Other actors have portrayed Optimus in different iterations of The Transformers series over the years and did great work. But Cullen’s voice is the gold standard that every other Optimus needs to measure up to. His deep, steady delivery gave the character gravitas. And more than that, it made him sound wise, courageous, caring, and good.

He helped transform Optimus into more than just a hero. He helped forge him into a role model. One of mine, actually.

And Cullen had a pretty good role model of his own: His brother Larry.

“Be strong enough to be gentle.”

In 2018, Cullen was asked at a convention about where he got the idea for Optimus’ voice. He revealed that his inspiration was his brother Larry, a decorated Marine Corps captain:

“It was 1984 and we were living in an apartment together and he would always take a little interest in where I was going. He said, ‘Peter, where are you going today?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to audition; I’m auditioning to be a truck. Evidently he’s a hero truck.’ Larry’s a hero and his face got somber. He said, ‘Peter, if you’re going to be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be a Hollywood hero with all the BS. All the yelling and screaming and trying to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.’ His voice was ringing in my ears as I’m driving to the audition. I read the copy and Larry was just coming out. His
voice, the way he talked to me. And it said, ‘I’m Optimus Prime.’ The words just rolled off my tongue.”

– Peter Cullen

I obviously didn’t know any of that when I was watching The Transformers as a kid. I just knew that Optimus Prime was what a leader should be: Strong, compassionate, decisive, able to lead by example, and ready to do the right thing even at great personal cost.

Those are pretty good lessons for a little boy.

And they’re good lessons for a product leader, today, too.

“We didn’t know he was an icon.”

After two seasons of TV adventures, the Transformers made their feature film debut in 1986, and the unthinkable happened.

They killed Optimus.

Major character deaths aren’t necessarily unusual in entertainment today: Dumbledore, Mufasa, and others have broken plenty of young hearts over the last thirty years. But in the mid-1980s, killing the heroic leader of an ongoing cartoon series was shocking. Kids cried in theaters. Parents complained. Hasbro, the owner of the toy line, was flooded with letters and phone calls.

Because they’d misunderstood their own product.

From their perspective, Optimus Prime was part of a toy line. There were new toys to sell, which meant making room for new characters.

But kids weren’t attached to a SKU.

They loved Optimus Prime.

Many decades later, a story consultant on the movie admitted to The Hollywood Reporter:

“We didn’t know that he was an icon. It was a toy show. We just thought we were killing off the old product line to replace it with new products.”

– Flint Dille

As business leaders, we can review sales numbers, usage metrics, or whatever other data we have and assume we understand why people value our products. But sometimes there’s more going on than meets the eye.

Hasbro knew Transformers was popular. They apparently didn’t understand that Optimus was irreplaceable.

Ironically, neither did Peter Cullen.

The fan letters the cast never saw

Forty years ago, there was no social media. There were no Transformers conventions. And according to Cullen, the cast didn’t receive fan mail. So when Optimus was killed, Cullen was out of a job. And he told Den of Geek that he’d wondered if his character had been killed off because he wasn’t good enough.

I was reading the movie script, getting ready to go into recording. I got to the page, and I just read it and when the dust settled in my brain, I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is it, I’m not coming back.’ […] There was no explanation, there was no intended meaning behind it. [So] at the time you interpret that as being ‘my character sucks; God, I must have been terrible in this role.’

– Peter Cullen

Cullen continued working steadily after the original Transformers ended, including voicing Eeyore for Disney and (I didn’t realize until the last few days) providing the sounds of the Predator in 1987’s Predator. But for nearly two decades, other actors carried the Matrix as Optimus Prime. Then in 2007, he returned to the role of Optimus Prime in the big budget Transformers movie by director Michael Bay. And he continued on in that role on Transformers: Prime, the War For Cybertron video games, and many other projects.

It’s still wild to me that Cullen had no idea, for so long, of the impact he’d had on so many GenX kids.

To their credit, Hasbro acted relatively quickly to bring Optimus back in 1987’s The Return of Optimus Prime… but things took a grim detour first in the episode Dark Awakening where Optimus returns as a zombie and is seemingly killed again at the end.

No matter what Hasbro did to Optimus, Cullen’s warmth and humanity shone through. I carried the leadership lessons I learned from his Optimus into adulthood. And whenever I read a Transformers comic book, it’s his version of Optimus that I hear.

In the 80s, Cullen didn’t get fan mail and Hasbro didn’t understand its audience. But both of them were closer to something great than they knew.

We won’t always see our own impact, and we may not immediately understand why people love what we’ve helped make. Both of those are good reasons to stay curious. And Larry’s advice isn’t bad either: Be strong enough to be gentle.

Closing Thought

Cullen’s surviving family made a simple request: “Honor Peter’s remarkable legacy by serving your communities and leading others with compassion, integrity and loyalty and always remembering to be strong enough to be gentle.”

