Every industry I've worked in claimed to be the relationship-based one. After eight of them, I've come around to thinking they were all telling the truth. Just not in the way they meant.

I inherited a new product line at launch. It failed before I'd even learned everyone's names. What followed was a month of hard conversations, a reset forecast, and a result I didn't expect.

Scrappy teams can MacGyver almost any problem. Budget gaps, technical issues, even team dysfunction. But the one thing duct tape can't fix is the thing that quietly kills most product launches.

A COO once asked me how riding motorcycles on a racetrack compares to leading product development. Three parallels that hold up at speed.