Informational: Makes important information stand out

• Memorable: Helps users remember how to accomplish key tasks

Stripe’s documentation includes interactive code examples that execute in real-time—distinctive because most documentation is static text, but purposeful because it helps developers understand implementation faster. This distinctive choice contributed to their 25% faster developer onboarding time.

Step 4: Test Memorability, Not Just Usability

Traditional usability testing asks “Can users complete tasks?” Von Restorff optimization asks “Will users remember how to complete tasks tomorrow?”

Implement retention-focused testing:

• Delayed recall tests: After completing a task, wait 24 hours and ask users to describe their experience

• Feature awareness surveys: One week post-onboarding, test which features users remember exist

• Competitive distinction tests: Show users similar products and measure which specific elements they recall

Figma discovered through delayed recall testing that users forgot how to access their community templates despite successful first-use. They introduced a distinctive purple “Community” tab that increased template discovery by 156% through improved memorability.

The Dark Side: When Distinction Backfires

Not all distinctiveness creates value. We’ve seen enough “quirky” products crash and burn to understand the failure modes:

Distinction without coherence: Random uniqueness that doesn’t align with brand or purpose feels gimmicky. Yahoo’s purple cow phase added memorable elements that contradicted their utility positioning, confusing rather than clarifying their identity.

Over-distinction: When everything is distinctive, nothing is. Medium initially had distinctive design at every turn, which paradoxically made individual articles less memorable because readers suffered from “distinction fatigue.”

Mistimed distinction: Being different at the wrong moment disrupts rather than enhances. Clippy was distinctive, but his distinctiveness interrupted users at high-concentration moments, creating negative memories associated with Microsoft Office.

The guardrails are clear:

1. Distinction should reduce cognitive load, not increase it

2. Memorable moments should align with user goals

3. Uniqueness should feel inevitable, not arbitrary

The Competitive Dimension

The Von Restorff Effect creates a winner-take-most dynamic in product markets. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that distinctiveness drives market share more than differentiation—being memorable matters more than being functionally different.

Consider Zoom versus the 15+ video conferencing tools that existed before it. Functionally, Zoom wasn’t dramatically different. But their distinctive elements—the virtual background feature, the name “Zoom” (suggesting speed in a category known for lag), and their one-click join links—created memorability that drove exponential growth. When the pandemic hit, people remembered “Zoom” because it had distinctive mental hooks, while functionally similar products (BlueJeans, GoToMeeting) remained forgettable.

This creates a strategic imperative: in mature markets where functional parity is inevitable, memorability becomes the primary moat. The question shifts from “How do we build better features?” to “How do we make our features impossible to forget?”

Measuring What Matters

Traditional product metrics miss memorability entirely. We measure activation, engagement, and retention, but we rarely measure memory formation.

Consider implementing these memory-focused metrics:

Unaided feature recall: After 7 days, what percentage of users can name three features without prompting? Mental availability: When users have a problem your product solves, how often do they think of you first? Distinctive asset recognition: Can users identify your product from a single distinctive element?

Canva tracks “template recall”—measuring whether users remember specific template categories one week after viewing them. This metric directly predicts 30-day retention and helped them optimize which templates to feature distinctively in their onboarding flow.

The Timeless Principle

Here’s what matters most: in an age of endless choice and finite attention, being good isn’t enough. Your product must create memories, not just experiences. The Von Restorff Effect isn’t a trick or a hack—it’s a recognition of how human memory actually works in information-rich environments.

The best product teams understand that they’re not just building features; they’re building memories. Every interaction is a potential memory formation opportunity, and the products that win are those that intentionally architect distinctiveness at moments that matter.

Stop asking “Is this feature good enough?” Start asking “Will users remember this feature exists?” Because in a world where users forget 90% of what they experience within 7 days, memorability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.

The paradox is beautiful: by being selectively different, you become impossible to forget. And in product development, being unforgettable is the only sustainable competitive advantage that matters.

---

🍪 The Serial Position Effect: Why First and Last Impressions Dominate User Memory

Architecting Product Experiences Around How Memory Actually Works

If I asked you to recall a feature list from a product demo you saw last week, which features would you remember? Research consistently shows you’d recall the first few and the last few—while the middle ones fade into oblivion. This isn’t a personal failing. It’s the Serial Position Effect, a cognitive phenomenon discovered in 1962 that explains why the beginning and end of any sequence dominate our memory, while everything in between becomes forgettable noise.