As much influence as he had on me, I didn’t know Peter Cullen personally or what he believed about God. But I do know this: I know Jesus loved us enough to live and die for us so that anyone who trusts in him and believes God raised him from the dead would have eternal life and be adopted into his family. I hope Peter is using his talents right now to give voice to characters and stories that make heaven rejoice.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Cullen.

’Til all are one.

Bonus Content

At a convention earlier this year, Cullen and Frank Welker (Megatron) reflected on their experiences working on Transformers: The Movie as part of its 40th anniversary celebration. They discuss the recording process, what it was like to work with Orson Welles, and joke about lessons learned.

On September 17, we’ll be able to hear Cullen voice Optimus in an all-new chapter added to the re-release of the 1986 movie.

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Waters flow faster
But gaps among river rocks
Revive weary fish

Today’s product management haiku was inspired by a recent interview with Emily Tate, a CPO and former Managing Director of Mind the Product, where she expressed a concern about remote work. Her observation is that working remotely can erode some of the fun and informal connections that build teams as we build products.

It’s a fair point. In product management, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to work better. We optimize processes, eliminate extraneous meetings, and experiment with new ways to shorten and improve learning cycles. That’s all good. But as AI and new tools help things flow faster, I don’t think product leaders should try to make everything flow faster.

The gaps among the river rocks aren’t necessarily inefficiencies to optimize away. To keep teams energized and our humanity intact, we need to wisely protect unproductive moments.

Fish need still water to recover from fighting the current, right? Well, people need unstructured time to slow down and actually connect with each other.

And it doesn’t take much.

Be willing to joke. Tell a story. Even better, listen to one. As product leaders, every time we spend a few minutes talking about someone’s kids, dog, or even the fish tank behind them, we’re implicitly telling everyone else that they’re allowed to be people at work too.

Bonus Content

Speaking of remote work, let’s check in with Professor Robert Kelly. You may remember him from the viral moment back in 2017 when his 4-year-old daughter hopped into his home office and crashed his live TV interview… and then his 9-month-old son rolled into the room… and then his wife literally slid into the room to round them up. In March 2026, the family spoke with Inside Edition and confirmed he still conducts regular remote interviews, but they now have a lock on the door.

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Which is still a slightly surreal sentence for me to type.

If you’ve followed Product Management Meets Pop Culture for a while, you may have noticed that I slowed down publishing here for a bit. Part of the reason for that? I needed to make room in my schedule to do some long-form writing.

Around 2020, I found myself wishing there were more stories for teenagers, especially boys, that were exciting, a little dark and weird, and also treated things like truth, faith, courage, family and friendship seriously.

Eventually I decided I should stop wishing somebody would write a story like that and try writing one myself.

The result is a supernatural fantasy/suspense story called Sam Vale: The Sword of Truth, the first book in the Coldwater Chronicles.

Writing the novel turned out to be a bit harder than having an idea for the novel. And in some ways, writing and self-publishing Sam Vale was a surprisingly good product management exercise. You have a target audience, a problem you’re trying to solve, an enormous backlog of things you could add or change… and eventually you have to stop iterating and ship the thing.

What’s Sam Vale: The Sword of Truth About?

Sam is a teenager who has always made sense of the world through his sketchbook. But something is wrong in his hometown of Coldwater. People aren’t acting like themselves. Authority figures can’t necessarily be trusted. And the things Sam sketches?

They’re not staying on the page.

And something ancient has been watching him draw.

Early reviewers have compared it to Stranger Things, which I take as a compliment. So if you like that show, there’s a decent chance you’ll like this too.

So here’s the shameless plug part: If it sounds like your kind of story, or you know a teenager who might enjoy it, I’d love for you to check it out.

Sam Vale is available on Amazon on Kindle (free with Kindle Unlimited), paperback, and hardcover.

And if you do read it, an honest Amazon or Goodreads review (good, bad, and/or ugly) would mean a lot.

Bonus Content

Apparently, product managers writing novels is a thing. A small thing, but still a thing. Check these out:

• Aldona Martynenka, a PM in Sweden, published her debut novel The Snow Melted in August in 2024
• Tara Tai is a product manager at Google and published their debut novel Single Player in 2025
• Christine Smonk, a PM based in Toronto, has her debut novel The Minute Givers debuting in January 2027

Are you planning to join the club?

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The hiring manager Jordan looks down at his notes. “Okay, pretty standard question. What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

Priya doesn’t hesitate. “Discovery.”

Jordan is taken aback by her candor. “Really? Why do you say that?”

“Well… before I answer, can I ask what you’re hoping to learn from the question?”

Jordan pauses. “I guess I want to understand where you think you have room to grow.”

“Got it. And when you say ‘room to grow,’ are you thinking primarily about skills, behaviors, or experience?”

“Um… any of those.”

“Okay. And what would you do differently based on my answer?”

Jordan puts down his pen. “You sure like to ask questions.”

Priya makes a note. “Interesting.”

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Most of us have felt it at some point in our product careers. That nagging feeling that you’re a fraud. That the successes you’ve experienced have essentially come down to good luck, good timing, or aligning yourself to competent people who carried you through.

