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Getting better all the time
A giant of the Renaissance and a product manager's best trait
Jason Scherschligt
August 25, 2026
At the boyish age of 87, Michelangelo, the famed Renaissance artist, is said to have declared, “Ancora imparo!” Translation: “I am still learning!”
The story may be apocryphal, but I love imagining octogenarian Michelangelo’s unbounded joy in learning. He discovered something new and reveled in the fact of that discovery. In two Italian words—”Ancora imparo!”—we see what animates one of history’s great geniuses: new learning, over a long life.
We moderns could learn a thing or two from old Mike from Florence. Michelangelo’s insistence on unceasing learning throughout a career is especially important for those of us working in digital products. Novelty bombards us, and it can be hard for a well-meaning product pro to keep up. Try this tool. Prompt like this. This framework is hot; stop using that old, cold one.
Once we’ve reached a certain level of experience, it’s easy to respond to the novelty with, “Hey, settle down. I’ve been working on this stuff for a while. I know how this works. I don’t need your new-fangled systems.” But the risk of such an attitude is stagnation. Michelangelo would have hated that.
If you had to pick one characteristic that distinguishes a great product practitioner, you could do worse than choose straight-up, unadulterated curiosity. So I say Be like Mike. Never stop learning. Ask a ton of questions, and keep questioning the answers. Why do people in our market struggle with this problem? How could we generate value if we solved it for our users? Oh wow. That’s how it works? I am still learning!
Here’s a back-to-school season challenge for all of us. Think of something related to your professional life that you would like to understand better. Then, create a plan to help you learn it. If that sounds overwhelming, enlist the help of an artificial intelligence tool. For example, try feeding your favorite LLM a prompt like this:
“I want to improve my ability to understand unexpressed customer needs for different types of users in the legal services industry. Give me a list of foundational materials to consume (articles, videos, books, podcasts). Then produce a personalized actionable learning plan I can complete over the next 6-8 weeks. Make sure this plan includes practical, real-world interactions with users, not just exercises I perform in my office. Finally, build a simple rubric I can use to evaluate my progress.”
Give it a try, and then commit to the learning. You might experience a rebirth—you know, a renaissance.
On to the Garden,
Around the Garden
A Product Expert’s AI Odyssey
Check it out: The Call to Adventure, Teresa Torres (Video + Illustrated Transcript)
In this recent talk, well-known product writer and speaker Teresa Torres (known for Continuous Discovery Habits and the Opportunity-Solution Tree) chronicles her 15-month journey to build her AI skills and incorporate AI in her product coaching work. Pollinator readers will appreciate her humility and her storytelling.
The tale begins when Torres broke her leg in March 2025. While out of commission, she identified an opportunity to augment her expertise (product discovery) with AI capabilities. She underwent a crash course in engineering principles and tools, using Claude as a guide. Over the next year, Torres ended up building new products and rethinking her entire business and service offering to take advantage of what she’d learned. It’s a rip-roaring tale. If you have thirty minutes, watch the video. Otherwise, the illustrated transcript is a quick read.
I've been on my own journey to discover how to adapt my thinking and practices using AI, while preserving the things that are important for humans to retain. It was helpful for me to hear a respected and experienced product expert like Teresa Torres describe her own journey (which is still very much in process). I think you’ll appreciate it, too.
“Everything around us is changing. New jobs are being created. Jobs are going away. Our roles are changing. Our product trios are collapsing.
We're being asked to do all sorts of new things. We are all being called to adventure. Every single one of us. All I did was I heeded the call. I took the first step. The first step led to the next step. That step led to the next step.”
Financial Acumen
Check it out: Owning the Financials: The Future of Product Management?, by Corinna Stukan, InsightsDriven
While contemporary product managers tend to be skilled at discovery, prioritizing, prototyping, and communicating, their financial acumen often lags in comparison. Corinna Stukan aims to fix that. She writes a newsletter called InsightsDriven on business insights for product professionals. In this issue, she helps product anagers become more financially astute. In fact, business financial literacy might be the single most important thing that a product manager can learn.
Stukan is an entrepreneur and an executive. She has made tough financial decisions and knows her way around a balance sheet. I appreciate how she frames product financials as a learning opportunity, and supports that with actionable steps that any product manager can understand and apply. Her key steps:
Get crystal clear on your business
Do a side project
Lose the mental blocks
Finally, Stukan connects the financial advice she offers with Product Management’s history, dating back to the famed Procter & Gamble “brand man” concept. She sees a future where product management is anchored in business, not just tech. After all, technology trends come and go. But delivering financial results never goes out of style.