For product managers, this insight is devastating and liberating in equal measure. Devastating because it means that premium feature you carefully positioned in the middle of your onboarding flow? Users probably don’t remember it exists. Liberating because once you understand how memory actually works, you can architect experiences that align with cognitive reality rather than fight against it.

The Serial Position Effect isn’t subtle—it’s dramatic. In Hermann Ebbinghaus’s foundational memory research, participants recalled the first and last items in a list with 70-80% accuracy, while middle items dropped to 30-40% recall. In product terms, this means the majority of your feature set exists in a memory dead zone, invisible to users not because it lacks value, but because of where it appears in their experience sequence.

The Memory Curve: Where Features Go to Die

Let’s start with an uncomfortable exercise: open your product’s analytics and look at feature adoption rates by order of introduction. If your product follows typical patterns, you’ll see a U-shaped curve—high adoption for features introduced first and last, with a significant valley in the middle. This isn’t correlation. It’s causation.

The Serial Position Effect manifests as two distinct memory phenomena:

The Primacy Effect: We remember what comes first because our attention is highest at the beginning, and our brain has time to encode information into long-term memory through rehearsal. When users first open your product, they’re cognitively fresh, motivated, and actively constructing their mental model of how your product works. First impressions literally get encoded differently in memory.

The Recency Effect: We remember what comes last because it’s still active in our working memory. Final interactions haven’t been displaced by subsequent information, making them easily retrievable. This is why users remember how a session ended, but struggle to recall middle interactions.

Dropbox learned this lesson the hard way. Their 2014 onboarding introduced seven features sequentially: file upload, sharing, sync, mobile access, Paper, collaboration, and recovery. Adoption data showed 73% of users utilized upload (first) and 68% used recovery (last), but only 31% ever tried collaboration tools (positioned fifth). By reconstructing their onboarding to lead with sharing and end with collaboration, they increased middle-feature adoption by 47%.

The implications cascade throughout product design:

Onboarding sequences: That critical feature you introduce on screen four? It’s in the memory dead zone. Users completed the task but can’t remember how when they need it again.

Navigation structures: Menu items positioned in the middle receive 65% less attention than those at the top or bottom of lists, according to Nielsen Norman Group eye-tracking research.

Feature announcements: When you launch multiple features simultaneously, users remember the first and last, while middle announcements disappear despite equal development investment.

The Dual-Curve Architecture

Understanding the Serial Position Effect means reconceiving your product as two distinct memory curves: primacy and recency. Each serves different purposes and requires different design strategies.

The Primacy Curve: Building Mental Models

First experiences carry disproportionate weight because they establish the mental model users will apply to your entire product. Choose wisely what goes first—you’re not just introducing features, you’re programming user expectations.

Start with core value, not comprehensive education: Slack’s onboarding genius was showing users a single channel conversation first, not explaining all features comprehensively. That first interaction established the mental model (”this is about conversations”) that makes every subsequent feature discoverable.

Use primacy for habit formation: Duolingo places their streak counter first in every session. This primacy placement created a habit loop that contributes to their 61% higher retention compared to language-learning competitors.

Establish emotional tone immediately: Mailchimp’s first interaction includes Freddie (their chimp mascot) waving hello. This sets a friendly, approachable tone that colors how users interpret every subsequent interaction, making them 23% more likely to explore advanced features because they feel psychologically safe experimenting.

The Recency Curve: Anchoring Future Behavior

Final impressions predict next actions. What users experience last becomes the anchor for their next interaction with your product.

End with success moments: Asana discovered that users who completed a task and saw the celebratory creature animation were 34% more likely to return within 24 hours. By ensuring sessions ended with completion signals, they transformed recency into retention.

Use final moments for calls-to-action: Spotify ends free-tier sessions with upgrade prompts—not arbitrary placement, but strategic use of recency. These final-moment CTAs convert 2.3x better than mid-session prompts because they’re captured in working memory.

Create deliberate endings: Most products let sessions peter out ambiguously. Headspace explicitly ends sessions with a completion screen and a “same time tomorrow?” prompt. This deliberate conclusion creates a memory hook that increased 7-day return rates by 41%.