Impostor syndrome is remarkably common among product managers. And it’s easy to see why. We don’t code, design, or sell. We do somewhat amorphous things like prioritize, position, articulate tradeoffs, and conduct discovery.

Other roles often have more tangible, immediate results. Product managers rarely get such clean feedback loops. Metrics move slowly, markets move quickly, and we’re expected to understand buyers, users, business and technology trends, competitors, and a dozen other things while routinely making decisions without complete information.

It’s easy to feel like everyone else knows something you don’t. It’s easy to doubt yourself.

But not knowing everything doesn’t make you an impostor. Good product managers aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know which questions to ask, how to find the answers, and how to bring the right people together to act on them.

Bonus Content

You’re not an empty suit. But the Gentleman Ghost definitely is. James “Jim” Craddock is an intriguing Batman villain that the caped crusader has been battling since the late ‘70s. Marvelous Videos explains Gentleman Ghost’s history in this video.

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It was remarkably easy to get roadmap alignment.

Meet Pup Trio

I created an iMessage sticker pack featuring a trio of cartoon dogs: a pug, a black lab, and a German shepherd.

The initial release of Pup Trio in June featured 13 stickers and some iterations. That wasn’t enough, so I went back to work. And now the updated Pup Trio is here!

The new version adds 20 more stickers, bringing the total to 33, with new expressions, seasonal options, and additional ways for a cartoon dog to communicate things you don’t feel like typing yourself.

The cast remains the same:

• The Pug: Dramatic, endlessly expressive, and always feeling something big.
• The Black Lab: Food-motivated, easily impressed, and up for absolutely anything.
• The German Shepherd: A little sassy, a lot loyal, and always has an opinion.

And now here’s the shameless plug part: If you use an iPhone or iPad and your text messages could benefit from more cartoon dogs, Pup Trio: Vibe Pack is available on the App Store for $0.99.

Sneak Preview

One more thing: You can expect at least one more update in 2026… including two additions to the pack itself. Here’s a teaser:

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The Thompson Twin’s 1983 pop song “We Are Detective” tells the playful story of detectives who are being spied on by other detectives, and there are lessons in here for how product management and UX can better cooperate to drive bigger business outcomes.

The lyrics go like this:

Somebody’s watching me
And now I’m nervous
And I shouldn’t be
Somebody’s got their eye on me
Perhaps I should invite him up for tea?

We saw him smoking by the newspaper stand
There’s something odd about his gloved left hand
Saw him again inside the old cafe
He makes us tense
We wish he’d go away

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

Somebody’s after me
He left his footprints by the garden tree
Last night when I got home
I got the feeling I was not alone!

Someone is on our tail
We think they’re opening up our morning mail
And now each time the telephone rings,
We think of frightening thing.

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

We dress up in disguise
To get away from all those prying eyes
Our friends all think we’re mad
But we know better
’cause the spy is bad!

We are detective
We are select
We are detective
Come to collect

“Somebody’s watching me, and now I’m nervous and I shouldn’t be”

In product development, there’s often a delicate dance between product management and UX, not unlike the dueling sets of detectives in the song.

Both often see themselves as detectives or investigators, which is not wrong. But, in my experience, sometimes they can see themselves as adversaries — in a low-key battle over who “owns” the user, or what is the “right” definition of success.

Instead of feeling like they’re in competition against one another, they can tackle complex problems more effectively by acknowledging “we are detective” and leveraging their distinct skills to drive the business forward.

“We are detective, come to collect”

An effective way to cultivate an environment of mutual respect and collaboration is to acknowledge that neither side truly understands where the other is coming from and intentionally take action to rectify that:

• Encourage product managers and UX team members to shadow one another so that product managers can learn more about the design process, and UX can learn more about product strategy
• Establish regular feedback loops to discuss progress, share insights, and address roadblocks
• Create shared metrics to align on common goals and objectives

“We dress up in disguise to get away from all those prying eyes…”

Product managers may define success in terms of business outcomes while UX may define success in terms of task success rate and error rates. But more effective teams will realize there are overlapping metrics that help both teams understand the broader picture.

Shared metrics that help align product management and UX typically include:

• Net Promoter Score – Indicates if a user is happy enough with your product or service to recommend it to others (UX) which directly correlates with renewal rate (product management)
• Active Users – Measures the number of users engaging with the product on a regular basis, which helps validate market demand for the product (product management) and provide insights on behavior patterns for optimization and enhancements (UX)
• Feature Adoption Rate – Identifies features that resonate with users which informs roadmap, external messaging and BDR outreach (product management) and future design enhancements (UX)
• User Retention Rate – Indicates the percentage of users who continue to use the product over a specific period of time
• Revenue & Conversion Metrics – Understanding revenue generated from product sales or conversions, as well as conversion rates for key user actions, indicates what to do more or less of in the future.

By tracking and discussing these shared metrics, UX and product management teams can assess the impact of their efforts, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance the overall user experience and drive business success.

