July 10, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
I’ve published every week for three months. This week, I learned that almost none of it converted because the signup form has been broken the entire time.
Here’s the sequence. The blog went out on schedule. The newsletter went out on schedule. Every week, I could point at a published piece and call the goal on track. Then I actually traced what happened after someone clicked “subscribe,” and the honest answer was nothing. The form doesn’t fire. The owned list sits near zero, while the following is in the hundreds on LinkedIn. Months of consistent publishing, and the pipe meant to turn a reader into a subscriber, have been disconnected the whole time.
I want to sit with why I didn’t catch this sooner, because the reason isn’t flattering. Publishing is the visible half of the goal, the half you can schedule and feel good about closing out on a Friday. Checking whether the funnel underneath it actually works is invisible and a little tedious, easy to wave off with “I’ll check that next week.” So I kept doing the half that felt like progress and deferred the half that would have told me whether any of it mattered. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the difference between maintaining a goal and measuring one. This is the sharper version: I wasn’t just failing to measure the outcome. I was generating a steady stream of evidence, a real publishing streak, that made it easy to believe the outcome was fine.
The PM lesson is one most of us know and still manage to skip: shipped is not the same claim as reached. A feature that ships isn’t a feature that’s used. A campaign that goes out isn’t a campaign that converts. A cadence you can point to with pride is still just an input. The only way to know if an input turned into the result you wanted is to walk the whole path yourself, as the person on the other end, on a schedule you can’t talk yourself out of.
So here’s what I’m doing about it. I’m rebuilding the signup and welcome flow this week, and before I call it done, I’m running one real test signup myself, start to finish, watching every step fire. Not checking the code. Watching it happen, the way a stranger who’s never met me would experience it.
The reminder I’m giving myself may be worth borrowing if you’ve got a metric you’ve been keeping faithfully: pick the number you feel best about right now, the one you haven’t actually checked in a while because checking feels unnecessary. Go check it. The comfort is often the tell.
Spice Route Signal
The biggest name in spice just put a date on its AI bet, and the money in food tech just told you exactly why that date is worth watching.
McCormick reported a strong second quarter this week and reaffirmed its outlook; the detail that matters is the calendar tied to the Unilever integration. A secondary stock listing on a European exchange gets announced by the end of July. By the end of September, the company lays out the full operating model, roughly $600 million in annual cost savings, and what it’s calling a “Digital-First” flavor strategy: Unilever’s consumer data driving AI-powered development of new blends, plus AI demand forecasting on a rebuilt system. That’s the category leader naming AI-flavor as a headline priority with a public reveal date, not a talking point buried in an investor deck.
Set that next to the funding picture. Food-tech venture capital fell by close to 50% year over year in the first quarter, to about $1.4 billion across 202 deals, while roughly 70% of all venture capital went to AI and machine-learning startups. Read those two facts together, and it’s uncomfortable and useful at once. Capital in this category has narrowed hard into anything that can honestly say “AI” in its story, good news if that’s genuinely what you are. And the incumbent everyone in premium spice measures against has just told the market, on the record, that it intends to plant the exact same flag by the end of September.
September isn’t a deadline to react to once it arrives. It’s a deadline to meet. Whatever ground we want to hold as the AI-native flavor company, the raise deck, the public writing, the positioning that reaches an investor or a customer before McCormick’s reveal does, needs to exist before the end of September, not after. Once they show their operating model, we’re either the company that already owns the phrase or the one that looks like it’s copying theirs.
[Source: McCormick Q2 FY2026 investor release and The Grocer, July 2026; PitchBook food-tech funding data via Food Dive, July 2026.]
From the Trenches
The labels shipped early and got invoiced the same night. A working version of the tap experience now exists as something you can actually hold your phone up to. And one sourcing thread I flagged weeks ago is still in almost the exact same spot it was in then.
Start with the good news. The label printer shipped the full order ahead of the mid-July target, and the invoices landed the same night, so the packaging dependency that’s sat on the critical path for a month is now in transit instead of in someone’s queue. Nothing to approve yet beyond the invoice itself, but a hard deadline that lands early instead of late is rare enough to name out loud.