The Strategic Positioning Framework

Applying the Serial Position Effect requires intentional sequencing decisions. Here’s a practical framework for positioning features and content based on memory principles:

Position 1: The Foundation Feature

Purpose: Establish core value and mental model Selection criteria: Choose your simplest manifestation of primary value Example: Zoom places the “New Meeting” button first—not because it’s the only feature, but because it establishes the mental model: “this app makes meetings happen fast”

Place your “aha moment” feature first. Users will remember it exists and, critically, will use it as a reference point for understanding everything else. When Twitter moved “compose tweet” from fifth position to first (upper right, primary position), new user posting within 24 hours increased by 28%.

Positions 2-4: The Strategic Middle

Purpose: Enable power users without confusing beginners Selection criteria: Features that serve specific use cases but aren’t core to initial value Example: Notion places advanced block types (toggles, databases, synced blocks) in the middle of their insertion menu, accessible to those who explore but invisible to those who don’t

The middle isn’t wasted space—it’s where you place features designed for progressive disclosure. Users who need these features will find them through search or exploration, but they won’t clutter the mental model of casual users who’ll forget they exist anyway.

Counter-intuitively, this is where you should place experimental features. If they fail, they fail in the forgettable middle. If they succeed, you can promote them to primacy or recency positions.

Final Position: The Retention Hook

Purpose: Create a memory anchor for return behavior Selection criteria: Choose your viral loop, upgrade prompt, or habit reinforcement Example: Instagram ends sessions by showing “suggested content”—a recency placement that keeps users returning because the last thing they remember is that there’s more to see

Linear (the project management tool) places their “Copy link” sharing feature last in their context menus. This final position created a 56% increase in viral sharing because users remembered that sharing was easy—even if they couldn’t recall how to use advanced filtering features.

The Navigation Paradox

The Serial Position Effect creates a fascinating paradox in navigation design: alphabetical ordering actively works against memory and usability, yet it remains the most common organizational pattern.

Consider a typical app navigation with 15 menu items alphabetically arranged. Items starting with letters early and late in the alphabet get disproportionate attention and recall, while M-R items (the alphabetical middle) become virtually invisible. This explains why critical features starting with middle-alphabet letters often see 40-60% lower engagement despite equal prominence in the interface.

The solution isn’t abandoning alphabetical ordering entirely—it’s recognizing when memory-optimized ordering trumps alphabetical convention:

Frequency-based ordering: Place most-used items first, with the second-most-used last, and everything else in the forgettable middle. Gmail’s navigation does this brilliantly—Inbox first, Trash last, with 12 other folders in between that only power users access.

Journey-based sequencing: Order items by typical user workflow, placing entry points first and completion actions last. Figma’s tools panel follows this pattern, with selection tools first (how you start) and export last (how you finish).

Value-based hierarchy: Position high-value actions at terminal positions. Netflix places “browse” first and “downloads” last—not alphabetically logical, but memory-optimized for their most valuable user behaviors.

The Onboarding Time-Bomb

Nowhere does the Serial Position Effect matter more than onboarding, where we routinely violate memory principles by cramming comprehensive feature tours into a single sequence. The data is damning: according to Appcues, users forget 90% of features introduced during onboarding within one week.

The traditional approach—show everything sequentially—guarantees failure because it creates a massive memory middle where critical features vanish. The solution requires reconstructing onboarding around primacy and recency optimization:

The Primacy-Only Approach

Show only your core value feature first, then end the onboarding. Everything else can be discovered progressively. Superhuman’s onboarding introduces only keyboard shortcuts in the first session—a primacy-focused approach that increased feature retention by 3x compared to their previous comprehensive tour.

The Spaced Repetition Model

Introduce features across multiple sessions, with each mini-session having its own primacy and recency. Grammarly introduces one writing improvement type per session over five days, ensuring each feature gets primacy position in its own memory curve rather than disappearing in a longer sequence.

The Choice-Based Sequencing

Let users select which features to learn about, making their choices first in a personalized sequence. Miro’s onboarding asks “What brings you here?” and positions the user’s answer first, while ending with collaborative features regardless of choice. This approach increased feature recall by 52% compared to fixed sequences.

The Email Sequence Application

The Serial Position Effect dramatically impacts email communication, where product teams routinely bury important information in the middle of messages. User research from Litmus shows that 65% of email readers remember the first and last sentences, while only 28% recall middle paragraphs.