And in that way, they’ll no longer need to dress up in disguise to get away from all those prying eyes, because together they’ll uncover the truths that no single detective could ever surmise.

Unless that detective was Sherlock Holmes. But that’s a whole other post altogether.

Bonus Content

Enjoy the official music video for We Are Detective:

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January

High: M3GAN
Creepy, funny, and featuring the year’s first dancing killer robot. An appropriate start to 2023.

Low: Velma
An adult reinvention of Scooby-Doo could’ve been interesting. Instead, YouTuber Disparu’s episode-by-episode dissections proved to be way more entertaining than the show itself.

Product: Stack Your Strategy
Ravi Mehta’s Product Strategy Stack connects mission, strategy, roadmap, and goals so they tell one coherent story instead of becoming disconnected planning exercises.

K-9 Crime: Officer Ice Pleads the Fifth
A Michigan police dog gets accused of stealing another officer’s lunch. Attorneys offer to represent him pro-bone-o.

Best 33-Pound Moon Costume: Miss USA
Hats off to Miss USA R’Bonney Gabriel, who competed at Miss Universe wearing an enormous 33-pound NASA-inspired moon costume. One small step for pageantry, one giant leap for shoulder strength.

Reading: Edison’s Conquest of Mars
Thanks to 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, I discovered the 1898 unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds in which Thomas Edison leads humanity back to Mars to take the fight to the Martians.

February

High: Jesus Revolution
A faith-based movie about the Jesus movement of the 1970s becomes an unexpected box-office hit.

Low: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Marvel swaps out the goofy, grounded charm that made the first two Ant-Man movies a success for a bigger, overstuffed, CGI-driven mess. The results: Tiny laughs and smaller box office.

Product: Growth Inflections
Lenny Rachitsky studied what happened immediately before successful products hit major growth inflection points. Turns out, most were driven by improving the product itself. Who could’ve guessed the best growth strategy focuses on making the thing better?

Preventative Measures: Bear Necessities
Japanese police, firefighters, and zoo workers practiced how to capture an escaped bear by using an employee in a bear costume. The drill tested a lot of things. Being convincing wasn’t one of them.

RIP: Raquel Welch

March

Game Changer: GPT-4
OpenAI released GPT-4, dramatically raising expectations for what gen AI could do. Around the world, boardroom presentation slides about NFTs were swapped out for slides about AI.

Low: Shazam! Fury of the Gods
The first Shazam! was about a boy who says a magic word to turn into an adult superhero, and it was a pleasant surprise. The only magic word audiences needed for this sequel was “nope.”

Product: What Exactly Is a Product Strategy?
Roman Pichler cuts through the ambiguity by focusing product strategy on four questions: Who are the customers? What needs will we address? How will the product benefit the business? And how will it stand out?

AI Has Entered the Chat: Balenciaga Pope
An AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing an enormous white puffer coat fooled a remarkable number of people. For a man famous for skipping the fancy vestments, it might be the least on-brand image the internet has ever produced.

April

High: The Super Mario Bros. Movie
A fun trip to the Mushroom Kingdom, even if it was very strange hearing the wrong voice come out of Mario’s mouth.

Low: Bud Light
A marketing partnership triggers a customer backlash, resurfaced comments from the company’s VP of marketing add fuel to the fire, and Anheuser-Busch responds in a way that seems to satisfy nobody. Whatever your politics, it’s a fascinating lesson in knowing your customer and being prepared to own your brand decisions.

Product: The ChatGPT Hype: Separating Reality From Fiction in Product
Ambre Josse offers some timely advice for everyone suddenly being asked to put ChatGPT into their products: Start with the customer problem, not the trendy technology you’re trying to add.

At the Movies: Movie Moose
A moose walks into a movie theater, chows down on popcorn, and gets a Happy Meal box stuck over his snout. Wildlife experts confirm that Happy Meals are not part of a moose’s natural diet.

RIP: Harry Belafonte and Jerry Springer

May

High: Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo #7
Marc Silvestri brings his excellent series to a close by forcing Batman into a three-front battle and a “nuclear option” just to get everyone out alive.

Low: Bud Light, Part II
April’s marketing controversy turns into a full-fledged business crisis as Bud Light’s sales continue to plunge, falling 24.6% year over year during one week in May. The consequences of alienating customers turn out to last considerably longer than a social-media news cycle.

Product: Putting ChatGPT to Work
Jing Hu explores practical ways product managers can use ChatGPT in their work.

Twitter: Verified Chaos
The confusion surrounding Twitter’s new blue-check system rolls into May, with verification no longer necessarily meaning what it did before. Changing a familiar product signal while leaving the signal itself intact turns out to be pretty confusing.

Decidedly Non-Tabular: Innuendo Iceberg
A photographer from Dildo, Newfoundland, captures a remarkably phallic 30-foot iceberg floating in Conception Bay. Yes, every part of that sentence is real.

