Newsroom: Larry Hackney

Executive Outcomes Series

In Progress

Ten articles translating platform investments into executive-language outcomes. Each piece is grounded in a case study and written for the VP, CPO, or CEO who needs to understand what a product investment actually buys.

Security ROISoon

What 100% MFA Adoption Actually Costs (and What It Saves)

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Integration EconomicsSoon

The $275K You're Leaving on the Table in Vendor Onboarding

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Activation EconomicsSoon

Why Your Onboarding Funnel Is a Revenue Leak

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Banking LTVSoon

Direct Deposit Enrollment as a Primacy Signal: The $250K Case

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Operational EfficiencySoon

Self-Service Checkout: The 30% Shift That Eliminated 1 FTE

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Engineering ROISoon

What 40% Fewer Defects Buys You: 2 Sprints Back Per Quarter

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Platform EconomicsSoon

Identity as Infrastructure: The Support Cost You Can't See

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Innovation ROISoon

Innovation Funnels That Actually Advance Ideas: The Air Force Model

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Content ROISoon

Content Infrastructure as a Revenue Driver: The $375K Case

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Growth EconomicsSoon

Funnel Optimization Without New Product Investment: 9% YoY Growth

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Featured

Data Strategy

The Flywheel of a Data-Driven Growth Engine

Stop Leaving Revenue on the Table

Every day, companies drown in marketing data but starve for actionable insights. The fix isn't more dashboards: it's a fundamentally different model for how data becomes revenue.

April 20257 min

Read

Data Strategy

Spring Cleaning Your Data

8 min

Product Management

From Interest to Impact: How I Learned to Grow My Influence as a PM

6 min

All Articles

39 total

AI & Technology

The Reasoning Layer: When Patterns Become Decisions

Context explains how things are related. Reasoning detects patterns across those relationships. This is where a system stops describing the world and starts predicting what happens next.

March 20256 min

Leadership

The Alignment Threshold: Turning Probability Into Inevitability

I tried to understand the statistical probability of meeting my wife. What I learned was simple: over time, the impossible doesn't stay impossible. It evolves into something closer to inevitability.

March 20258 min

AI & Technology

The Decision Layer: Where Context Becomes Action

Context without action is observation. The Decision Layer is where trade-offs become real, where risk is accepted, and where the system stops informing and starts influencing.

March 20257 min

AI & Technology

Confidence vs. Conviction: The Missing Layer in Knowledge Systems

A system can be highly confident and still be wrong. It can lack conviction and still be right. Most AI systems collapse these two signals into one: and that's where trust breaks down.

March 20256 min

Data Strategy

The Context Layer: Where Signals Begin to Make Sense

Data tells you what happened. Context tells you why it matters. Without a context layer, you're not building intelligence: you're building a very expensive search engine.

March 20256 min

AI & Technology

The Integration Layer: Where Industry Signals Finally Connect

The data exists. The signals exist. The problem is that they live in completely separate systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The Integration Layer is how you fix that.

March 20257 min

Data Strategy

The Data Layer: Where Industry Signals Begin

Before you can build intelligence, you need signals. Before you can have signals, you need a data layer that captures the right information at the right fidelity. Most organizations skip this step.

March 20256 min

AI & Technology

What an AI Agent Could Actually Do for a Promotional Products Affiliate

Not a theoretical AI. Not a chatbot that answers FAQs. An actual agent that understands the promotional products ecosystem and takes meaningful action on behalf of an affiliate.

March 20258 min

AI & Technology

AI, Knowledge Engines, and the New Dunning-Kruger Problem

We've created a new version of the Dunning-Kruger effect: but instead of humans overestimating their competence, we've built systems that project confidence they haven't earned.

March 20257 min

Leadership

The Authentic Swing: Why Authenticity Is a Force Multiplier

Authenticity isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic asset. The PMs who build the most trust, move the fastest, and create the most durable products are the ones who lead from who they actually are.

March 20255 min

Product Management

The Real Job of a Product Manager in a Data-Heavy Industry

In a data-heavy industry, the PM's job isn't to manage a roadmap. It's to understand the data well enough to know what questions to ask, what signals to trust, and what decisions the data actually supports.

March 20257 min

AI & Technology

How the Layers of a Knowledge Engine Work Together

Understanding the individual layers is helpful. But the real value appears when you see how they work together: and how each layer's output becomes the next layer's input.