Apply serial positioning to product emails:

First sentence = value statement: “Your team shipped 47 features this quarter”—not “Here’s your quarterly report” Middle = supporting details: Data, explanations, features list Final sentence = call to action: “Review your roadmap”—making the desired action the last thing users see

Intercom restructured their feature announcement emails using this pattern, moving their “Try it now” button from middle to final position and adding a value statement first. Open-to-action conversion increased by 67%.

The Meeting Structure Mandate

The Serial Position Effect should revolutionize how product teams run meetings. Standard meeting patterns—agenda review (first), discussion (middle), summary (last)—accidentally optimize for forgetting decisions made during discussion.

Reconstruct meetings around memory:

Start with decisions needed: Place decision-making first when cognitive resources are fresh Middle for discussion: Let context and debate happen in the forgettable middle End with decisions made + action items: Ensure everyone leaves with clear recall of outcomes and next steps

Basecamp famously restructured their product reviews using this pattern, placing prototype review first (primacy for the thing that matters) and ending with go/no-go decisions (recency for accountability). They reported 90% better alignment on decisions compared to traditional meeting structures where prototypes appeared mid-agenda.

The Measurement Challenge

Traditional product analytics track feature usage but not feature memory. We measure whether users clicked a feature, not whether they remember it exists for future use. This creates a critical blind spot.

Implement memory-focused measurement:

Week-one recall testing: Survey new users asking them to list features they remember, then correlate with usage data Task completion without prompts: Measure how often users complete tasks without help docs or support—a proxy for memory retention Return task efficiency: Track how quickly users re-find features they’ve used before—faster searches indicate better memory encoding

Airtable implemented “feature memory scoring” by tracking how users accessed features: direct menu clicks suggested memory retention, while search usage indicated forgotten features. This metric revealed that features introduced in positions 3-6 of onboarding required 3x more search usage, prompting a sequence restructuring that improved adoption.

The Timeless Truth

The Serial Position Effect reveals an uncomfortable reality: most of your product exists in a memory dead zone through no fault of its own, simply because of where it appears in the user’s experience sequence. Fighting this cognitive reality is futile. Designing around it is strategic.

The most successful products don’t try to make everything memorable—they accept that only primacy and recency positions create lasting memory, and they architect experiences accordingly. Your core value proposition goes first. Your retention mechanism goes last. Everything else becomes progressively discoverable rather than frontloaded into forgettable sequences.

This isn’t about limiting features or dumbing down products. It’s about respecting how human memory works and positioning your product’s value in the cognitive spaces where memory actually forms. First impressions establish mental models. Last impressions predict return behavior. Everything in between is optional to memory formation—design accordingly.

The question isn’t whether your feature is valuable. The question is whether it’s positioned where users will remember it exists. Because a feature that isn’t remembered might as well not exist at all.

---

🍪 The Third Door Strategy: Finding Non-Obvious Paths to Product Success

How the Best Product Decisions Hide Beyond the Obvious Choices

There’s a nightclub metaphor that perfectly captures a truth about product strategy that most teams never discover. There’s the First Door—the main entrance where 99% of people wait in line, hoping to get in. There’s the Second Door—the VIP entrance where billionaires and celebrities slip through. But then there’s the Third Door—the one nobody tells you about. It’s the entrance you create by running down the alley, banging on the door a hundred times, cracking open the window, and sneaking through the kitchen.

In product development, we’re obsessed with doors one and two. We either follow best practices (the first door) or we try to throw resources at problems (the second door). But the most transformative product decisions—the ones that create category-defining companies—almost always come through a third door that didn’t obviously exist.

The Third Door Strategy isn’t about being contrarian for its own sake. It’s about recognizing that binary choices are usually false dichotomies, and the most valuable path forward is often one you have to construct yourself. This is the strategy behind Airbnb photographing listings when everyone said marketplace success required transaction volume, not content quality. It’s why Slack built a gaming company before pivoting to communication tools. It’s how Figma chose the browser when every designer “knew” professional tools required native applications.

The Binary Trap: Why Two Choices Are Usually Wrong

Product teams face dozens of apparent binary decisions daily:

“Should we prioritize new features or fix technical debt?” “Do we focus on acquisition or retention?” “Should we build for power users or optimize for beginners?” “Do we compete on price or quality?” “Should we go deep in one market or expand broadly?”

