July 17, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
Everyone in my industry can see the same wave coming. Almost none of us have done the boring work to stand where we are.
I read a survey this week that named a gap I’ve been feeling for months. SPINS asked senior CPG leaders about agentic commerce, the near future where an AI does your shopping for you, reads the options, and puts a few in the cart before you ever see a shelf. Forty-six percent called it very disruptive. Eleven percent said they felt ready for it. Roughly a third admitted their own products aren’t built in a way that an AI could actually read.
Sit with those numbers, because they describe almost every company I know, including mine, on a bad week. Nearly half the industry agrees on where this is going. Fewer than one in ten have done the work to be there when it arrives.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Seeing the future is cheap. Everyone at every conference can draw you the same curve. Agreement about direction feels like insight, and it costs nothing, which is exactly why it’s worth nothing on its own. The rare and valuable part is the unglamorous prep underneath: the clean, structured, machine-readable version of your product that an algorithm can parse without a human translating it first. Nobody claps for that. It doesn’t ship as a feature. It photographs terribly. And it’s the whole difference between the 46 percent and the 11 percent.
I’d like to tell you I’m safely in the 11. I’m not. I write about this shift constantly, and this week I still caught myself with the boring groundwork half-done while I chased the visible stuff that felt like progress. Knowing the wave is coming did not make me ready for it. It just made me feel ready, which is more dangerous.
So the lesson is the one I’m giving myself. Consensus about the future is not preparation for it. If you can already see where your market is heading, the useful question isn’t whether you’re right about the direction. You probably are, along with everyone else. The useful question is which piece of dull, invisible groundwork you’d need to have finished for that future to be good news instead of a threat. Then go do that piece this week, while it’s still early enough to be a head start and not a scramble.
Spice Route Signal
This Sunday, connected packaging stops being a marketing choice and starts becoming European infrastructure.
This Sunday, July 19, the European Union switches on the central registry for its Digital Product Passport. Strip away the acronym, and it’s a simple, consequential piece of plumbing. Scan a code on a product, and the registry resolves that identifier to the manufacturer’s approved data: the source, the batch, the record behind the object in your hand. It works through a scannable carrier, and the rules list both QR and NFC as valid.
Two facts keep this honest. Food isn’t in the first wave. Batteries lead, with passport registration mandatory in February 2027, followed by textiles later in 2027 and electronics in 2028. No spice jar is obligated to carry anything this year. And NFC, the tap-a-tag approach we bet on, is explicitly allowed, not sidelined in favor of a printed QR.
Read this next to the survey up top, and it’s one message arriving from two directions. An AI wants to read your product without a human in the loop. A regulator wants to link your product to a verified record. Both reward the same asset, and neither cares how nice your label looks. They care whether there’s clean, trustworthy data behind the scan.
This sharpens what the tag is actually for. When a chip under a lid was rare, having one was the differentiator. Once a scannable identifier is a standard European infrastructure, the tag itself differentiates nothing. The moat is what happens after the tap: the farmer, the batch, the freshness record, the story a competitor can’t clone because they don’t own the relationships behind it. We’ve been building toward that version of the standard since before it was a standard. The move now is to stay a step ahead of it, and to resist the temptation to overclaim a mandate that, for food, hasn’t arrived.
[Source: EU Digital Product Passport central registry go-live July 19, 2026, via Traceable Digital and Customs Manager; carrier and category-phasing detail via Karmactive, July 2026.]
From the Trenches
A box of finished labels showed up early this week. Two emails I’d already written went nowhere at all.
Start with the good news, because there’s a real piece of it. The label printer delivered the full run ahead of schedule, and I collected the box this week and stuck two of them to the packaging just to see. They look like something a real company makes. That dependency has sat on the critical path for a month, and it’s finally, physically done. The invoices are still open, so “done” means there’s a bill I need to pay, but it exists, and it’s good.
Now, the part that connects straight back to The Take. Two emails that should have gone out this week didn’t. One is the packet for the co-packer I want to run our reformulated blends: quantities, costs, lead times, the whole ask. The other is a first outreach to a second co-packer, so the first one isn’t the only quote we ever get. Both were written. Both had a deadline this week. Both are still sitting in my drafts, finished and unsent, which is somehow worse than not having written them at all. I knew exactly what to do. I did the drafting, the visible ninety percent, and skipped the send, the invisible last step that’s the only part that counts.
The tech thread carries on in the same spirit. The tap-to-story demo works, but it still lives as a demo, not as a real web address that a stranger could reach. The physical tags land around July 23, and before they do, I owe myself a decision on how we build the page they point to, and a live URL for it to resolve to. That call is about a week from being late.
The trademark filing, for what it’s worth, is still sitting in a queue somewhere waiting for a human to be assigned to it. Nothing to do but wait, so I’ll say nothing more about it until there’s something to say.
None of the unfinished items photographs well. That’s the pattern I keep having to name out loud. The finished box of labels feels like progress because you can hold it. The two unsent emails don’t feel like anything, and that’s precisely how they’d stay quiet for another week if I didn’t write them down here.
From the Rack
Allspice tastes like three spices at once, which is exactly why the people who named it got it completely wrong.
Caribbean Sunset leans on allspice for its backbone, and allspice has the best misnaming story in the cabinet. It’s a single dried berry, picked unripe from one tree that grows best in Jamaica, and when you smell it, your brain insists it’s a blend: clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, a little black-pepper warmth underneath, all at once. The first Europeans to meet it made the obvious mistake. They assumed anything that tasted like four spices had to be four spices, called it allspice, and the wrong name stuck for good. It’s the smoky, warm depth under a plate of Jamaican jerk, and it’s one berry doing the work people assume takes a whole rack.
Here’s the lesson hiding in that berry. The market names your product by what it reminds people of, not by what it actually is. When you make something genuinely new, the people meeting it for the first time reach for the nearest familiar category and file you there, and the borrowed label sticks whether it fits or not. Allspice has spent four hundred years as an imaginary blend because of one confident first impression.
You don’t get to opt out of being categorized. A customer, an investor, and soon an AI doing the sorting will all drop you into some bucket in the first few seconds, with or without your permission. The only real choice is whether you define that bucket on purpose, in language plain enough that a stranger repeats it back correctly, or whether you let a rushed first impression name you and then spend years living under a label you didn’t pick. Give people the accurate word before they invent the wrong one.
On My Desk
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford.
Given a week that kept circling one idea, that you don’t get to skip being categorized, only choose whether you do it on purpose, this is the book that says it best. Dunford spent years as a positioning consultant watching good products struggle because the market filed them under the wrong category and then judged them by the wrong yardstick. Her argument is blunt and, I think, right. Positioning isn’t a tagline or a vibe. It’s the deliberate act of choosing the context you want to be understood in, so your strengths read as strengths instead of as a strange version of something else.
That maps onto everything above. The allspice problem is a positioning problem. The readiness gap is a positioning problem, because being legible to an AI is really just being clearly categorized, one more audience at a time. If a stranger can’t repeat back what you said in a single sentence, all you have given them is a name
It reads fast, closer to a working manual than a business book, and it’s aimed at exactly the founder who’s sure the product is obviously great and can’t understand why the market keeps misfiling it. If that’s ever been you, it’s a good week to pick it up.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #16. 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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What’s the one piece of dull, invisible groundwork you keep deferring because the payoff still feels far off? Hit reply, I read every one.
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