RIP: Tina Turner

June

High: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Somehow, one of the best Spider-Man movies gets an equally inventive sequel. Maybe Hollywood will realize that superhero fatigue doesn’t apply when you make a really good superhero movie.

Low: The Flash
After years of development, controversy, hype, and extraordinary claims about how good it was, The Flash finally races into theaters… and quickly exits out the back door.

Product: Be an Umbrella, Not a Funnel
Rich Mironov asks what product leaders owe their teams and offers a wonderfully memorable principle: Protect your team from organizational chaos instead of simply funneling that chaos down to them.

Viral Rewind: Poultry Portal
For reasons unknown, the New York Post resurfaces the wonderfully bizarre tale of how a Turkish man’s disappearing chickens led to the rediscovery of the ancient underground city of Derinkuyu.

RIP: The Iron Sheik and John Romita Sr.

July

High: Barbenheimer
I didn’t see Barbie or Oppenheimer in theaters, but could not escape the Internet turning two wildly different movies opening on the same day into a cultural event. Sometimes your customers come up with the marketing campaign for you.

Low: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
The Indiana Jones series ended with the original trilogy. Everything since has been a fever dream brought on by snake bites.

Product: Minimum Lovable Product
Jiaona Zhang makes the case for building a Minimum Lovable Product instead of settling for a viable one. Don’t just ask what’s minimally necessary to solve the problem; find what customers love and lean into it.

RIP: Paul Reubens, Tony Bennett, and Sinéad O’Connor

August

High: Helsing
I discovered Pat Shand’s Helsing comics this month and loved them. Liesel Van Helsing is the daughter of the legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, a brilliant inventor, and hunts all the nasty creatures who stick to the shadows.

Low: Blue Beetle
The trailer declared “Batman is a fascist” and that was enough for me to sit this one out. It’s such a fundamental misreading of Batman that I had no desire to find out what else the movie had to say.

Product: Four Questions for When You’re Stuck
Caroline Clark offers four coaching questions product managers can ask when they’re stuck, helping change perspective and find a way forward. That’s especially useful in a job where so much depends on influencing people you don’t directly manage.

Read the Fine Print: Zoom + AI
Zoom faces a backlash after users discover language in its terms of service that raises questions about whether customers themselves could be used to train AI.

RIP: Bob Barker and Arleen Sorkin

September

High: Batman: Venom
I finally read the classic story of Batman’s struggle with the strength-enhancing drug that would eventually become synonymous with Bane. There’s a product management lesson hiding in this one that I need to come back to.

Low: The Market
September lives up to its reputation as a lousy month for stocks: the Dow drops 3.4%, the S&P 500 loses 4.8%, and the Nasdaq falls 5.8%. Ouch.

Product: Quality + Consistency
After reaching 500,000 newsletter subscribers, Lenny Rachitsky shares ten lessons he’s learned along the way, including one that resonates deeply with me: Quality + consistency = all that matters.

RIP: Jimmy Buffett

October

High: RiffTrax’s Amityville Dollhouse
Just in time for Halloween, RiffTrax takes on the 1996 horror movie featuring a dollhouse replica of the infamous Long Island location.

Low: Batman #138
To change his former Robin’s anti-hero behavior, Batman secretly reprograms Jason Todd’s mind so that adrenaline triggers debilitating fear. You’d think the guy whose own mind was altered by people he trusted might have second thoughts about this approach.

Product: Think Critically
Eira Hayward makes the case for critical thinking as an essential PM skill: Distinguish data from opinion, uncover assumptions, ask better questions, and don’t simply accept the information put in front of you.

Classics Illustrated: The Scarlet Letter
I read the Manga Classics adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter — and it was excellent. Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!

RIP: Matthew Perry, Richard Roundtree, and Suzanne Somers

November

High: A Strange Habit of Mind
Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter mentally reconstructs scenes, imagining different versions of events until he can intuit what really happened. This is the second book in the ongoing series about an ex-operative turned academic who still solves crimes. Excellent thriller.

Low: WeWork
WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, files for bankruptcy. I’d used their spaces occasionally and liked the concept, which is a good reminder that a product providing real customer value doesn’t necessarily mean the business behind it will work in the long run.

Product: Two Paths Are Better Than One
Susana Lopes makes the case for dual-track product career ladders so great individual contributors don’t have to become managers simply to advance. Having moved from the IC track mentoring PMs into leading a product team myself, this one particularly resonates.

AI Has Entered the Boardroom: OpenAI
OpenAI fires CEO Sam Altman, then brings him back five days later with most of the board replaced.

December

High: Godzilla Minus One
An absolutely terrific Godzilla movie, including one of my favorite sequences of the year as Godzilla pursues a tiny boat across the ocean.

Low: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Ten years after Man of Steel kicked things off, this version of the DC cinematic universe comes to an end with one last underwhelming trip to Atlantis. Not so much a grand finale as a deflated fizzle.

Product: Back to Basics
Christian Idiodi goes back to the essence of product management: Create something valuable for the customer and viable for the business while partnering with design and engineering to address usability and feasibility.