Here’s the pattern: whenever a product decision feels binary, you’re probably asking the wrong question. These aren’t actually either/or choices—they’re false frameworks that blind us to third doors hiding in plain sight.

Consider Netflix in 2007. The apparent binary choice: invest in their mail-order DVD business (their proven revenue source) or build streaming technology (expensive, uncertain, and cannibalizing their own business). Competitors like Blockbuster saw this binary clearly: either you’re physical or digital.

Netflix chose a third door: they invested heavily in both simultaneously, using DVD profits to fund streaming development while building a streaming service that didn’t compete with their DVD catalog initially. This “bridge strategy”—neither abandoning the old nor betting everything on the new—became the template for their dominance in both eras. By 2013, they had 36 million streaming subscribers while still operating the world’s largest DVD-by-mail service.

The third door wasn’t compromise or middle ground. It was reconstructing the question entirely. Not “which business model?” but “how do we build the next model while extracting maximum value from the current one?”

The Anatomy of Third Door Thinking

Third door strategies share common characteristics that distinguish them from conventional approaches:

They Reject the Framing

First and second door thinking accepts the problem as presented. Third door thinking questions whether the problem itself is correctly framed.

When Stripe was founded in 2010, the payment processing market seemed mature. The binary appeared to be: compete with PayPal for consumer payments (first door) or target enterprises like Braintree did (second door). Stripe rejected this framing entirely and asked: “What if the problem isn’t payment processing, but developer experience?”

By reframing the question from “who should we process payments for?” to “how should developers integrate payments?”, they found a third door: make payment integration so simple that developers could implement it in minutes rather than weeks. This reframing created a $95 billion company in a “mature” market because they redefined what problem needed solving.

They Combine Incompatible Truths

Traditional strategy demands choosing between competing approaches. Third door strategy asks: what if both approaches contain essential truths that only work when combined?

Spotify faced an apparent contradiction: listeners wanted unlimited music access (suggesting a streaming model) but valued ownership (suggesting a purchase model). The music industry insisted you couldn’t have both—either you own copies or you rent access.

Spotify’s third door: create a streaming service that feels like ownership. Your playlists, your library, your collection—all the psychological benefits of ownership without the friction of purchases. By combining the unlimited access of streaming with the personalization and control of ownership, they created a category-defining product serving 626 million users.

They Build What Doesn’t Exist

Sometimes the third door isn’t waiting to be discovered—it needs to be constructed. This requires creating conditions, resources, or approaches that currently don’t exist in the market.

Amazon faced a critical decision with AWS in 2006: should they focus on retail (their core business) or technology infrastructure (completely different from their expertise)? The binary seemed clear: stay focused or diversify.

Their third door: recognize that world-class infrastructure they built for retail could become its own business, funding and improving their retail operations while creating a new category. They didn’t choose between retail and infrastructure—they built infrastructure so good it had to become its own business. AWS now generates over $90 billion annually and funds Amazon’s retail experimentation.

The Search Process: Finding Doors That Don’t Obviously Exist

Third door strategies don’t emerge from traditional strategic planning. They require a different search process:

1. Invert the Question

When facing a strategic decision, write down the conventional wisdom. Then systematically invert each assumption.

Zoom’s founding happened through inversion. Video conferencing tools assumed: meetings require scheduling, participants need accounts, quality demands downloads and installation, and business tools should look serious.

Eric Yuan inverted each assumption: What if joining required no account? What if it worked in browsers? What if one-click links replaced scheduling friction? What if enterprise tools could be delightful? These inversions created Zoom’s third door between consumer simplicity (Skype) and enterprise reliability (WebEx).

Document your inversions systematically:

Assumption: Enterprise tools require extensive training Inversion: What if enterprise power came from consumer simplicity? Third Door Hypothesis: Build enterprise features with consumer-grade UX

2. Study Adjacent Industries

Third doors often exist in other industries facing structurally similar problems. The solution isn’t in your industry yet because everyone is looking at the same competitors and examples.

Notion studied video game design when building their knowledge management tool. While competitors looked at other documentation tools (Confluence, Google Docs), Notion asked: “How do video games create addictive building experiences?” The answer—block-based construction with endless combinability—became their third door between rigid docs (Google Docs) and messy wikis (Confluence).

