The first feature I ever shipped as a PM…
was ignored.
Not because it was bad.
Not because the team didn’t work hard.
Not because the idea didn’t make sense.
It was ignored because I made the classic early PM mistake:
I thought shipping the feature was the win.
It wasn’t.
The real win is getting users to understand it, try it, trust it, and come back to it.
When we launched Try Theo, I was excited.
No signup.
No friction.
A simple way for anyone to experience an AI mock interview and get feedback in minutes.
In my head, the value was obvious.
But users don’t live inside your head.
They don’t know why you built it.
They don’t know what problem it solves.
They don’t know what to do next unless the product makes it painfully clear.
That was my lesson.
A PM’s job is not to ship features.
A PM’s job is to create behavior change.
That means asking:
Will users notice this?
Will they understand it?
Will they trust it?
Will they repeat it?
Will this move the metric we actually care about?
The feature is just the artifact.
The behavior is the product.
That shift changed how I think about product.
Before, I cared about what we shipped.
Now, I care about what changed after we shipped.
Because the market does not reward effort.
It rewards adoption.
Still learning.
Still building.
And still reminding myself:
A shipped feature is not a finished feature.
It’s the beginning of the real test.