Deck The Halls: Christmas Margaritas
I discovered the Christmas margarita this year. Merrymaking ensued.

AI Has Entered the Dance Floor: Optimus Gen 2
We started the year watching M3GAN dance, so it seems appropriate to end it with Tesla unveiling an updated Optimus humanoid robot that can dance too. Fortunately, it was all dancing, no murdering.

What Were Your Favorite Stories From 2023?

AI was obviously the biggest through-line of the year. My biggest surprise? Godzilla Minus One. I expected to enjoy it. I did not expect it to become one of my favorite movies of the year. What moments from 2023 stand out to you?

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Bonus Content

Entrepreneur Dave Ramsey shares practical advice on how to simplify making more effective decisions:

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In the Hostess ad Blown About, the Human Torch’s battle against the villainous Blow Dryer provides a tasty framework for helping Product Managers navigate an ever-changing market landscape.

< SPOILER WARNING >

This article features key plot points from one of these bizarre 40-year-old comic book ads. Actually… the entirety of this bizarre 40-year-old comic book ad is pictured below. So, consider yourself warned!

< / SPOILER WARNING >

Our story ad begins with Blow Dryer attempting to rob a high society party using her supersonic hair dryer.

The Human Torch happens to be flying by and notices the nefarious activity.

Our villainess selects her new target…

… and nearly snuffs out his flames!

Realizing he’s no match for her weapon, Torch pivots his approach. He reaches for the pile of Hostess Cup Cakes, left out in the sun, at this high society party.

He tosses the pastries at her, and she drops her weapon.

She’s so distracted by the chocolaty cake and icing that the Torch is able to capture her and save the day.

“I’ve Got To Get Her Hands Off That Blow Dryer…”

Product managers don’t often face off against supersonic hair dryers — but we often face situations where existing strategies or product offerings no longer align with the evolving market landscape and customer preferences, and we need to adapt.

Because the Human Torch lives in an alternate universe where everyone is head-over-heels in love with Hostess products, his solution is straightforward. No need to gather data or beta test. Just grab a fistful of Hostess cup cakes and you’re good to go.

In our reality, we need to adapt to stay relevant. But we need to be a bit more data-informed.

We need the H.O.S.T.E.S.S. Framework.

The H.O.S.T.E.S.S. Framework

When your product is no longer resonating, this delicious framework provides a proactive approach to adapt and improve:

• H: Helpful Data – Start by collecting pertinent data: Key performance metrics, customer feedback, market trends, competitor behaviors.
• O: Objective Analysis – Look for trends, shifts in behavior, changes in preference by audience segments.
• S: Strategic Reconnection – Engage directly with customers to uncover insights on preferences, pain points, needs. Customer surveys can help with quantitative data. Customer workshops can provide qualitative data.
• T: Transformative Plan – Based on insights gathered, define new objectives, key changes, updated value proposition. Be clear about your intentions and how success will be measured.
• E: Excellent Execution – Collaborate with the team to make prioritized changes based on expected impact and feasibility.
• S: Strategic Communication – Communicate changes to internal teams and external stakeholders. Articulate how changes align with business goals and benefit customers and users.
• S: Systematic Measurement – Continuously gather feedback and regularly assess KPIs to track the impact of your changes. If measurements are not trending in the right direction, consider further adjustments.

By following the H.O.S.T.E.S.S. action plan, Product Managers can taste sweet success without all the extra calories.

Bonus Content

In this fan film, the voice cast dramatize another Hostess Twinkies ad starring the Human Torch, Hot Tempered Triumph:

Want more Hostess comic book ads? Check out the Indispensable Hostess Comic Ads Checklist.

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Rebney is probably the most famous person you’ve never heard of, but you have likely heard his voice. He was a former RV salesman whose hysterical, explosive, profanity-laced outbursts circulated on VHS tapes in the 1990s and then became one of the web’s first viral sensations in the early 2000s.

In 2009, a documentary crew caught up with Rebney and helped viewers get to know the man behind the cursing montage.

Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer discovered Rebney living alone, on top of a mountain, unaware of his fame. And we meet a man who is far smarter and lovable than you’d expect based on his on-the-job meltdown.

Upon Rebney’s passing, Steinbauer told Entertainment Weekly:

“Jack was the holy grail of VHS heroes we wanted to meet but we were nervous he’d hate us or throw a punch. Instead, when we met him at a show and he saw how much joy his hilarious outtakes brought people, he actually hugged us at the end of the night! And keep in mind, this is a man who called a fly a ‘[expletive] jackass.’ We’ve all had frustrating days at work but none of us has expressed it as colorfully or eloquently as Jack Rebney. He will be missed.”

– Ben Steinbauer

I will admit: I’ve watched the viral clips of Rebney multiple times over the last 15 years and I laugh out loud every time as if it is the first time I’ve seen them.

Of course, I’m laughing at Rebney’s explosive reactions to the heat, to the flies, to his own inability to remember the script that he wrote himself.

