April 24, 2026 | The Product Manager’s Journal
The Take
Today, April 24, GitHub flips a switch.
Starting this morning, if you use Copilot Free, Pro, or Pro+, your code, your file names, your cursor patterns, your comments, all of it defaults into training data for Microsoft’s AI models. Unless you went hunting for the opt-out toggle buried in account settings after a notification email that conveniently forgot to link to it.
Copilot Business and Enterprise customers? Exempt. By contract. Their data is safe because their lawyers negotiated it to be safe.
If you’re an individual developer, hobbyist, student, or solo founder paying $10 a month, you’re not a customer. You’re an input.
I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, and the thing that keeps bothering me isn’t that GitHub made this decision. Plenty of companies have. Anthropic did a version of it in August 2025. JetBrains runs the same pattern. The industry has quietly settled on a norm where consent is a product tier. Pay enough, and you get respect. Pay less, and you get a dark pattern with a legal alibi.
Here’s why this hits home for me, and why I wrote a full post about it today: the spice industry has been running this exact playbook for a century.
Walk into any grocery store and pick up a jar labeled “paprika.” You get almost nothing. No country of origin, no farm, no harvest year, sometimes not even a straight answer about what’s actually in it. “Spices” on an ingredient list can legally mean a dozen things you never agreed to eat. Twenty-eight documented fraud incidents in 2024 alone, Sudan red dye in chili powder, wood powder in oregano, and lead chromate in turmeric.
Meanwhile, the big food-service buyers, restaurant groups, CPG manufacturers, and distributors get certificates of analysis, supplier audits, and traceability written into their contracts. If something goes wrong, they have lawyers and recourse.
The home cook gets a jar.
Same asymmetry. Different industry. Both industries are betting that asking for permission first is expensive, and that nobody’s going to force the change.
That’s the floor Trevean is built to refuse. Every jar of Kyoto Garden, Persian Sunrise, North African Night Market, Caribbean Sunset, and The Silk Road ships with the farmer’s name, the farm, the harvest date, the lot number, and an NFC tag that exposes the whole supply chain when you tap it with your phone. The same data that an enterprise buyer would negotiate into a contract is handed to the person who’s actually going to cook with it. No upsell. No pricing tier. No settings page to hunt through.
Two principles I want to say plainly, because I think they generalize well past code and cumin:
Transparency that depends on what you pay isn’t transparency. It’s a premium feature dressed in ethical language. If the version of your product that respects people’s rights costs more, you’ve admitted the default version doesn’t.
Consent buried in a settings page isn’t consent. It’s an extraction with a legal alibi.
Microsoft is a three-trillion-dollar company. They can afford to ask. So can we. So can everyone.
→ Read the full post: Transparency Isn’t a Feature. It’s the Floor.
Spice Route Signal
I also finally dusted off a post I’d left in draft for months.
“Why Thematic Roadmaps Are the Communication Tool Most Founders Never Learn” is the piece. Short version: if you’ve ever watched someone’s eyes glaze over 30 seconds into your roadmap pitch, the problem isn’t your roadmap. It’s that you’re listing features when you should be telling a story.
I had this moment a few months back, sitting across from a potential retail partner, walking her through NFC adhesive tag development, Shopify Plus custom templates, and a recipe API. I watched it happen in real time: the slow blink, the polite nod, the physical lean backward that means I am closing down.
Same roadmap, rebuilt around three themes: Know Your Spice, Cook With Confidence, Never Waste Again, and the conversation changed inside 45 seconds. “Tell me more about the transparency part,” she said.
The post walks through the five-step build using Trevean as the case study, and includes the mistake I almost made (creating themes that were really just relabeled phases, which was a glorified timeline). It also covers something I didn’t see coming: thematic roadmaps speak to AI agents in ways feature lists never could. The same language that makes a human lean forward is the semantic context that makes an AI assistant recommend you over a competitor with better SEO and no coherent narrative.
Design for the human. The machine will follow.
→ Read the full post: Why Thematic Roadmaps Are the Communication Tool Most Founders Never Learn
From the Trenches
The lid is going to be the reason this whole thing ships on time, or doesn’t.
Quick update on where things stand. We’re close to settling on a lid supplier. The Chinese suppliers have been outstandingly fast, accommodating, asking good questions back, and sending samples within days. The US supplier is… still not replying. I want to support domestic manufacturing. I really do. But silence is its own answer, and at some point the math wins.
