Writing
Recent writing
Essays on industrial AI, product strategy, and PM craft. Syndicated from Substack.
RSS → UI. If the list is empty or stale, read the publication directly on daraafraz.substack.com.
May 5, 2026 · Substack
How I Shamelessly Judge Communicators, Myself Included
You’ve met them. The colleague who speaks often, smoothly, and at length—and somehow leaves no fingerprints on reality. They summarize confidently, the room nods, and ten minutes later you can’t recal...
Read on Substack
Mar 19, 2026 · Substack
How I Own the Communication Layer
Most product managers think their job is to own the product. I've come to believe the more important job is to own the layer underneath it: the communication architecture that determines whether the r...
Read on Substack
Jan 26, 2026 · Substack
How I Moved from Wizards to Agents
The most important question in industrial AI onboarding isn’t “did the import succeed?” It’s “what can the system actually do now—and what’s still missing?”That distinction changed how I think about t...
Read on Substack
Jan 18, 2026 · Substack
How I Raise the Issue Without Becoming One
The people who actually move organizations forward share a strange discipline. They raise difficult issues without becoming difficult to work with. They bring up important topics without drawing impor...
Read on Substack
Jan 18, 2026 · Substack
How I Tell Agents from Agency
All agentic AI systems have agents. Not all agents are agentic.That one sentence explains most of the confusion in this space.Since large language models started sounding competent, “agent” has become...
Read on Substack
Jan 12, 2026 · Substack
How I Execute on Executive Initiatives
Product development should be customer-driven. That’s the orthodoxy. But in certain companies—enterprise, defense, industrial—executives make strategic bets. Initiatives come top-down. You’re not vali...
Read on Substack
Jan 3, 2026 · Substack
How I Think About Problems as Things That Must End
For a long time, I thought fixing a problem meant assigning it to the right person. If something kept breaking, we gave it an owner. If a process failed, we wrapped a role around it. Ownership felt li...
Read on Substack
Jan 3, 2026 · Substack
How I Applied Bias Toward Action
Bias toward action wasn’t something I adopted because it sounded good in a framework. I learned it by watching how it played out in practice—first in leadership decisions, and then in my own work.Acti...
Read on Substack
Dec 29, 2025 · Substack
How I Stopped Building for Day 100
The problem with ambitious roadmaps is they assume the future will cooperate. Ours didn’t. We’d planned to ship charting-in-chat and live plan editing for our industrial AI agent—features that let exp...
Read on Substack
Dec 31, 2024 · Substack
How I Built a Lightweight System to Tackle Design Debt
Design debt doesn’t arrive with a bang. It creeps. One misaligned component, a couple of “we’ll-fix-it-laters,” and before you know it, UX starts to feel like a rental car with too many dings—technica...
Read on Substack
Dec 30, 2024 · Substack
How I Use Perception to Drive Alignment
In product meetings, the bottleneck is rarely decision-making. It’s misalignment—quiet, unacknowledged, and often disguised as polite disagreement.I’ve found that most decisions stall not because the ...
Read on Substack
Dec 12, 2024 · Substack
How I Treat Waiting as a Design Surface
You’ve probably lived this moment: clicking through a list, trying to delete a batch of items, only to have the buttons shift after each click. What should’ve been a breeze turns into a mild existenti...
Read on Substack
Dec 12, 2024 · Substack
How I Match Designers to Problem Classes
In organizations where design maturity is low, the term “design” functions less as a discipline and more like a vague aspiration—something like “make it better,” without specifying what it is or what ...
Read on Substack
Dec 11, 2024 · Substack
How I Use Low-Fidelity Design as Leverage
Designing first isn’t just best practice—it’s a force multiplier. Early in my career, I was a Design Engineer, obsessing over the pixel-perfect frontier of the front-end. I assumed polish was the leve...
Read on Substack
Dec 10, 2024 · Substack
How I Used Design to Fix a Broken Product Process
Process is one of those things people either overdo or avoid entirely. Do it right, and you create momentum—clarity, alignment, and breathing room for people to do their best work. Do it wrong, and yo...
Read on Substack