But I’m also laughing at myself, because – like Steinbauer commented — I can absolutely relate.

I’ve certainly had frustrating days at work or in life and I have failed to life up to the high expectations that I’ve set for myself or that others have set for me.

Maybe not so colorfully in terms of language, but still.

As I consider the legacy of Jack Rebney to me, I see two important lessons for product managers.

One positive lesson we can take away from Rebney’s viral fame is the importance of authentic, memorable messaging.

On a regular basis, I remember and chuckle at some of Rebney’s catchphrases:

• Will you do me a kindness?
• We’ve got flies comin’ for us!
• You’re disturbing what’s left of my brain!
• I don’t want any more [expletive] any time, during the day, from anyone — and that includes me!
• NO MORE!

And his catchphrases have popped up in various Hollywood productions ranging from Crazy Stupid Love to SpongeBob SquarePants.

In product management, creating memorable and compelling messaging is key to capturing the attention of your target audience.

Memorable slogans or catchphrases can help you build brand recognition and foster a loyal following — for your product, but also for yourself as a product manager.

I am not suggesting expletives are the right brand strategy.

But cultivating an authentic brand for your product and for yourself as a product manager is essential to success on multiple levels, so don’t dismiss it as marketing fluff or internal politics.

One negative lesson we can take away from Rebney’s viral fame is the importance of not letting our anger define us or damage our careers.

When Winnebago found out about Rebney’s outbursts, they let him go.

In product management, there may be times where anger is absolutely the correct response to a given situation.

In my career, I’ve sometimes squashed that anger down or bottled it up. But I think a more healthy response is to harness that emotion and change it into something more productive.

Here are some steps I recommend:

• When anger arises, take a moment to assess the root cause. Getting clarity on the true trigger helps start the process of redirecting that energy in a positive way.
• As part of that process, remember to breathe. Pause. Keep your composure. Don’t react, respond.
• Reframe the anger as motivation. If the sales team is failing you, don’t lash out. Embrace the mindset that challenges are opportunities in disguise and use that to propel you forward.
• Use your new motivation to seek constructive solutions. Understand the true problem. Communicate. Work collaboratively to solve that problem to the extent that you can.
• Prioritize self-care. Product managers have fun, interesting, challenging jobs. But they are also stressful jobs. So engage in activities that relax and recharge you, so you have the resilience and mental clarity required to channel anger into productive outcomes.

Closing Thought

Death is terrible, and this pain and suffering we endure on earth is not how it’s supposed to be. Jack was an unintended celebrity with a small circle of people he would actually consider friends. I didn’t know him personally or what he believed about God, but I know Jesus loved us enough to live and die for us so that anyone who trusts in him and believes God raised him from the dead would be reconciled with God and adopted into his family. I hope Jack is making people laugh out loud in heaven right now with his colorful way with words and that their laughter echoes into eternity.

Bonus Content

Rebney shares his thoughts on cursing. Golly whompers!

A few years ago, Rebney’s small circle of friends surprised him for his 87th birthday and it’s very touching.

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Not to be grandiose, but — at its core — that’s what this field is.

Our job as Product Managers is to find the truth, understand it, quantify it, qualify it because it may be true and also irrelevant to what we’re seeking to accomplish, and then make the relevant truths understandable to others so the business can make informed decisions about strategy and tactics.

There’s more to it than that. But it’s not less than that.

And that drive to understand, to question, to look beneath the surface, often brings us to unexpected places that require further discovery and investigation.

That’s been true in my career and also in my personal life.

As we approach Easter, I’m reflecting on the intersection between the professional and the personal and wanted to share how product management led me to the empty tomb of Jesus.

My Journey

Around 2010, I was seeing a lot of success in my career, which was great. But inside, I was a bit of a train wreck. My identity at that time was rooted in this noble idea of being The Good Guy: Having all the right answers, getting to work before everyone else, being the last person to leave at night.

The result was recognition, promotion, and approval at work — which was fantastic! — coupled with a soul absolutely crushed by anxiety and self-demands.

Eventually the breaking point came when I knew I needed to change.

I tried therapy, meditation, exercise, even hypnosis to try to reset and recenter myself. None of it worked.

Eventually, as a last resort, I decided to pray for help.

But the question then was — pray to whom?

“Call to me and I will answer you…”

I grew up Catholic and was a religious studies minor in college. But I went to church because my mother made me, and I studied world religions in school because I found them interesting, not because I believed in any of them.

After all, religious claims tend to be very personal. They can’t be verified. They’re not falsifiable.

But at that point, I was at the end of my rope. I wasn’t interested in confirming or denying religious claims; I needed help and in my mind it was either pray or medicate. I chose the former.

When I prayed for the first time as an adult, it was to the God I remembered from church as a kid. I told Him, I didn’t know if He was real, but I could really use the help if He was.

Little did I know that He actually expects and answers prayers of that type. In the biblical book of Jeremiah, He says, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.” And he did answer me. But the answer just led to more questions.