The engineering puzzle right now is the cork liner. Our current lid has a cork liner on the inside, great for sealing, great for freshness, aesthetically right for what Trevean is. The problem: cork insulates the NFC tag. A customer taps their phone on a beautifully corked lid and gets nothing. Which defeats the entire point of the jar.
So I’ve been working with the supplier on what I think is a clean fix: ship the cork liner as a separate component. We apply the NFC tag directly to the bottom of the lid, then sandwich the cork liner between the tag and the jar. The NFC reads through the thin bamboo lid face. The cork still does its job of sealing. Nobody sees the tag, but the phone finds it.
Small detail. Huge implications. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t show up on a roadmap, doesn’t make it into a pitch deck, and will absolutely determine whether the transparency story I wrote about in this week’s Take actually works in someone’s kitchen. Physical products are humbling like that.
Parallel thread: we’re building the Trevean website with Claude Designer. First impressions? Whoa. I’ll hold the full review until we’re further in, but the speed-to-coherent-page is something else. If it holds up through the polish phase, I’ll do a proper write-up on what actually worked, what I had to redo by hand, and where the craft still has to come from a human. Stay tuned.
From the Rack
Turmeric. Specifically, why the color you trust is the color most often faked.
Turmeric’s bright golden-orange hue is one of the most visually recognizable colors on any spice rack. It’s also one of the most adulterated spices in the world. The most common adulterant? Lead chromate is an industrial pigment used to make pale, low-quality turmeric look like a premium product. Lead chromate is neurotoxic. It accumulates. Children are especially vulnerable.
The reason this keeps happening isn’t that bad actors are especially clever. It’s that the market rewards the color without verifying the source. Buyers grade turmeric by how vibrant the powder looks. So, upstream somewhere in the chain, someone realized you could fake the grade with a pigment that costs pennies.
The PM lesson buried in that: surface metrics get gamed the moment they become the scoreboard. If you’re measuring vanity color, brightness, DAU, page views, whatever the visible signal is in your world, and you’re not also verifying the thing underneath, you’ve built a system that rewards adulteration. Every product org has its own version of lead chromate.
The fix isn’t a better vanity metric. It’s an independently verifiable one. For turmeric, that’s the curcumin content tested in a lab, with a chain of custody you can audit. For products, it’s outcome metrics tied to actual customer behavior, not delivery velocity.
You can’t spot the fake by looking harder at the surface. You have to go one layer down.
On My Desk
“But What If We’re Wrong?” by Chuck Klosterman.
I picked this up on a whim and couldn’t put it down, which surprised me because I wasn’t sure how it connected to anything I’m working on. Klosterman’s premise is deceptively simple: take the things we currently consider obviously true about science, about art, about democracy, about history, and ask what future generations will look back at and think, “How did they not see it?”
He’s not trying to be contrarian. He’s asking a harder question. Every generation believes its consensus is the mature, final version. And every generation has been wrong about significant pieces of it. Leaded gasoline. Asbestos insulation. “Four out of five dentists recommend.” The question isn’t whether we’re wrong about something important right now. It’s which thing?
I kept putting the book down and thinking about spices. About food, really. About the current default, where a jar on a shelf tells you almost nothing about what’s inside, where it came from, or who grew it, and we’ve collectively decided this is normal. Walk into a grocery store in 2026, and almost everything on the shelves is working from the same opacity playbook.
Is there any chance, any real chance that 40 years from now, someone walks through a museum exhibit on “early 21st century food packaging” and cannot believe what we accepted? Do the defaults we live inside right now look, in retrospect, as absurd as a gas station attendant topping off your leaded tank while you smoked a cigarette next to it?
I think there is. And I think the companies building for that future, the ones treating transparency, traceability, and verifiable provenance as the floor and not a premium tier, are the ones that will look, in hindsight, like they were paying attention.
Klosterman doesn’t make that argument himself. I made it while reading him. That’s the best kind of book. About 270 pages. Finishes in a week if you let it.
That’s the Rack
Thanks for reading Issue #5. I’m Dan Blizinski, founder of Trevean Spice and the person behind The Product Manager’s Journal, where I write about PM frameworks that come from actually building things, not just theorizing about them.
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Question for you this week: where in your product is the equivalent of GitHub’s buried toggle or lead chromate turmeric? The default that works because nobody’s forcing the change yet? Hit reply. I read every one.
The PM’s Spice Rack is published weekly on The Product Manager’s Journal and on LinkedIn. Subscribe to get it in your inbox.