The most interesting part of teaching future PMs was not the theory. It was watching them run into the same walls experienced teams hit: assumptions presented as facts, consensus reached too early, activity mistaken for evidence.
In May 2026, I stepped into a new kind of room. Hyper Island invited me to be an Industry Leader for their Product Management course — Collaborative Project & Stakeholder Management. Five weeks, one real client brief, a final week where every team ran a workshop with real stakeholders from a real company.
I went in thinking I would be the one with the answers. What happened was the reverse. A room full of good questions makes you put words to things you have been doing on instinct for years. I learned as much about what I believe as I taught.
The teams that did the most interesting work were the ones who slowed down in front of the client. They asked the uncomfortable question: is this actually the problem? They did not take the brief for granted. They surfaced assumptions and opened up the opportunity space before reaching for solutions. What made it work was not method — it was that they had learned to think together first, to disagree without rushing to consensus.
That is the part of product management no framework really captures. We work in a time where AI makes shipping faster every month. Which makes a few things matter more, not less: that instinct to question the problem before building the solution, and the ability to think together with other people. Neither can be generated.
I will be back at Hyper Island after summer as Industry Leader for another course. Turns out teaching is exactly the kind of thing that feels slightly too big — until you do it.