It’s planning season! Time to set goals and priorities for next year. But great plans go beyond the what. They also tackle the why, how, and who. These six dimensions can turn good plans into great execution: strategy, people, process, technology, structure, and communication.

There’s an awkward gap between Slack and Zoom: too much for a message, not enough for a meeting. That’s where short videos live. My team uses them constantly, and they’ve completely changed how we collaborate across time zones.

Too many teams mistake coordination for collaboration. Meetings multiply, documents circulate, and it feels productive. But real collaboration is something else entirely. Borrowing from UX practice, here’s how to move beyond parallel play and use structured workshops to help teams think together.

Want to get past polished generalities? Try Retrospective Case Analysis: a simple but powerful interview technique that invites people to walk you through the last time something really happened. That’s where the truth lives.

UXers are masters of reducing complexity into clarity. Sometimes the unlock isn’t another slide of quotes or a wall of data, but a boundary object: a model, map, or matrix that distills what’s messy into something everyone can see, understand, and act on.

Experience narratives are fast, vivid, and human. They paint the movie scene of the future so that PMs, designers, and engineers are all building toward the same experience, not just the same requirements.

Asking "How would it work if it were magic?" sparks the kind of bold, human-centered thinking that pushes teams beyond the obvious.

Here's what PMs need to know about working better with UX. Great partnerships are built on early inclusion, shared context, and feedback that fuels iteration.