1) Core Product Management Mindsets & Judgement

1. Great judgment and insights are a core part of the role to help the team/org make the right decisions and bets often. And be decisive to turn that judgment into effect. See snapshot below of Gmail creator talking about the importance of getting the major decisions and features right.
2. Deeply understand the value and vision of your product and the broader business, market, and industry. Product management often involves hearing wide ranging views from so many users and stakeholders that the soul of the product can get diluted if the PM does not have a feel of the North Star the compass should be pointing to. Take responsibility for shepherding the evolution of the product, and put in the work to do so.
3. Understand the macro/forest. This line by Jobs on seeing 'the city over a few streets' is in my view a critical part of being a strong PM (see the first 30 seconds of this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p-tvud7owQ)
4. The problem stated is NOT necessarily the problem to solve. Most PMs have had the experience of building something eagerly asked for by someone only to realize the output shipped does not deliver the outcome desired. Ask why before what. Well worded by Marty Cagan: "Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results...Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution".
5. The willingness to say 'no' (or ‘not right now’) often. A core responsibility of product management is prioritization, and there is extreme importance in what you don’t build, both for the direct impact on the product (avoiding unnecessary or confusing features for example) and the indirect opportunity cost (what that time and talent could have gone towards instead). This can be an unsung part of the job but recognizing when an idea/feature may not be needed or worth experimenting on can free up invaluable time for an idea/feature that does matter. Saying yes is saying no to something else.
6. At the start of each [day / week / month / quarter / year / initiative] ask 'how can I fail?' This is one of the most useful mental models for thinking in general, and I have found highly applicable to product management. Running through this model will often identify needed work, decisions, and course corrections, and the effects of consistently avoiding these avoidable issues will compound (per Charlie Munger’s inverting model, see here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K90AElLIwv8)
7. Consider the context. A lot of information is non formulizable and may be specific to the feature, product, business, customer, people, etc. but highly matters. Factor in the context.
8. Stay flexible and not overly tied to past views and decisions. Little-known business legend Henry Singleton has perhaps the best operating and capital deployment record in American business history. Singleton credited flexibility as among the most important reasons for his success, saying "I know a lot of people have very strong and definite plans that they’ve worked out on all kinds of things, but we’re subject to a tremendous number of outside influences and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible...I reserve the right to change my position when the facts change...My only plan is to keep coming to work…I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan ahead way into the future."

2) User Understanding & Product Discovery

1. Meet with users often and focus on user experience. Deep knowledge of the user (their issues, desires, how they think) is critical to inform prioritization, feature development, and gain context. Test/demo for contact with reality. Per Marty Cagan: “the most important thing a PM does is put something in front of users”.
2. Collect and analyze the data often. Along with understanding your current and potential users, deep knowledge of the data (metrics/analytics, A/B test results, qualitative data, survey results, etc.) is critical to inform prioritization, feature development, and gain context. Balance intuition with data/evidence.
3. 7 key product dimensions to consider (industry standard template)
   1. User (who is the user)
   2. Action (action they will take/task will do)
   3. Interface (how will the user interact)
   4. Data (what data involved in the action)
   5. Control (controls/perms to perform task)
   6. Environment (env/context user ops in)
   7. Quality Attribute (non functional reqs)
4. 4 key risk dimensions to consider (per Marty Cagan)
   1. Would this add value (value risk)
   2. Can we build it (feasibility risk)
   3. Can they use it (usability risk)
   4. Does this make business sense (viability risk)

3) Teamwork

1. Stay connected with people, it will help you see the macro per above and stay informed on business, users, priorities, etc.
2. Product managers need to give space and autonomy - do not be a bottleneck. Do not be a constraint on the speed of your teammates. Leave a lot of space for influence and responsibility with the engineers (note the value of having product focused engineers)
3. The best ideas are generally not in any one person’s head. Foster discussions and opportunities and norms for various inputs, disagreements, syntheses, and iterations.
4. Work with other departments. Close partnership is needed not just with engineering and design, but business, marketing, legal, support, etc. to get their insight and buy in.
5. Communication skills - written and verbal - are critical to do everything from engaging in requirements understanding to sharing a vision to effectively collaborating on day to day activities to making a pitch to decision makers.
6. Leverage going with the grain of your org (cadence for when to get dependencies in, when to request funding, etc).
7. Add more soul and clarity to your product goals - the definition of your goals can make a real difference on team motivation.

4) Execution & Operations

1. Speed compounds: Per Sam Altman: “Move faster…This year instead of next year. This week instead of next week. Today not tomorrow. Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize.”
2. Small things compound - "You must sand down all the edges and fix the P2 bugs, instead of only focus on the demo paths" (Garry Tan)
3. Product managers need to handle the ‘white space’ that may fall in the gaps of roles and departments, either by taking an action or making sure an action is taken. One of my product management heroes is a former basketball player named Shane Battier whose teams performed far better when he played though none of the primarily tracked stats indicated this should have been the case - all the little things add up. Link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html
4. Iterate: Prototype, test hypotheses early and often, and continue to iterate to ensure you are solving the right problems in the right ways and course correcting / incorporating feedback along the way. This will ultimately both save time and lead to better products. 
5. High agency: overlaps with many others here, take action and responsibility and push things forward
6. Keep the ball rolling: what’s the next action step? Do not let things stall that should be moving forward. “PMs should be comfortable navigating the rough ocean of ambiguity so their teams can operate in the calm seas of clarity” (Shreyas Doshi).
7. Ability to turn ambiguity into clarity and progress. In situations of uncertainty, with multiple options and many of them undefined, PMs need to provide concrete opinions, goals, and actions. “
8. Aim for extreme clarity & make the implicit explicit (about the assumptions you are making, who is doing what, etc). Note the former COO of Stripe, and the current CPO of Meta, both called out this item as one of their top recommendations and keys to success.
9. Provide some degree of a clear process but not too much process (planning cadence, meeting cadence, reporting artifacts, etc). Too much process reduces speed, autonomy, creativity, and high value work. But you need some process and structure to work effectively within and across teams (goal setting, technical design reviews, raising blockers, general collaboration, etc.).
10. People over process; execution over reports. The right people executing at a high level on the right things is more important than anything else, because just about everything else will eventually succeed if you have that and filling you don’t). This is as important as anything else on this list.
11. Activity does NOT equal achievement. The Leverage/Netural/Overhead model (https://coda.io/@shreyas/lno-framework) from Shreyas Doshi is a helpful model of where activity is well spent or not. Attending lots of meetings, sending lots of emails, working lots of hours, are all not the objective function. Spend time thinking of what will really provide value and what you can do to enable that, and focus on those highest leverage actions.
12. You need to find focus blocks (you won’t be able to do the job right without these in your calendar)
13. Passion and Grit. lots of meetings, requests, frustration, details, white noise, reporting, research, etc. Really caring about what you are working on and the endurance that comes with that will support you succeeding at all of the above!

ChatGPT’s new 4.5 model is a material improvement over the 4.0 model

New image generation model from OpenAI, one cool example of the type of impact and use this can have

Impact of AI coding already seen in the world of startups 

Still early but democratizing game development will be a very exciting space to watch out for

Games are going to be huge, Google already doing crazy stuff: https://gamengen.github.io/

Robot technology continuing to improve at a rapid pace, supported by underlying AI acceleration 

VR technology and adoption might still have a ways to go but cool to hear about some real use!