Derek Zumsteg

Myanmar Fitness Instructor GIF by GIPHY News - Find & Share on GIPHY Discover & share this Myanmar Fitness Instructor GIF by GIPHY News with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

Being on LinkedIn lately is like

media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2l...

I wrote them an email saying "hey, that's a wild fee, what's the deal, and also, it contradicts what's on your FAQ page about what fees you charge and what they're capped at" and the CS response was "please note we only charge this fee when you invest, here's the chart of fees". Sigh.

Honeycomb's "processing fees" for bank accounts at 3% for what's a flat fee per-transaction is crazy town frolics

Honeycomb Credit's "processing fees" for bank payments are *wild* -- they're paying a flat fee for bank payments, and it is not $50. Or $5. This just... an insane amount of extra fee they're extracting here.

And Honeycomb is already charging fees on the other parts of this transaction --

I always want to reply to people who put these together (or panels, or a hundred other things) and say "did you put work into making it this way, or did it just happen? Are you surprised to realize how it turned out? Do you feel an urge to re-do this?"

If you're about to post a "must-read" list or "thought leaders" or whatever, and they're 100% famous white dudes, maybe spare a second to think of whether they need the boost, and don't post that list? And then, hey, take another second to consider diversifying your inputs?

LinkedIn math so far: they showed my abhorrently bait-y post:post that linked out to my long and thoughtful blog post at a ~10:1 ratio.

In you ever wondered why LinkedIn is the way it is 😛

Posted that blog to LinkedIn, saw it get immediately buried, as nearly all "contains link to external content" suffers from, and out of frustration, I posted this linked-in style update. I feel gross.

Blog posts in the same AI vein I'm working on
- why writing these make me feel bad (likely to be more than one)
- why 80% right delivered confidently is so dangerous
- how the "you gotta cram it down their throat" top-down adoption approach is so wrong, and concerning

I want all my competitors to use AI for product strategy And I want them to use it for all their strategy. Slather it everywhere! Make all your vision product strategy auto-generated from auto-polled sources like auto-summarized customer feedback. Becaus…

Blog, in which I try using AI tools for high-level product strategy and emerge hoping all my competitors adopt them.

www.zumsteg.net/2025/07/08/i...

#productmanagement

Bullet one: Easier to Catch: the bright white cover makes these training softballs easier to track and locate, making them easier to catch; Enjoy better visibility, so you do not get lost in the fields. Bullet two: Adorable Present Supplies: our practice softballs are ideal for adult, softball players, and other beginners to learn how to track, throw, and pitch with ease, good gift for family, colleagues, etc.; They will feel your care and love, and your relationship will be improved

Increasingly deranged product description for bulk, cheap softballs concludes with scaring you and then reminding us of the value of human connection:

NASA's concept Origins Space Telescope will for life on exoplanets using the mid-infrared spectrum: vast distances of space to a resolution of a millionth of a meter, the diameter of a human hair. It could still not detect my interest in receiving fundraising requests from James Carville.

The extent to which LinkedIn buries posts that contain outside links surprises me every time. It's almost not worth doing, which seems counter to being a professional social network where everyone's going to be linking to company stuff/news.

Can you use AI throughout product management? I’ve been trying to use AI tools and different models to see how useful they are in helping with Product Management work, testing each one in some detail, and I feel like I’m in a different reality…

I spend 2,000 words going through all the things in ProdPad's "PM's guide to using AI" and talk about where it can work, where it falls short, and why sometimes you shouldn't use AI tools even if you can. www.zumsteg.net/2025/05/16/c...

Youtube message claiming they'll show fewer Shorts on the home page.

Lies Google has told me, a continuing series:

Sick of seeing arguments about the inefficacy of collectively turning off the money faucet to someone who has personally funded global efforts to strip away the already-precarious rights and safety of trans folks. If you want to live that life, do it away from me and stop wasting time equivocating.

Screenshot calling out AI summarization for missing user feedback that they're being poisoned

Testing using AI tools to summarize customer feedback. tldr; potentially useful, you still have to do the reading, because there's still a lot they're missing. Like poison!

www.zumsteg.net/2025/04/11/c...

#productmanagement #ai #chatgpt #claude #grok #gemni

Can AI help product management? Today: failing at rote, boring research Since OpenAI launched I’ve tried to use LLM tools to see if they can help with my work in Product — we have a strange and often-impossible job, which Cagan describes as requiring us to …

I'm blogging trying AI tools for different Product Management work where I've seen it suggested as a good case. First: "go lookup something about each of these IDs" did not go well at allllllllll.

www.zumsteg.net/2025/04/10/c...

Enjoy! Suggest other things! Harvest my frustration!

Email from Monday.com "Your account is now AI-powered!"

Has anyone, ever, gotten an email with a subject line like this and thought "oh thank God, finally, what a joy and relief, can't wait to see this"

Signed a bunch of docs today, one a "here are my aliases/AKA." Intended for "I'm Steve sometimes Stephen" but in practice is "list of name misspellings anyone managed to attach to my credit, ever" ...and you're expected to say "yes my identity includes the time someone called me "Darren Rumstein"

Cold email tactic o' the day: "it's not that I want to bug you, it's my boss" trying to capitalize on your sympathy for others.

Sometimes stakeholder management is wildfire management (I’m doing a talk at Agile on the Beach and in cutting down the content, I’m finding a lot of blog ideas. As always, drop me a line if you have topics or want to chat or whatever) I wan…

A hopefully useful lens as you consider your stakeholder management: www.zumsteg.net/2024/07/01/s...

#productmanagement #product