“To truly contribute to a company's financial success, you have to shift your mindset outside just the product roadmap. Sometimes the business goals can be achieved by improving your features and your platform, but sometimes the answer might also lie in collaborating more closely with sales or marketing to make it happen.”
From Parts Unknown
Check it out: Mapping the Unknown — The 10 Steps to Map Any Industry, by Steve Blank, on Medium
One of the wilder things about being a consultant on digital product topics is exposure to industries and problems that I’d never even considered. Topics I’ve learned about as a consultant at SDG include methane emissions in the global oil & gas industry, training for HVAC technicians, logistics for transporting road salt, and drones that monitor the health of crops. Each of these domains is populated by companies, vocabulary, history, regulations, and lore—and it’s all worth knowing.
Product professionals are often well-schooled in technology, prioritization frameworks, and communication methods, but woefully on their own when it comes to learning how their product’s industry actually operates. This brief, delightful article from entrepreneurship and product legend Steve Blank helps us overcome this gap. Blank’s article is a few years old (2022), but it’s one of the clearest explanations I've seen for understanding the structure of an industry.
Blank’s process is iterative and additive, much like his famed lean methods for prototyping and MVP-making. Think of it as “lean industry immersion.” I like how his process unfolds through drafting and iteration: to me, this is essentially a writerly approach. He advises starting with quick lists of companies you know about, then building connections to indicate relationships, then adding details as your research uncovers more of the landscape.
Whatever industry opportunity comes my way next (Beekeeping? Soup-making?), I’ll use Blank’s process to comprehend it.
“Drawing a diagram of the relationships of companies in an industry can help you deeply understand how the industry works and who the key players are. Start building one immediately. As you find you can’t fill in all the relationships, the gaps outlining what you need to learn will become immediately visible.”
O Captain! My Captain!
Check it out: Captain, Coach, and Counselor: The Multifaceted Role of a Product Design Lead, by Robyn Johnson, on Medium. Recommended by SDG’s Allison Lorenzo.
SDG colleague Allison Lorenzo is a skilled and sensitive UX designer, analyst, and collaborator. So when Allison recommended this post from Robyn Johnson, I had to check it out. Johnson, a product design lead at IBM, uses her own experience to explain how a product design lead—her job—needs to deftly bounce across three different roles: captain, coach, and counselor. Here’s SDGer Allison describing why this matters:
“Product design leads are unusual because they're accountable for team outcomes but don't have actual authority over the people doing the work, which can be really challenging…They are also magnets for venting from both designers and stakeholders, so there's a lot of emotional management (Counseling). I've experienced this too, but never thought of it as a trend that design leads are uniquely positioned for. Robyn Johnson’s post helped simplify and explain this in a way that’s easy for working designers to grasp.”
More blossoms
The Future of the Website. If you feel like our beloved World Wide Web has lost its way, this article might soothe your soul. Here entrepreneur and web standards expert Joost de Valk describes how the web of the future will simultaneously serve human and agentic users, and how a technically perfect, standards-based system is now totally possible, and preferable. Lovely.
Intentionally Human: Product Managers in the AI Era. Jeremy Daly is the kind of product leader the Pollinator loves: he sees product work as fundamentally a human endeavor. In this post he examines AI’s effects on product management through a series of “from-to” shifts, including From PRDs to Prototypes, From Feedback to Fluidity, and From Ideas to Instant Iteration. My favorite is probably From Operators to Orchestrators.
Too Good With People. Product managers need to communicate, collaborate, and influence in every direction: in, out, and up. The ability to interact with all types of people is often described as a product manager’s superpower. But here product consultant Noa Ganot argues that skill in interacting with people can actually doom a product manager’s success. She summarizes this in a pithy subheading: “They didn’t hire you to agree.”
The AI Competence / Judgment Gap. One of our favorite product writers, Itamar Gilad, tackles one of our favorite topics, wisdom and judgment in product management. The coolest insight is his description of a “danger zone” in AI-enabled product: “With AI, your proficiency level in doing exceeds your proficiency level in judging. In other words, AI lets you do work that you’re poorly equipped to judge. A PM may generate bad production code and a developer may choose bad ideas, and neither can tell the difference.”
Outside the Box
iFixit describes itself as “a global repair community of people helping each other fix their stuff.” The most prominent feature of the site is a vast directory of diagrams and manuals for all manner of devices, machines, and doodads. If you need to fix, say, a broken spring-loaded tape measure, iFixit will have the manual that shows you exactly what’s happening inside the mechanism. There’s also an engaged community of advocates for repairability, guided by the slogan “the future is repairable.”
Check it out at https://ifixit.com.
About the Pollinator
The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.
Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.
The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].
Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.
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