March 20259 min

Industry

The Hidden Data Problem in the Promotional Products Industry

The promotional products industry is not short on data. It's short on structure. The information flowing through the ecosystem every day is enormous: but the relationships between those pieces of information remain hidden.

March 20257 min

Product Management

Count the Wolves: Separating Noise from Signal in Product Discovery

Grant was riding at night when he heard wolves in the darkness. His officer asked how many there were. Grant didn't want to betray fear: so he guessed the lowest number he thought plausible. That's exactly what bad product discovery looks like.

March 20256 min

Industry

What the Promotional Products Industry Can Teach the Tech World

The promotional products industry rarely gets mentioned in conversations about technology innovation. That's a mistake. Under the surface, it operates one of the most complex and fascinating commerce ecosystems in business.

March 20258 min

AI & Technology

How Knowledge Engines Could Transform the Promotional Products Industry

Knowledge engines are starting to appear in conversations about AI and analytics. But the core idea is actually straightforward: and the implications for the promotional products industry are significant.

March 20257 min

Data Strategy

The Real Problem With Data Isn't Access. It's Structure.

Most organizations believe they have a data problem. In reality, they have a structure problem. The data exists. The insight often exists too. But the relationships between those pieces of information remain hidden.

March 20256 min

Product Management

Wait… You're Not Thinking About Q3 Yet?

It's early in the year and many teams are still debating what to build next. Roadmaps are still shifting. But here's the uncomfortable reality: if your organization isn't already thinking about Q3, you're already behind.

January 20255 min

Data Strategy

The Data Lake Was Never About Data

Every data lake project I've seen fails for the same reason. Not bad infrastructure. Not missing ETL pipelines. The data was there. The relationships between the data were not.

May 20257 min

Data Strategy

The Schema Is the Product

Most product managers hand off data architecture to engineering and move on. That is the mistake. The schema is the most consequential product decision you will make.

May 20256 min

Industry

When the API Standard Is the Problem

API standards are supposed to solve integration problems. But sometimes the standard itself is the bottleneck: not because it is wrong, but because it was designed for a world that no longer exists.

May 20257 min

Data Strategy

The Pipeline Is Not the Product

We spent six months building a pipeline that moved data from suppliers into a central repository. Then we discovered that moving the data was the easy part. Making it useful was the whole job.

May 20256 min

Product Management

Anertia: What We Were Really Building

On the surface, Anertia is a platform for authentic self-expression. But the real product we were building was something harder to name: a system for helping people say what they actually mean.

May 20257 min

Product Management

The Authenticity Engine

A prompt is not just a question. It is a design decision. The prompts you ask determine the answers you get: and the answers you get determine the kind of platform you build.

May 20256 min

Product Management

What Anertia Taught Me About Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit is supposed to feel like a pull. Like the market is dragging you forward. What I discovered building Anertia is that sometimes the pull is real, but the market is not ready to admit it.

May 20257 min

Industry

The Dealer Who Does Not Know What They Do Not Know

Only 14% of car buyers trust AI as much as a dealership salesperson. But the more interesting number is this: most dealers do not know what their AI is actually doing.

May 20257 min

Industry

The K-Shaped Dealer

The automotive market has not just slowed down. It has split. And the dealers who do not understand which half of the K they are in are making the wrong strategic bets.

May 20257 min

Product Management

The Scoring Model as Product

A scoring model is not a technical artifact. It is a product decision. Every weight you assign, every threshold you set, every trigger you include is a statement about what you believe drives human behavior.

May 20258 min

Industry

The OEM Compliance Moat

C-4 Analytics holds official provider status for 11 OEM programs. Most people think of that as a sales credential. It is actually a product constraint: and a competitive moat.

May 20256 min

Product Management

The Product Manager as Translator

The best product managers I have worked with share one skill that rarely shows up in job descriptions: the ability to translate between worlds. Between engineering and business. Between user need and technical constraint.

May 20256 min

Product Management

The 90-Day Product Orientation

The most dangerous moment in a PM's career is the first 90 days on a new product. You know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be right. Here is the framework I use to navigate it.

May 20258 min

Product Management

The Invisible Problem

Users complain about the visible problems. The invisible problems: the ones so embedded in the workflow that nobody thinks to mention them: are where the real product leverage is.

May 20256 min

AI & Technology

The Life Event as Signal

Search intent tells you what someone wants right now. Life events tell you what someone will need in the next ninety days. The gap between those two signals is where the best marketing decisions live.