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline…”

Over a period of a few months, the anxiety that had been wrecking my life gradually melted away. As I started to actually read the Bible and discuss it with friends who were Christians, I began to understand who God is. But even as I started to understand God and Christianity a bit better, I needed to understand if it was actually true. I needed someone to tell me why I should believe.

Had I deceived myself into thinking God was real to give myself permission to feel better?

Was I really feeling better or had a hypnotized myself into feeling something that wasn’t real?

Even I had been healed, how would I ever know which god had healed me?

How do I know the Bible is true?

Am I being ungrateful to God, the Universe, or whomever by even asking these questions?

And then I read something stunning from Jesus. In John 7, people are complaining about Jesus healing someone on their holy day of rest. As part of His response back, He says: “Look beneath the surface so you can judge correctly.”

“Look beneath the surface…”

Jesus was inviting inquiry.

So I started to investigate. Over time, it became clear that there is a way to determine if Christianity is true and if the Bible is for real — and it all centered on Jesus.

Unlike other religions, Christianity makes a specific claim about an historical event: That Jesus died and was raised from the dead. If that did not happen, Christianity may have some interesting things to say — but at its root, it would be false. However if the resurrection did happen, that changes everything.

One of the most useful resource in answering that question came from Gary R. Habermas in The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ who points out several facts that most religious and secular New Testament scholars agree on, including but not limited to:

• Jesus died by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman government
• Something happened to Jesus’ body after he was crucified, because his tomb was empty
• Jesus’ followers claimed to have had interactions with a resurrected Jesus
• Paul transformed from a persecutor of Christians to an apostle after an encounter with the risen Jesus
• Jesus’ apostles transformed from skeptical cowards to missionaries who faced persecution and death for proclaiming Jesus is God, and turned the Roman world – and the rest of the world – upside down… within one generation, Christianity had spread to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

There are other facts, but these are generally the most agreed upon. The reason they’re agreed upon is because they’re supported by multiple, independent sources — including enemy testimony, early creeds, and historical texts outside the Bible itself.

Lots of religious adherents are sincere in their beliefs. But Jesus’ disciples are unique in all of history because they were actually in the position to not just believe something happened but were present to see it. To experience it.

They were willing to suffer and lay down their lives for this message about Jesus’ death and resurrection because they knew it was true. Realizing that made it easier for me to put my trust and hope in Him, too.

“For God so loved the world…”

Christianity is the worst news and the best news all at once, and you see those truths captured in the Christian celebrations of Good Friday (commemorating Jesus’ death) and Easter (celebrating His resurrection).

In simple terms, the story of Christianity is this: God made it. We broke it. Jesus fixed it.

In more detail:

• The eternal, holy, omnipotent, omniscient God creates space, time, and matter (Genesis 1:1)
• He creates human beings in His image to know and enjoy Him (Genesis 2:18-25)
• Since true love is sacrificial in nature and requires conscious consent, He gives us free will so we have ability to choose Him and follow His ways or reject Him and go our own way (Genesis 2:16-17; Joshua 24:15; Galatians 5:13; Mark 8:34)
• The first humans choose to rebel against Him because they want to be Him (Genesis 3:
• As a result sin (the bad things we think, say, and do) enters the picture
• All of creation is infected and affected by sin – including all of us (Psalm 51:5; 1 John 1:8)
• Sin separates us from God (Isaiah 59:2)
• And as our creator, God defines the penalty of sin as death (Romans 6:23)
• People try to do good things to make up for the bad things, but no amount of good can make up for the fact of sin that is in all of us – and that’s the bad news (Isaiah 64:6)
• The good news is – just as sin is inherited, or imputed, to us, the way out of our situation can also be imputed, or credited, to us when we put out trust in God’s son, Jesus
• That is the meaning of John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
• Jesus lived the perfect life none of us did and took the punishment we all deserve, so that when we put our trust in Him, He takes on our record of wrongdoing and He gives us his record of goodness (2 Corinthians 5:21; Ephesians 2:8-10)
• Jesus warns his followers that becoming a Christian does not erase all your troubles (John 16:33)
• But it does provide a tangible hope by freeing you from the penalty of sin (Romans 6:23), the power of sin over your life (1 Corinthians 10:13), and eventually the presence of sin (Revelation 21:4)
• Jesus will return again, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him (Hebrews 9:28) and to make all things new, destroying death, mourning, crying, and pain (Revelation 21:1-8)

The parentheticals above are references in the Bible so you can read these statements for yourself in context.

“Behold I make all things new…”

Death, destruction, sadness, and evil are all part of our lives today. But Jesus’ declaration, “Behold I make all things new…” in Revelation 21 is a reminder that better days are ahead and the best is yet to come. In the present day, I can rest in that hope — and in the understanding that I no longer need to pressure myself to be The Good Guy because Jesus is all that and so much more.

Bonus Content

If you’re interested in a short overview of reasons to believe, in general, that there is a creator god and, specifically, that he’s the God of the Bible, this video provides a good starting point.

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