Create an adjacent industry map:

Our Problem: User onboarding complexity Structurally Similar: Video game tutorials, theme park wayfinding, IKEA assembly instructions Third Door Potential: How do theme parks orient millions of first-time visitors without explicit instruction?

3. Embrace Constraint as Strategy

When resources feel limiting, ask: “What could we build that’s only possible because of our constraints, not despite them?”

Instagram’s founding team couldn’t build a full-featured photo-sharing platform (the first door) or compete with Facebook’s resources (the second door). Their constraint: two people and a few weeks of funding.

Their third door: make photo sharing so constrained and focused (square crops, simple filters, one-step posting) that the limitations became the feature. Instagram launched with 13 features when competitors had hundreds, and reached 100 million users within two years because their constraints created focus and differentiation.

4. Look for Timing Arbitrage

Third doors often appear when you ask: “What could we do now that will be obvious to everyone in three years?”

Shopify’s bet on small-business e-commerce in 2006 looked absurd. Amazon dominated online retail (first door), and enterprise platforms served big companies (second door). Small businesses seemed like the worst market—no resources to spend on software.

Shopify’s third door: recognize that cloud computing and improving web tools would eventually make e-commerce accessible to everyone, and whoever owned the small-business infrastructure would own the future of retail. They built for a future that didn’t exist yet but was inevitable, reaching 4.5 million merchants by 2024.

Implementation: Building Through the Third Door

Finding a third door is valuable. Having the courage to walk through it while everyone else insists it doesn’t exist requires different organizational capabilities:

Create Permission for Exploration

Third door strategies feel wrong initially because they violate conventional wisdom. You need explicit organizational permission to explore non-obvious paths.

Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” rule wasn’t just about team size—it was about creating units small enough to pursue third doors without requiring company-wide consensus. AWS, Alexa, and Prime all started as small teams pursuing hypotheses that seemed crazy to the broader organization.

Implement exploration frameworks:

10% time for third door investigation: Not innovation theater, but structured time for exploring problems from different angles Prototype permission: Authority to build working prototypes of non-obvious approaches without business case approval Decision reversibility: Categorize decisions by reversibility—third doors require trying approaches that can be undone if wrong

Build Capability Before Consensus

Third door strategies rarely achieve consensus before implementation because people can’t evaluate what doesn’t exist yet. Build working prototypes that demonstrate the approach rather than arguing for it conceptually.

Figma spent three years building browser-based design tools when everyone “knew” professionals required native apps. They didn’t convince people through presentations—they built a working tool that proved the third door was viable.

The prototype pathway:

Month 1-2: Build the minimum viable demonstration of the third door approach Month 3-4: Test with friendly users who will give honest feedback Month 5-6: Iterate based on usage data, not opinions Month 7+: Let results speak louder than strategy decks

Maintain Strategic Patience

Third door strategies usually take longer to prove out because you’re building infrastructure, changing behavior, or waiting for market timing that others don’t see yet.

Slack spent four years as a gaming company (Glitch) before pivoting to communication tools. That “failure” wasn’t wasted time—it was building the third door. The internal communication tool they built for distributed game development became Slack, but only because they had the patience to let the third door reveal itself.

Strategic patience markers:

Milestone-based, not time-based: Judge progress by capability development, not arbitrary timelines Compound improvement focus: Are you getting disproportionately better at the new approach? That’s validation even without revenue Learning velocity over efficiency: Are you learning faster than resources consumed? That’s the third door signal

When Third Doors Fail

Not every non-obvious path leads to success. Third door strategies fail in predictable patterns:

The Contrarian Trap

Being different doesn’t make you right. Some doors don’t exist for good reasons. The failure mode: mistaking novelty for strategy.

Quibi raised $1.75 billion for “quick bites” of premium video content designed for mobile viewing in 10-minute segments. They positioned this as a third door between traditional TV and YouTube. It failed within six months because they were contrarian without solving a real problem—people didn’t want professionally produced content in 10-minute chunks.

The test: Does your third door solve a real problem differently, or is it different for difference’s sake?

The Complexity Collapse

Third doors that combine incompatible approaches can collapse under their own complexity. Trying to be everything to everyone usually means being nothing to anyone.

