June 26, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
I spent days looking busy so I wouldn’t have to make a call I’d already made on day one.
This week, I closed four loops I’d been carrying for too long. A web partnership I kept “evaluating.” A sourcing problem I kept “researching.” A blend decision I kept “circling.” When I lined them up at the end of the quarter, everyone had the same shape. I knew the answer at the start. I just kept the thread warm instead of deciding.
Here’s the trap, and it’s an easy one to fall into. Not deciding rarely looks like sloth. It looks like work. You answer fast, you follow up, you forward, you circle back. Every one of those is real effort, and none of it is the effort. If a week is full of activity about a decision and empty of the decision itself, that isn’t diligence. It’s avoidance with good email hygiene.
I think we do it because of how the two problems make us look. A process problem flatters you. A willingness problem doesn’t. “Hidden bottleneck” casts me as the sharp detective who cracked the case. “I avoided it” casts me as the guy who let good options idle for a week and a half because the call was hard and I’d rather look busy than be wrong. The label I reach for first is usually the tell.
So before any framework, I’ve started running one question. On day one, did I already know whose call this was? If the honest answer is no, then the block is real, and a diagnostic earns its keep. Go find the hidden input. But if the answer is yes, put the framework down. You can’t diagnose your way out of not wanting to decide, and no clever process catches a decision you already made and chose to leave on the floor.
The reminder I’m giving myself this week: take the thread you’ve nudged the most and ask if you knew the answer on day one. If you did, make the smallest reversible version of that call today. Then notice you didn’t need a process. You needed to stop performing.
Spice Route Signal
The biggest spice company on earth beat its quarter, the stock rose, and the number that actually matters went quietly the other way.
McCormick reported its second quarter this week. Adjusted earnings landed ahead of expectations (about $0.80 a share against roughly $0.70), reported sales rose almost 17%, margins expanded, and the stock climbed around 5% the next day. Read the headline, and it’s a clean beat.
Now read underneath it. Stripping out acquisitions, organic growth was only about 1.7%, with consumer volume soft. The quarter was driven by price and margin, not by more people buying. The day after the print, the analysts weren’t talking about the earnings line. They were talking about soft demand and a tax headwind coming next quarter.
Here’s the lesson I keep relearning. When a number jumps, ask what moved it. A quarter held up by price increases while units go flat is a different animal than one driven by growth, even when the headline reads the same. Price can prop a number up for a while. Units are the parts that compound. A green metric isn’t a green trend, and the gap between the two is where you either see the softening early or get surprised by it later.
I’m filing this less as a competitor read and more as a discipline I want to keep once we’re actually selling. Not just “did revenue move,” but “what moved it.” The flattering version of that question is the one I’ll be most tempted to accept.
[Source: McCormick Q2 CY2026 results and day-after analyst reaction, via StockStory and Simply Wall St, June 26, 2026.]
From the Trenches
The last full week of the quarter turned into a week of finally deciding the calls I’d parked.
Fitting, given The Take. Almost everything that moved this week was a call I’d been carrying too long, and the quarter ending was the forcing function that made me stop carrying them.
The website was the clearest one. The partner I’d brought in to scope the build came back with a revised number that had nearly doubled. I held the project and decided to finish the site in-house, with an outside designer to polish it. I’d been circling that decision for weeks. The doubled quote didn’t change the answer. It just made me admit the answer I already had.
The build side broke open, too. Two of our blends had been stuck for what felt like forever, and I’d been blaming the search for a blending partner. The real block was a sourcing problem I’d quietly parked: a U.S. import restriction on a couple of the original origin ingredients. Once I actually named it, I reformulated both blends with regional substitutes and ordered them. They arrived this week, so the hand-blended market-test batch is finally moving. I’m defining it now: ratios, batch size, who gets a jar.
A couple of smaller ones moved as well. I shipped the first sample jar overseas to lock the lid, and three carriers quoted me $150, $500, and $32 for the same half-pound box, which tells you how much of logistics is just knowing which door to walk through. And the first run of tags that sit under each lid went into production this week, set to ship in mid-July. That one comes with an honest catch: the partner who was going to build the tap-to-story experience stepped out, so the build itself needs a new path. The tags will exist before the experience they’re meant to trigger does.
None of it photographs well. It was a week of closing loops, not opening them. After a quarter where the hardest work kept turning out to be admitting which calls were already mine, that feels like the right way to end it.
From the Rack
Saffron is the one spice in our line that no machine touches. Every thread is pulled by hand, at first light, before the day thins the color.
Saffron is the precious heart of Persian Sunrise, our Persian-inspired blend, and it’s the most labor-intensive spice on earth by a wide margin. The threads are the three slim red stigmas inside a crocus flower, and they’re picked by hand in the cool of early morning, when the color holds its deepest. It takes something close to 150,000 flowers to make a single kilogram. Steep a few threads in warm water and they bloom a whole pot of rice gold, with an aroma that sits somewhere between honey and dried hay.
This is the spice I’m hand-blending into the market-test batch this week, which is part of why it’s on my mind.
Here’s the PM lesson sitting in those threads. The most valuable part of a product is often the part you can’t automate. You can mechanize the drying, the milling, and the packing. You can’t mechanize the picking because a machine still can’t tell a ripe stigma from the petal around it. The value lives exactly where the hand-work refuses to scale.
There’s a version of that in whatever you’re building. The judgment call a model can’t make for you. The one line of copy that quietly took an afternoon. The decision, back to The Take, that’s yours and only yours. Protect the hand-work. It’s usually what the customer is actually paying for.
On My Desk
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Given a week to admit I’d avoided calls I’d already made, this is the one that kept surfacing. Pressfield gives the avoidance a name: Resistance. The force that sits between you and the work you know you should be doing. Naming it is most of the value, because once it has a name, you start catching it in the act.
What makes it land for a builder and not just an artist is his claim about how Resistance disguises itself. It almost never shows up as laziness. It shows up as productive-looking activity. More research. One more follow-up. A cleaner inbox. His argument is that the more important the work, the more Resistance you’ll feel, and the better dressed it’ll be. That’s the day-one test from the other side: the busier you look around a decision, the more likely you’re avoiding it.
It’s short, almost a series of aphorisms, and it gets a little mystical in the back third. Read it for the first two-thirds. If you’ve ever mistaken motion for progress, it will name exactly what you were doing.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #13. 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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