Another year is in the books, which means it’s time to look back at some of the highs, lows, and product insights from a time where generative AI exploded and superhero movies discovered that audiences might actually expect them to be good. Let’s dive in!
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?
New Around Here?
- Connect on LinkedIn
- Follow me on X
- Schedule time to talk product
- Join the product management community on Gartner Peer Insights