Evernote positioned itself as a third door between note-taking and project management, between personal and professional, between simple and powerful. This breadth created an unusable product that served no use case excellently. Their userbase declined 67% between 2013 and 2018 as focused competitors (Notion, Roam, Obsidian) chose clearer doors.

The test: Does your third door have a clear, specific user it serves better than alternatives?

The Resource Mismatch

Some third doors require resources you don’t have. Attempting them leads to mediocre execution of a good strategy.

Many companies try to copy Amazon’s third door approach of building internal tools that become products, but lack the scale to make it work. You need massive operations (first door) to generate tools worth productizing (third door). Without sufficient scale, you’re just building internal tools poorly.

The test: Do you have the capabilities, resources, and scale to execute this third door, or are you mimicking a strategy that works for companies in different positions?

The Timeless Principle

The Third Door Strategy isn’t about being clever or contrarian. It’s about recognizing that most strategic decisions are presented as false binaries because that’s how our pattern-matching brains simplify complex situations. But the world rarely offers only two paths forward.

The best product strategies emerge when teams reject binary thinking and ask: “What’s the question beneath the question?” “Which constraints could become features?” “What would be obvious to build three years from now?” These questions don’t lead to obvious doors because they reject obvious framing.

This requires organizational courage. Walking through a third door means going where there’s no obvious path, where best practices don’t apply, and where you’ll be wrong in ways that look stupid initially. Most teams don’t have the stomach for this discomfort, which is exactly why third door strategies create such powerful competitive advantages.

Stop accepting that your most important product decisions have only two options. When you encounter a binary, celebrate—you’ve found an opportunity to construct a third door. The path forward isn’t choosing between the options presented. It’s building the option that doesn’t exist yet.

Because in product development, the best answer to “Should we do A or B?” is almost always “What’s C?”

---

🔥 MLA #week 32

The Minimum Lovable Action (MLA) is a tiny, actionable step you can take this week to move your product team forward—no overhauls, no waiting for perfect conditions. Fix a bug, tweak a survey, or act on one piece of feedback.

Why it matters? Culture isn’t built overnight. It’s the sum of consistent, small actions. MLA creates momentum—one small win at a time—and turns those wins into lasting change. Small actions, big impact

MLA: Kill a Zombie Meeting

Why This Matters:

“Zombie meetings” are recurring meetings that have lost their original purpose but continue to shamble forward, consuming time and energy. They started with good intentions—a weekly sync, a planning session, a status update—but over time, the context changed, the team evolved, or the problem was solved. Yet the meeting lives on, populated by half-present attendees checking email and wondering why they’re there.

These meetings don’t just waste time—they erode team morale, create meeting fatigue, and signal that the organization doesn’t value intentionality. By identifying and eliminating (or restructuring) just ONE zombie meeting, you send a powerful message: we respect our time, we question our defaults, and we’re willing to change what isn’t working. This small act of courage can inspire others to do the same and gradually shift your culture toward more purposeful collaboration.

How to Execute:

1. Identify a Zombie Meeting Candidate:

Look for recurring meetings on your calendar that exhibit these symptoms:

• Low engagement: People routinely multitask, arrive late, or skip without consequence

• Unclear purpose: Ask 3 attendees why the meeting exists—if you get 3 different answers, it’s a zombie

• Status theater: The meeting is mostly people reading updates that could be async

• Momentum loss: The meeting was created for a project or initiative that’s complete or stalled

• Attendance bloat: Half the attendees rarely speak or contribute

Ask yourself: “If this meeting disappeared tomorrow, what would we lose?” If the answer is “not much,” you’ve found your target.

2. Gather Evidence (30 minutes):

Before making your case, do a quick audit:

• Review the last 3-4 meeting notes or agendas. Are there recurring action items? Meaningful decisions? Or just reports?

• Check attendance patterns. Who consistently attends vs. who has stopped showing up?

• Time-box a quick survey. Ask 2-3 regular attendees: “On a scale of 1-10, how valuable is this meeting? What would happen if we canceled it?”

This isn’t about building a prosecutorial case—it’s about validating your instinct with light data.

3. Frame the Change Properly:

This is where many people fail. Don’t position killing the meeting as a critique of its creator or as “we’re too busy for this.” Instead, frame it as evolution:

Sample message to organizer/stakeholders:

“I’ve been thinking about how our [Meeting Name] has evolved. When we started it [timeframe ago], it served a clear purpose: [original goal]. Now that [context has changed / we have new tools / team has grown], I wonder if there’s a better way to achieve that goal—or if the goal itself has shifted.

