Happy New Year! 🎉🥳🍀
I’d like to reflect about a post by Shreyas from last year for 2026 that got my attention:
You can keep chasing 100s of frameworks, mental models, tactics, playbooks, success stories, tools, and templates throughout your career, and yet the fundamental capability that will unleash your product mastery across domains and companies is this: understanding how people think.
And why? Because Product Management is fundamentally a people business.
I’d like to amplify this thesis further: you can’t truly understand others until you understand yourself.
I spent years collecting frameworks and best practices, to unlock success. They made me better, but something was missing. The breakthrough came when I realized that context matters and primarily, the people in that context matter most.
To work effectively with people, you need to meet them where they are. And to do that authentically, you first need to know who you are.
Oscar Wilde captured it perfectly: “‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.”
Once you’re aware of it, act and reflect on a regular base to improve.
The Path:
- Know thyself
- Be thyself
- Understand how people think
- Understand your context and system
- Then learn frameworks and tools
- Meet people where they are and adapt
- Reflect, act, repeat
Frameworks matter, but without self-awareness and people skills as your foundation, you don’t succeed.
What’s your take? What would you add to this?
Personal Blog of Patrick Sauerwein 