May 20257 min

AI & Technology

The Second-Order Effects of AI

The first-order effect of AI is efficiency. The second-order effect is the collapse of the advantages that efficiency used to create. We are entering the second-order phase: and most organizations are not ready for it.

May 20257 min

Product Management

The PM Who Builds

Most product managers describe products. The best ones build them: not to ship, but to learn. The prototype is not the product. It is the question.

May 20256 min

🍽

Framework: The Red Napkin Playbook

The 3-visit framework that explains every onboarding system I've built.

Jon Taffer's Red Napkin strategy from Bar Rescue is deceptively simple: three visits, three specific interventions, one loyal customer. The insight isn't the tactics: it's the underlying principle. The system knows where the customer is in their relationship, and delivers the right intervention at the right moment.

In B2B SaaS onboarding, this translates directly: Visit 1 is the quick win that makes the product's value concrete. Visit 2 is the activation prompt: the direct deposit moment, the integration setup, the feature that predicts long-term retention: delivered after the user has experienced enough value to act. Visit 3 is the stickiness layer: cross-sell, multi-product adoption, or deeper integration at the moment the habit is established.

The USAA 90-day onboarding journey is this framework operationalized across 180 interactions. The Tend state-driven onboarding is this framework applied to cross-border compliance. The iPROMOTEu identity decision system is this framework applied to platform access control. The pattern is consistent because the underlying principle is universal: state-aware systems make better decisions.

Read the White Paper USAA Case Study Tend Case Study

Visit 1: Red Napkin

Seat the customer with a red napkin. Signal to staff: this person is new, give them your best.

Deliver a quick win in the first session. Make the product's value concrete before the user has time to doubt.

80%more users retained when a quick win is delivered during onboarding

Visit 2: Chicken Discount

Handwrite a '$5 off chicken' voucher as they leave. High-value incentive at the moment of highest receptivity.

Surface the activation behavior: direct deposit, integration, core feature: after the user has experienced value, not before.

+12-15%direct deposit enrollment when prompt timing was redesigned at USAA

Visit 3: Free Cheesecake

Handwrite a 'free cheesecake' voucher on the same card. Lock in the habit, create an expectation of ongoing value.

Introduce the stickiness layer: cross-sell, multi-product, deeper integration: at the 30-day milestone when the habit is established.

+10%multi-product adoption from 30-day milestone cross-sell at USAA

Newsroom:Field Notes from the Work

Executive Outcomes Series

Featured

The Flywheel of a Data-Driven Growth Engine

Spring Cleaning Your Data

From Interest to Impact: How I Learned to Grow My Influence as a PM

All Articles

The Reasoning Layer: When Patterns Become Decisions

The Alignment Threshold: Turning Probability Into Inevitability

The Decision Layer: Where Context Becomes Action

Confidence vs. Conviction: The Missing Layer in Knowledge Systems

The Context Layer: Where Signals Begin to Make Sense

The Integration Layer: Where Industry Signals Finally Connect

The Data Layer: Where Industry Signals Begin

What an AI Agent Could Actually Do for a Promotional Products Affiliate

AI, Knowledge Engines, and the New Dunning-Kruger Problem

The Authentic Swing: Why Authenticity Is a Force Multiplier

The Real Job of a Product Manager in a Data-Heavy Industry

How the Layers of a Knowledge Engine Work Together

The Hidden Data Problem in the Promotional Products Industry

Count the Wolves: Separating Noise from Signal in Product Discovery

What the Promotional Products Industry Can Teach the Tech World

How Knowledge Engines Could Transform the Promotional Products Industry

The Real Problem With Data Isn't Access. It's Structure.

Wait… You're Not Thinking About Q3 Yet?

The Data Lake Was Never About Data

The Schema Is the Product

When the API Standard Is the Problem

The Pipeline Is Not the Product

Anertia: What We Were Really Building

The Authenticity Engine

What Anertia Taught Me About Product-Market Fit

The Dealer Who Does Not Know What They Do Not Know

The K-Shaped Dealer

The Scoring Model as Product

The OEM Compliance Moat

The Product Manager as Translator

The 90-Day Product Orientation

The Invisible Problem

The Life Event as Signal

The Second-Order Effects of AI

The PM Who Builds

The 3-visit framework that explains every onboarding system I've built.

More articles coming

A System of Systems

Newsroom:
Field Notes from the Work