Beyond Incremental... Breakthrough Leadership
The leadership newsletter for product leaders who want breakthrough impact, not incremental improvements. Weekly frameworks to multiply your influence and accelerate your career.
Being indispensable is a leadership trap
Leadership Advantage - Issue 30 by Andrea Michalek If your team can’t think strategically without you, that is not a compliment. It is a warning sign. This is the essence of what I call The Context Keeper Trap, one of the most common ways capable product leaders unintentionally limit their impact. On the surface, it looks like leadership: you are in every pivotal meeting, connecting execution to vision, guiding trade-offs, representing the product strategy, keeping priorities aligned. But...
🔹 The Professional Autopilot Trap
Leadership Advantage - Issue 29 by Andrea Michalek Autopilot doesn’t look like failure. It looks like plateaued growth, endless meetings, and a calendar so full of escalations you can’t remember the last time you shaped the market instead of reacting to it. You’re not broken.You’re not failing.You’re not even underperforming. You’re hitting quarterly targets.Your team respects you.Stakeholders know they can count on you. By every traditional measure, you’re succeeding. But here’s the part...
🔹 The framework I've been building with you (revealed)
Leadership Advantage - Issue 28 by Andrea Michalek Hello my friends! Beyond Incremental: The Journey Revealed A Behind-the-Scenes Look at 12 Weeks of Writing in Public For the past 12 weeks, you’ve been receiving newsletters about leadership breakthroughs, scaling yourself, and creating category-defining impact. Last week, I mentioned I was writing a book. Today, I want to show you what we’ve built together. Every newsletter has been a piece of a larger puzzle - the Beyond Incremental...
🔹 Faster, cheaper, prettier… and still irrelevant
Leadership Advantage - Issue 27 by Andrea Michalek You don’t win by building a better product than the competition. You win by creating a space where competition doesn’t exist. That’s category creation: not improving what's already there, but building the market around a problem only you can solve. Most product leaders aren’t doing this.They’re professional optimizers. Making things faster, cheaper, prettier… and call it breakthrough thinking. Real category creators don’t optimize. They...
🔹 The hidden stage of leadership no one warns you about
Leadership Advantage - Issue 26 by Andrea Michalek Most senior product leaders are one promotion away from losing the passion that made them successful. In over 100 leadership coaching sessions, I’ve seen the same shift: more meetings, less making. Here’s how to break that cycle. When I was a first-time founder learning about venture capital, I dove into pre-money and post-money valuations, cap tables, and more. I expected to learn about money, not mental health, and that disconnect taught me...
🔹 Natural Authority: The Leadership Skill No One Taught You
Leadership Advantage - Issue 25 by Andrea Michalek Ever feel like you’re doing great work but still not getting noticed? You’re not alone, and the fix isn’t a new title. It’s something deeper. I once had a mentee who wanted a promotion and a bigger team. I asked why. What about his current role wasn’t satisfying? Was it the pay? What was driving him? He smiled. “Of course I’d be happy making more, but that’s not it.I want what you have. I want more power.”I looked back at him, confused,...
🔹 Think you’re helping by having the answers? Think again.
Leadership Advantage - Issue 24 by Andrea Michalek Most product leaders think their job is to have answers. It’s not. Your real job is to ask better questions: the kind that unlock ideas your team hasn’t thought of yet. You’ll hear some version of ‘test your ideas’ from entrepreneurs, scientists, and product leaders alike. It can come in many forms: Mark Zuckerberg, “Move fast and break things.” Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Tom Peters (In...
🔹 Would they work with you again?
Leadership Advantage - Issue 23 by Andrea Michalek The most valuable asset I’ve built in my career? Not a product. Not IP. Not revenue. It’s a network of people who still want to work with me again. Years ago, I posted that I want to create an environment where I’d be proud to have my family come to work for me. My brother Mike called me after reading it. “Great post,” he said, “but that part about me working for you… as the kids say, is sus.” We laughed. I told him not to worry. I don’t...
🔹 Why fast-moving teams aren’t rushing
Leadership Advantage - Issue 22 by Andrea Michalek Why some teams ship game-changing features in six weeks while others stall for six months. I’ve been obsessing over a question lately: Why do some teams move impossibly fast while others grind through endless cycles? I’ve worked with teams at every stage: early startups, high-growth scaleups, and mature product orgs. What separates the fast from the frustrated isn’t brilliance or better tooling. It’s how the team works together, how they make...
🔹 5 Leadership Lessons That Turn Good Teams Into Peak Performers
Leadership Advantage - Issue 21 by Andrea Michalek What you’ll learn in 5 minutes: How to move from managing tasks to multiplying talent through proven frameworks used by product leaders at high-growth companies. What is the environment where you have done your best work? Who are the leaders who inspired you to do more? Or was the team culture that made you want to step up? What anti-patterns have leaders around you created that harm the team’s performance? As a new leader, leadership felt...
The leadership newsletter for product leaders who want breakthrough impact, not incremental improvements. Weekly frameworks to multiply your influence and accelerate your career.