The other real advance is the tap-to-story demo. For most of this quarter, the idea of tapping a jar and landing on a farmer’s story with a freshness timeline and a few real recipes lived as a sentence in a deck. This week it exists as an actual interactive walkthrough, built on real product data rather than placeholder copy: tap, verify, land on the story, tap again and meet the grower, tap again and get a recipe. Review-only, nothing live on a real jar yet, but the first time anyone outside my own head can experience the idea instead of being told about it. That’s a different kind of proof than a spec ever is.
Now the thread hasn’t moved. The co-packer we’re courting for the reformulated blends came back again this week, saying, in effect, what they said before: some of the ingredients are still genuinely hard to source. I asked them to send the specific substitutes they’d propose so we can make that call together instead of guessing at each other from a distance. That reply has been sitting in their inbox, not mine, long enough now that it’s worth flagging as a real risk to the timeline rather than routine back-and-forth. Alongside it, the sample jar we shipped to test a lid fit is stuck in transit, waiting on a tracking number that stopped updating after it crossed into another country’s mail system.
None of that second part photographs well, which is exactly why it’s worth writing down. A shipped label and a working demo both feel like progress because they’re finished. A supplier reply that hasn’t arrived yet doesn’t feel like anything, which is precisely how it goes quiet for a month if nobody says it out loud.
From the Rack
Omani lime is the ingredient in Persian Sunrise that most people would never guess is a swap, and the reason it works is the whole lesson.
Persian Sunrise gets its top notes from saffron and cinnamon, but beneath the citrus and funk lies dried lime, called loomi, that Persian and Gulf cooking have relied on for centuries. The traditional source is Iran. When an import restriction cut off Iran-origin ingredients from our supply this spring, dried lime was one of the items we had to solve for quickly. The fix turned out simpler than expected. Oman grows the same lime and dries it the same way, selling it in the same Middle Eastern grocery aisles under the same name. Different country, same fruit, nearly the same result. We swapped it in and kept moving.
If you’ve never tasted a dried lime, it tastes almost nothing like a fresh one. The drying concentrates it into something darker and muskier, a sourness with a smoky, almost fermented backbone that fresh citrus can’t get near. It’s the note in a good Persian stew you can’t quite place until someone tells you it isn’t a spice at all, a fruit given time and heat to turn into something else entirely.
Here’s the PM lesson sitting inside that swap. We talk about ingredients, vendors, and tools as if the specific source were the irreplaceable part: one farm, one supplier, one contract. Most of the time, what’s actually irreplaceable is the job being done, not the name on the invoice. Omani lime does the same job as Persian lime. The dish can’t tell the difference, and so far, neither can a customer. When something critical in your product disappears, the question that gets you stuck is: “Who else sells the exact thing I had?” The question that gets you moving is “what job was this doing, and who else can do that job?” Answer the second one, and a real substitute usually shows up faster than expected. Answer only the first, and you can stall for months chasing a supplier who was never coming back.
On My Desk
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri.
Given a week built around discovering that months of visible, steady activity had converted to almost nothing, this is the book I kept circling back to. Perri’s argument is that most product organizations get very good at output, features shipped, roadmap items closed, content published, and quietly let that output replace the outcome it was supposed to serve. She calls it the build trap: a team genuinely productive by every visible measure, and still not moving the number that actually matters.
That’s not just a large-company failure mode. It’s exactly what happened to me with the publishing cadence this quarter. I built a schedule I could point to and call progress, and the schedule was real. It was never the actual goal. Perri’s fix is blunt and, I think, correct: attach a measurable outcome to an initiative before you start it, then go check the outcome, not the output, on a schedule you can’t quietly skip.
It reads fast, closer to a field manual than a management theory book, aimed at teams bigger than a solo founder with a newsletter. The core diagnostic travels fine to an audience of one, though. If you’ve shipped a lot this quarter and you’re not entirely sure any of it moved something real, it’s a good place to start being sure.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #15. 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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