Tennis lies to you quickly. Hiking lies to you slowly. Product management does both.

If you've built products long enough, everything becomes a case study. Your hobbies, your vacations, even your disasters, all filtered through the lens of systems and feedback loops. It took a tennis court in Austin and a mountain in Colorado to teach me that not all data is created equal.

Fast Feedback Feels Like Control

Tennis is addictive because it responds to you immediately. Ball in, ball out. Point won, point lost. You flatten your serve, and before the ball hits the ground, you know whether it worked.

This speed feels like learning. It isn't, always.

A winner that clips the net isn't evidence your form is right. It's a lucky mistake. A double fault on a perfect toss might be nerves, not mechanics. Fast feedback teaches responsiveness, but it also breeds false confidence. You start trusting every signal, even the noise. You start believing that because you can react quickly, you understand what's happening.

I've played over a hundred hours of tennis in the past year. I'm still not sure which lessons from the court are real and which are confirmation bias dressed up as improvement.

Slow Feedback Doesn't Care About Your Plans

Hiking operates on the opposite timeline.

A few years ago, my wife and I planned to climb Mount Blue Sky in Colorado. To dodge Frontier's baggage fees, we shipped our boots, packs, and layers to Denver via UPS a week early. Clever. Cost-effective.

The box never arrived.

We discovered this at our Airbnb the night before the climb. No gear. No time. We spent the next morning at REI, hemorrhaging money on rental equipment we didn't want for a climb we were now too stressed to enjoy.

That's hiking feedback. You make decisions a week in advance. The consequences arrive at mile eight, 12,000 feet up, when the blisters start screaming. There's no iteration. There's only commitment and its eventual, expensive result.

The decisions that matter happen at basecamp. Not on the trail.

Product Management Gets Both Problems at Once

Product sits in the worst position: feedback is slow and noisy.

Last year, I helped build Smart Jobs, an AI-powered recommendation engine for property maintenance. We were applying LLMs to procurement before it was trendy. For months, it felt like a miss. Usage was modest. Customers were "polite," which is how you know you're in trouble.

The signal was murky. Was the product wrong? The timing? The positioning? Were we even measuring the right things? We could have made a convincing case for any of those explanations.

We kept pushing. Tightened the UX. Stayed patient. A year in, it caught fire. Adoption inflected. Customers started asking for it by name.

The "yes" arrived, but it took twelve months. It came wrapped in enough noise that we could have quit, or pivoted into something worse, at any point along the way.

Knowing Which Game You're Playing

The thing I keep coming back to: you have to recognize which type of feedback you're actually getting.

Tennis problems require responsiveness. Stay light. Adjust constantly. But don't over-index on any single point. The speed of the game doesn't mean you've mastered the system. It just means you're getting more chances to fool yourself.

Hiking problems require commitment. Front-load your thinking. Stress-test your assumptions before you start moving. Accept that some decisions are final and prepare accordingly.

Product problems require discernment. Is this a moment to react and iterate? Or is this noise I should ignore while trusting my preparation?

The signal always arrives eventually. Your job is to still be standing when it does.