52 Projects in 52 Weeks.

Dear Product Manager, It’s Your Turn.

Dear Product Manager,

I have a problem. Actually, I have hundreds of them, and that’s really my problem.

Everywhere I look, I see things that could work better, things that should exist, or things that I just think would be fun to explore. I’ve spent years thinking and sometimes writing about these ideas, often in my Dear Product Manager posts on LinkedIn, encouraging someone else to do something about them.

Well, it’s time to take my own advice.

I’m going to build 52 projects in 52 weeks.

Think Julie & Julia, where Julie Powell decides to cook her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in a year. Except instead of mastering French cuisine, I’ll be tackling a ridiculous collection of ideas, solving problems, and probably creating a few new ones along the way.

And unlike Julie, I don’t have a cookbook. I’m making up the recipes as I go.

Just start.

I’ve been thinking about something Gary John Bishop explores in his book Unfu*k Yourself. We spend so much time in our own heads, thinking about what we want to do, convincing ourselves we’re not ready, or waiting for the perfect circumstances to come along.

Then I saw a recent Caitlin Clark commercial with a wonderfully simple message: Start how you can.

You don’t have to be good at something to begin. You get good by showing up, trying, failing, learning, and trying again.

Two very different messengers delivering essentially the same advice.

Just start.

It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet how many good ideas never make it past the thinking-about-it stage?

I’ve certainly contributed my share to that pile in my half-bakery.

So rather than spending another year thinking about all the things I’d like to build, I’m going to see how many I can actually get out into the world.

The rules are simple.

Every Sunday, I start a new project.

Every Saturday, I ship whatever I’ve built.

That’s it. Seven days. One idea. Something to show for it.

Some projects will be useful. Some will be ridiculous. Some might be solutions to problems nobody else knew they had. And I’m reasonably certain a few will be spectacular failures.

That’s part of the fun.

I’ve been experimenting with AI-assisted development, or what the cool kids are calling vibe coding. It’s changing what’s possible for someone like me, who knows what he wants to build but hasn’t always had the technical skills, time, or patience to build it himself.

The distance between having an idea and actually building something is getting remarkably short.

AI isn’t magic. There’s still plenty of trial and error, debugging, bad assumptions, and the occasional conversation with a chatbot that makes me question which one of us is actually intelligent.

But it opens doors that used to be closed.

When is something finished?

Here’s where things get interesting.

As a product manager, I know how easy it is to keep adding features, expanding scope, and convincing yourself that something needs just a little more work before it’s ready.

There’s always another feature. Another improvement. Another reason to wait.

My wife, Sherry, is an artist. When I think about one of her ArtPrize projects, I’m reminded that artists wrestle with a similar problem. There is always another detail to refine, another element to reconsider, another brushstroke that might make the piece just a little better.

But at some point, an artist has to decide the work is finished. Not because they’ve exhausted every possibility, but because they’ve decided it’s ready to share with the world.

A painting isn’t finished because there’s nothing left to paint. It’s finished because the artist decides to sign it.

Saturday is when I sign my paintings.

If I haven’t finished, maybe I was too ambitious. Maybe I spent too much time polishing the wrong things. Or maybe I need to figure out how to build faster next time.

Whatever the reason, I don’t get another week. I get another lesson.

And on Sunday, a fresh canvas.

You’re coming along for the ride.

I don’t want this to be a collection of polished success stories written after everything has worked out.

I want to document the process while it’s happening.

The problems I’m trying to solve. The ideas that inspire me. The nits that frustrate me. The tools and AI techniques I’m experimenting with. The moments when something unexpectedly works, a solution surprises me, and the moments when everything goes sideways.

Think of it as a live journal of one guy trying to turn a year’s worth of ideas into actual things, just during nights and weekends.

I have a TON of ideas already. More than I could reasonably tackle in a year. But I also know myself well enough to predict that somewhere around week 37, I’ll be staring at a blank screen wondering what on earth to build next.

Suggestions are welcome. Especially the weird ones.

I have no idea what all 52 projects will look like, which ones will work, or what I’ll learn along the way.

But that’s kind of the point.

We spend an awful lot of time thinking about what we could do, what we should do, and what we’d do if only we had more time, resources, or expertise.

What happens when we stop waiting for all those things and just start building?

I intend to find out.

Dear Product Manager, stop adding things to the roadmap and start shipping.

And yes, I’m talking to myself.