I’d love to explore either restructuring this meeting to be more impactful or redistributing the work to async channels. Could we chat briefly about what outcome we’re really optimizing for here?”

Key framing principles:

• Assume positive intent (the meeting was useful once)

• Focus on outcomes, not just time savings

• Offer alternatives, don’t just complain

• Make it collaborative, not confrontational

4. Prepare Your Alternative:

Don’t just kill—offer a path forward. Options include:

Option A: Cancel entirely

• Replace with async updates (Slack digest, shared doc, Loom video)

• Trust that if something urgent arises, people will reach out

Option B: Reduce frequency

• Weekly → Biweekly or monthly

• Standing 1-hour → 30 minutes only when needed

Option C: Restructure

• Change format (demo-based, decision-focused, workshop-style)

• Trim attendee list to only essential contributors

• Split into smaller, more focused meetings

Option D: Sunset with a review clause

• Cancel for 4 weeks, then evaluate if anyone actually missed it

• If no one notices, permanent deletion confirmed

5. Execute the Change:

Once you’ve aligned with key stakeholders:

1. Send a clear communication to all attendees explaining:

   • What’s changing and when

   • Why (briefly—focus on positive framing)

   • What replaces it (if anything)

   • How to voice concerns or questions

2. Update the calendar immediately:

   • Cancel future instances or update recurrence

   • Remove the meeting from any shared team calendars

   • Archive notes/documents to a clearly labeled location

3. Set a review checkpoint:

   • “We’re pausing this meeting for the next month. Let’s check in on [date] to see if we need to revisit.”

6. Follow Up (2-4 weeks later):

After the meeting has been dead for a few weeks, close the loop:

Reach out to key participants:

• “Has anything fallen through the cracks since we stopped [Meeting Name]?”

• “Do you feel more or less aligned with [relevant stakeholders/goals]?”

• “What did we learn about how we can collaborate more effectively?”

Share your findings:

• If the meeting is genuinely unmissed, celebrate the time reclaimed

• If gaps emerged, address them with targeted solutions (not by resurrecting the zombie)

• Document the decision and learnings in a shared space

Bonus: If this went well, encourage your team to do their own zombie hunt.

Expected Benefits:

Immediate Wins:

• Time reclaimed: If it’s a 1-hour weekly meeting with 8 attendees, you’ve just freed 32 hours per month

• Increased focus: Reduced context-switching and calendar fragmentation

• Visible leadership: You’ve modeled intentionality and the courage to challenge defaults

Relationship/Cultural Improvements:

• Trust building: Team members see you value their time and attention

• Reduced meeting fatigue: Fewer low-value meetings make high-value ones feel more purposeful

• Permission granting: Others feel empowered to question their own zombie meetings

Long-Term Organizational Alignment:

• Healthier meeting culture: Sets a precedent that all meetings must earn their keep

• Agile mindset: Reinforces that processes should evolve with changing needs

• Intentionality norm: Encourages regular review of all recurring rituals and systems

Bonus Challenge:

After your first zombie kill, try this:

• Institute a “meeting sunset clause”: Every recurring meeting has a 3 or 6-month review date on the calendar when the organizer must re-justify its existence

• Create a “zombie graveyard” document: Track killed meetings and what replaced them—celebrate the wins

---

Let us know how it went and what conversations it sparked! Use the #MLAChallenge hashtag to share your story. Let’s inspire each other to make intentionality everyone’s business.

Bonus points if you share:

• How much time you reclaimed

• What surprised you about the reaction

• What you learned about your team’s collaboration needs

🎯 Remember: The goal isn’t to have fewer meetings—it’s to have better ones. Sometimes the best meeting is the one that doesn’t happen.

---

📝 The Evidence-Based Approach: How to Research B2B Personas That Actually Work

The Question That Changes Everything

Here’s a question that will transform your persona research: Are you asking “When does your company purchase software?” or “When do you purchase software?”

That subtle shift—from company to individual—is the difference between generic, bureaucratic personas that gather dust and powerful research insights that drive product decisions.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I spent months researching “how enterprises buy analytics platforms.” I interviewed CIOs, collected procurement