The “Oh S**t” Moment I was sitting in Zus Coffee in Kuala Lumpur —or maybe it was a Third Wave Coffee in Bangalore or a Blue Bottle in San Francisco; the scent of venture capital desperation smells the same everywhere—listening to a pitch. The founder, let’s call him “Prompty Paul,” was sweating through his sustainable Allbirds.
Inspired by: Shreyas Doshi’s Deep Dive on Micromanagement. Listen here before you rage-quit: Understanding Micromanagement: A Deep Dive
There is a moment in Shreyas Doshi’s brilliant analysis where he drops a truth bomb that usually sends “visionary” Product Managers scrambling for their noise-canceling headphones. He essentially argues that micromanagement is not a binary evil; it is a situational necessity.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” — Bill Gates
This is Part 3 of my series on the collapse of the traditional software industry.
This is Part 2 of my series on the collapse of the traditional software industry. In Part 1, How “Vibecoding” and The Outcome Economy Are Killing the SaaS Dinosaurs, I explained how AI is making software production free. Today, let’s talk about why your pricing model is about to bankrupt you.
Let’s start with a bedtime story that is currently keeping the General Counsel of a $10 billion company awake at night.
In June of this year (2025), a developer named Michael Luo (known online as “AzianMike”) decided he was tired of paying DocuSign $15 a month to sign three PDFs.1 He didn’t complain on X (formerly Twitter).
Let me give you some context before I start ranting. I’ve been in the trenches of media technology for 25 years. I was writing code for Set-Top Boxes (STBs) when “on-demand” meant walking to Blockbuster. I built the architecture for the first DVRs that let you pause live TV. I have worked on engineering the streaming pipes that allow you to binge-watch in 4K without buffering and to figure out how to connect a second screen device to a Satellite Pay TV system.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a product manager or not, if you have ever tried building a product, there are three keywords that you would have come across for sure; Strategy, Roadmap and Prioritization. In all organizations, these three keywords are used in every context whenever there is ambiguity and decision making is hard.