June 12, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
I spent two weeks convinced a cork liner was killing my product. The real suspect was the old spare phone in my hand.
Here is the setup. Every jar we are building has a small tag under the lid that you tap with your phone to see the farmer, the batch, and the origin. For two weeks, the tag would not read reliably through the cork liner inside the lid. So I did what a founder does. I started questioning the cork. Was there metal in it? Was the liner too thick? Did I need a different material, a different supplier, a different lid?
I was already drafting the redesign in my head.
Then I got on a call with our tag supplier and described the problem. He was genuinely surprised. Cork is not supposed to interfere with the antenna at all. And as I walked him through my setup, the likely culprit surfaced. I had been testing with an old phone I keep around as a spare, the kind you toss in a drawer and stop trusting for anything real. The cork was what I could see, so the cork got the blame. The instrument that did the reading was never questioned.
That’s the trap, and it’s easy to fall into. When a test fails, it often feels like the problem is in what you’re testing. Rarely do we consider that the failure might be due to how we’re testing it. A false negative caused by a faulty instrument can appear exactly like a genuine defect in the product. The same result shows on the screen, but the underlying cause can be completely different. The consequences of confusing these two are significant: one leads you to contact suppliers, redesign, and face weeks of delay, while the other means grabbing a better phone from the drawer.
Before redesigning the product, audit the instrument carefully. The key reminder for this week: if something appears broken, verify your test first before making a decision about the design. Ensure the ruler is correct before re-cutting the board.
Spice Route Signal
The biggest name in spice is combining with a packaged-foods giant in a roughly forty-billion-dollar deal, and the most useful part for a small founder is what it does to the incumbent’s attention.
On June 4, executives met in Baltimore to advance the integration of McCormick and Unilever’s food business into a single company with roughly twenty billion dollars in combined sales. When it closes, Unilever shareholders end up with about 55 percent, McCormick holders with about 35 percent, and more than fifteen billion in cash going to Unilever. The deal is targeted to close around mid-2027, and investors are already questioning the scale and the execution risk out loud.
Here’s what this looks like in practice: the category leader has just committed to about eighteen months of integration efforts covering org charts, systems, redundancies, and culture. This isn’t a period for launching exciting new products; it’s a time for internal meetings and coordination.
For a company of our size, an incumbent’s distraction can be a valuable advantage if you use it well. The premium discovery lane, featuring single-origin spices with verifiable stories, remains accessible even as the industry giant focuses on a merger. This opportunity won’t last forever, but it is available now, mainly because the category’s biggest player faces bigger challenges than worrying about a startup branding each product with a farmer’s name.
Distraction at the top is room to move at the bottom. The only question is whether you move while the window is open.
[Source: FoodNavigator-USA, “McCormick and Unilever Advance $40 Billion Food Merger Plans,” June 4, 2026.]
From the Trenches
A heads-down week, and the kind that moves a launch even though none of it photographs well.
The big milestone has finally been reached. I have submitted the purchase order for our first two labels, with the print run scheduled to finish by mid-July. That order had been waiting for just one founder’s signature for longer than I care to admit, stuck behind my own hesitation to commit the funds. It’s now officially placed. The labels are turning into tangible items on an actual timeline.
On the tag side, I had the supplier call I mentioned earlier, and it achieved two things. First, it reframed the cork-liner issue as a testing problem, which I verified with a retest this morning: the cork is fine, and the bad reads were coming from an old test phone. Second, it brought us closer to obtaining a quote for our initial run of tags. The order I consider a genuine commitment on my part is modest by their standards, and understanding the difference in how we perceive volume is an important reflection for a founder.
The co-packer search restarted, too. Two blenders are at the early conversation stage. I told one of them that a gap in their grinding setup would not rule them out, because I care more about the right partner than about whether every capability sits under one roof on day one.
None of it is glamorous. It consists of quiet, step-by-step work that often goes unnoticed and is the true foundation of every successful launch.
From the Rack
Cumin straight from the jar tastes dusty. Toast it for forty seconds, and your kitchen fills with a warm, nutty aroma. The seed has always been strong; it was simply waiting to be unleashed.
Cumin is the backbone of North African Night Market, our Moroccan-inspired blend. Out of the jar, it is honestly underwhelming, a little flat, a little dusty, the smell of a thousand forgettable weeknight dinners. Most people meet cumin in that dormant state and quietly decide it is a boring spice. They are judging it asleep.
Put those same seeds in a dry pan over medium heat. In under a minute, the kitchen changes. The aroma turns toasty and faintly sweet, earthy in a way that pulls you toward the stove. Nothing was added. The flavor sat locked inside the seed the whole time, waiting for heat to wake it. North African cooks have toasted their cumin for centuries, not as a flourish but because they know the spice does not perform until it has the right conditions.
Here is the PM lesson sitting in that pan. We are quick to judge potential by its dormant state. The feature that was tested flat. The hire who was quiet for a month. The market that looked dead in a survey. Sometimes the cork really is broken. But often the raw material is fine, and the conditions were wrong, and you measured it cold.
Before dismissing something as boring or broken, consider whether you ever truly toasted it, giving it the right heat, context, and moment to reveal its true nature. Often, flat results are not due to weak ingredients but because good ingredients are tested in the wrong pan.
On My Desk
How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard.
Given the week I just had, blaming a cork liner for what turned out to be a bad phone, this is the book that kept surfacing in my head. Hubbard’s argument is that almost anything you call immeasurable is really something you have not yet figured out how to measure, and that most measurement problems are clarity problems wearing a disguise. You do not need a perfect instrument. You need to know the question you are actually asking and how much uncertainty a rough reading would remove.
The core idea I keep returning to is that measurement isn’t about achieving certainty; it’s about reducing uncertainty compared to your initial state. My confusion between the cork and the phone was a clear mistake: I measured the wrong variable using an unvalidated instrument and then took the result as fact. Always define the actual question first, then verify with the appropriate tool.
If your work involves making decisions under uncertainty, which is the core of the job, this one deserves its place on your shelf. It can be dense in some sections, but it’s worthwhile to persevere.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #11. I’m Dan Blizinski, founder of Trevean Spice and the person behind The Product Manager’s Journal, where I write about PM frameworks grounded in actually building things, not just theorizing about them.
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