July 24, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
I posted one job this week and a hundred people answered by the next morning. My first feeling wasn’t relief. It was dread.
I needed a developer to build the tap experience for our packaging, so I wrote the role up and posted it. Within a day, the inbox had more than a hundred proposals in it. On paper, that’s a great problem. In practice, I sat there staring at the list and realized I had traded one problem for a harder one. I no longer needed to find help. I needed to reject ninety-something people quickly and correctly, and I had no fast way to do it.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Generating options used to be the hard, slow step. Now it’s close to free. Post a job and a global marketplace answers in hours. Open a feature-request board and it fills. Send a survey and the responses pour in. Ask an AI for approaches, and it hands you twelve before you finish your coffee. The bottleneck moved. It isn’t getting options anymore. It’s choosing among them without drowning.
And here’s what I keep getting wrong. I open the channel before I’ve decided how I’ll close it. I post the job, then start inventing my criteria while a hundred proposals stack up, which is exactly backward. By the time the options arrive, the calm moment to think about what I actually want is gone. Now I’m reading resumes with a full inbox and a ticking clock, which is the worst possible state to make a careful choice in.
The fix is boring, but it works. Write your disqualifiers first. Before you open the tap, name the two or three things that let you say no in ten seconds. For this hire, it was simple once I forced it: no relevant NFC or hardware-adjacent work, gone. Can’t point to a live thing they shipped, gone. Won’t do a small paid trial task, gone. That list turned a hundred proposals into a short stack I could actually read like a human being.
The sharpest filter, though, was one line I almost cut as pointless. At the bottom of the job post I wrote: please start your proposal with the word “saffron” so I know you read the brief. I thought it was a throwaway. It did more sorting than the rest of my criteria combined. Nearly half the proposals never said saffron. They opened with a generic pitch or a wall of credentials, the same template they fire at every posting. No saffron, no read, gone in a second.
Two things caught me off guard. The people who found me another way, through LinkedIn, through email, resumes and connection requests showing up out of nowhere, sailed right past the tripwire, because they never saw the brief that set it. A filter only works on the channel you build it into. And my patience wore thin in real time. The first few who missed the word got a polite note that they hadn’t read the brief. Around the tenth, polite turned into one blunt line: you failed a test of attention to detail, you’re out. After that, I just deleted them; no reply. (Not my proudest run, but an honest one.) That one word highlighted the only trait I actually care about in this role, whether someone reads closely before they act.
This week I’m reminding myself that a funnel with no filter is just a bigger pile of options. Keeping every option open feels like power, but each one you leave alive quietly drains your attention, and it adds up fast. The best filters are cheap to set and force the other side to make one honest bit of effort to get past. The real discipline isn’t gathering more choices. It’s deciding, before they arrive, which ones you’ll throw back.
Spice Route Signal
The reason brands are putting a chip in the package just changed, and the new reason is the one that helps us.
Appetite Creative’s 2026 survey landed with some real numbers. Confidence in connected packaging hit 92.3 percent. Adoption climbed from 72.6 percent last year to 81.2 percent this year. And the share of brands adopting to meet Digital Product Passport rules jumped from 30.4 percent to 51.4 percent. Taps are turning into standard equipment across the industry, fast.
The number that actually matters, though, isn’t any of those. It’s the reason underneath them. For the first time, the top driver brands cite for adding a tap isn’t marketing engagement. It’s authentication and anti-counterfeit. Companies aren’t reaching for the chip to run a cute campaign anymore. They’re reaching for it to prove a product is real and to show where it came from.
That’s a meaningful shift in what the tap is for. When the job was engagement, the winner was whoever built the slickest post-tap experience. When the job is proof, the winner is whoever has real, verifiable data behind the scan. A pretty animation with nothing true behind it fails the new test. A plain page backed by an actual farmer, an actual batch, and an actual freshness record passes it.
Which is the ground Trevean has been standing on the whole time. We didn’t add a tag to be clever. We added it so a stranger holding the jar can confirm the origin story is real, down to the farm and the batch. The market spent a year deciding that proof is the point. That’s the part we can’t be caught faking, because we built the relationships that make the proof true. The move now is to make the first three seconds after a tap show provenance and freshness, not a product page, because that’s the reason the whole industry now says it’s tapping.
