What I am doing here
A senior PM's working notes on craft, careers, and the AI shift. Plus why I am writing them in public.
I have spent 22 years in tech and 12 of those at Microsoft. Most of that time I have been the person who writes the artifacts other people use. Certification objective domains. Lab content. Curriculum strategy. The DevOps cert track. AZ-400. Now, as a senior PM, the labs strategy for cloud, AI, and security across Microsoft.
That is the day job. It is good work and I am staying.
This newsletter is something else.
What changed
The work is changing under all of us. AI did not lower the bar for product management. It moved the bar. The old question was “can you produce the artifact.” The new question is “can you tell me which parts you do not trust.”
I see this from a vantage that is a little strange. I do not just ship product. I help define what “competent” looks like for the people who will be hired into product, security, and platform roles next year. When the curriculum changes, the bar changes. When the bar changes, the work changes. The feedback loop between what I do and what the industry asks of PMs is short and direct.
So I have a point of view forming, every week, about what stays human in PM work and what does not. About which workflows survive the model, which ones get cheaper, and which ones quietly disappear.
I have been keeping those notes private for a while. I am going to start writing them down for real.
Who this is for
Senior product managers, roughly 8 to 15 years in tech, sitting inside big tech or a serious scaleup. You run real surface area. You ship to real customers. You have opinions about Azure DevOps or GitHub. You feel the AI shift is rewriting what “good PM” means and you are tired of the firehose.
If you are looking for a primer on what a PRD is, this is not for you. If you are looking for the next “10 ways to leverage AI in product,” also not for you. There is a lot of that already and most of it is bad.
If you are a senior PM trying to figure out which parts of the job stay yours and which parts get reshaped, this is the conversation.
What you will get
One essay every Tuesday at 6:30 AM Central Time. Same day, same time, no skip weeks. Cadence is the whole game.
PM craft. Specs, prioritization, stakeholder management, IC leadership at the senior level, post-mortems, launch reviews. The artifacts and the meetings and the decisions.
AI for PMs. Tooling, workflows, prompt patterns specifically for PM work. Not “use ChatGPT to brainstorm.” Things like: the prompt I run before every spec review, the diff between a draft you trust and a draft you cannot, what happens to discovery when the model already read the customer interviews.
Careers. Level transitions at L62 to L65, building authority while staying employed, the IC versus manager fork, comp patterns, when to leave.
Industry takes when they earn the post. When a launch or a re-org or a model release actually moves something, you will get my read within 48 hours. No takes on takes.
What you will not get
Anything Microsoft-internal. No roadmaps, no headcount, no internal slides, no comp specifics from the day job. Views here are mine and not Microsoft’s.
Listicles. If a post is “7 things you must know about,” I did not write it.
Fake humility, fake excitement, or AI-marketing voice. No “unlock,” no “supercharge,” no “let us unpack.” If a sentence sounds like it could open a SaaS landing page, it does not ship.
Hot takes on politics, religion, or culture wars. There are other places for those and other writers who do it better.
Why a newsletter and not just LinkedIn
LinkedIn is rented. The algorithm decides what gets seen. Your “followers” are an audience the platform owns. A newsletter is mine. You subscribed, you decided, and your inbox is one of the last places on the internet where attention is still consensual.
LinkedIn still gets posts from me. Different cadence, same body of work. If you are here, you have the canonical version.
Why now
Two reasons.
One. The AI shift in product is moving fast enough that one year of silent observation is a year of useful notes I should have written down. The notes are more useful in public than in a private OneNote vault, both to me and to anyone reading.
Two. I have been hiding behind the artifacts of my job for 22 years. The certification cuts. The lab specs. The content. They were always “the team’s” output, never mine in any named way. I am at a point in my career where the thinking is mine, and the thinking is worth signing.
That is what this newsletter is. The work, with my name on it.
Practical things
Cadence: Tuesday 6:30 AM Central Time, every week.
Format: One essay, roughly 800 to 1500 words. Sometimes shorter. Rarely longer.
Cost: Free. If a paid tier shows up later, free subscribers keep getting the weekly essay. Paid would be additive, never gated.
Replying: Hit reply on any issue. It goes to hi@macedonotes.com and I read every one.
One thing before you go
If you read this and thought of another senior PM who would actually use it, forward this issue to them. That is how this thing grows, one trusted recommendation at a time. There is no growth hack here. There is no referral program. There is just the work, and people you trust telling other people you trust.
Thanks for being here on issue one.
See you next Tuesday.
Luiz
Views are my own and do not represent Microsoft.