[Source: Appetite Creative connected packaging survey 2026 (confidence 92.3%, adoption 72.6%→81.2%, DPP-driven adoption 30.4%→51.4%, authentication now the top driver), via Packaging Insights, July 2026.]
From the Trenches
A hundred proposals arrived for a job I had been postponing for weeks. The build I genuinely need is still not live.
Start with the real progress, because there’s some. I finally posted the developer role for the tap experience, the one decision I sat on for far too long. The response was immediate and a little overwhelming, which is the story up top in The Take. The hiring problem is now a selection problem.
The physical side moved too. The production run of NFC tags arrived this week, a thousand of them, which turns a plan into inventory sitting on a desk. That’s the good kind of pressure. It also means the clock I’ve been describing for a month is finally out of slack. Now these have to resolve to something real, or I’ve got a box of stickers that lead nowhere. So my job next week isn’t a heavy build; it’s the unglamorous plumbing: attach the domain myself so the tap resolves, rather than waiting on the new hire who hasn’t even been chosen yet.
The label printer replied about payment, so the two open invoices there are unblocked and waiting on me to actually pay them. Money I owe, for work that’s done. That’s the easy kind of bill.
One honest, slightly embarrassing beat. While reviewing my own investor materials this week, I found a profile in there that was completely wrong, carried over from an old version of the company before we were even called what we’re called now. It had been sitting in the deck looking authoritative and being false. Nobody caught it because it looked finished. That’s the second time this month a “done” thing turned out to be quietly broken, and it’s a good reminder that something can look finished and still be wrong.
None of this photographs well. A hundred proposals feels like momentum. The domain that still doesn’t resolve, the invoices I haven’t paid, the bad data I just found in my own deck, those don’t feel like anything. Which is exactly why I’m writing them down, so they don’t sit for another week.
From the Rack
Cardamom is one of the most expensive spices on earth, and the reason is that you can’t harvest it all at once, no matter how badly you want to.
Persian Sunrise leans on green cardamom, and cardamom is stubborn in a way that teaches you something. The pods don’t ripen on a schedule you control. On a single plant they come ready a few at a time, over weeks, and each one has a narrow window when it’s perfect: picked a little early it’s green and bright and worth the price, left a little late it splits and dulls and drops in value. So the harvest isn’t a harvest. It’s the same rows walked over and over across a season, hands moving plant to plant, taking only the pods that are ready today and leaving the rest for the next pass. That patience, repeated, is most of why the spice costs what it costs. You smell it and you get that cool, resiny sweetness with a citrus edge, the note that makes a cup of Persian tea taste like somewhere else.
The lesson from that berry is clear: you can’t pick everything at once. Attempting to do so damages the crop. The pods that are ripe will reward you, while forcing immature ones leads to poorer quality and wastes effort. Success comes from repeated, careful passes rather than rushing to harvest everything in one go.
This is a roadmap within a single plant. When numerous options are technically available, the discipline involves picking only what is ripe at this stage and trusting yourself to revisit later for the remaining work. The founder who attempts to harvest the entire field at once, ship every feature, pursue every lead, and fill all gaps simultaneously ends up with incomplete work and no high-value deliverables. Focus on one row at a time, take what’s ready, and return later.
On My Desk
Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
Given a week that was all about a hundred options and the need to say no to most of them fast, this is the book that sits closest to the problem. McKeown’s whole argument is that the ability to choose is a muscle most of us have let go soft, because saying yes is easy and social and immediate, and saying no is quiet, lonely work you never get thanked for. His line for it is the disciplined pursuit of less, and the point isn’t doing less for its own sake. It’s putting your effort behind the few things that actually matter instead of spreading it thin across everything that merely could.
This directly relates to the tap I opened this week. Every one of the hundred proposals represents a small yes waiting to be granted, and the only obstacle between me and a month of wasted effort is a clear, honest list of what I’ll reject immediately. It also aligns with my personal rule about taste: that true taste involves being able to say no to nearly everything and yes to only a few select things. This book, spanning two hundred pages, advocates precisely for this approach, which explains why it’s on my desk during a week like this.
It reads quickly and somewhat repetitively, similar to a book emphasizing a single idea, and that idea justifies the repetition.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #17. 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 filter you use to say no fast when the options pile up? Hit reply; I read every one.
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