Mid-January is often when supply reality catches up with roadmaps. This time, things are tougher than ever. Late last year, a major constraint tightened across consumer hardware. Global memory shortages, driven by DRAM and NAND capacity being pulled toward AI and data-center demand, began pushing up prices and stretching lead times for the kind of memory almost all embedded devices rely on. This is a structural reallocation and not a temporary hiccup. For years, memory sat in the BOM as a...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Even in 2026, necessity and value beat novelty way more often than we want to think. I see a contrarian signal hiding in plain sight right now. Despite all the noise around emerging tech, retail reinvention and AI-driven everything, consumer buying behavior is staying stubbornly grounded. Value first. Essentials prioritized. Discretionary buys and upsells getting swatted away like pesky flies. McKinsey’s latest consumer research confirms what many founders feel but few plan around. Households...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Proximity is becoming a feature, not an afterthought, and buyers appreciate the difference immediately. In my home city, a new carbon fiber manufacturing facility is about to start production. It is the first of its kind in Canada, and uses carbon from the Alberta Oil Sands, the world’s third largest proven oil reserves. One of my clients wants to be an early customer, even though their current parts come from China at a lower cost. The calculus is shifting. Near-shoring is gathering speed...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Loyalty can stall because the product works too well. My wife and I were talking yesterday about Peloton. We’ve had our bikes for six years now. They work great. No complaints. No big urgency to upgrade. And THAT there’s the business problem. We wondered why Peloton doesn’t offer a buy-back or trade-in program, like Levi’s, Zara, LuluLemon and Apple do. Not as a sustainability thing, but an upgrade accelerator. I suspect the fear is resale cannibalization. If used bikes flood the market, new...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Digital payments change buyer psychology long before logic shows up at the party. I’ve been a fan of wireless payments via Apple Watch for nearly a decade. I still love how quick it is and many people don’t realize it’s much more secure than using a card, because a one-time token is swapped rather than disclosing my card number. But there is a subtle shift going on every time a buyer like me taps instead of hands over cash. Recent research calls it Spendception, a psychological effect where...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Procrastination has become the silent competitor in modern product markets. I have been catching myself doing this more often lately. I shortlist a product. I am 99% convinced it is the right one. And then I pause. Not that it is too expensive, but because a voice whispers that a better version might show up next month. That hesitation is not usually about the money or an unknown product. It is avoiding future regret. Across mid-priced physical goods, buyers are stalling at the finish line...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Other humans feel the difference even before they know why. Lately I have been noticing something in my social feeds. Sensing it with my gut before my brain catches up. Every so often I scroll past a LinkedIn post that hits me with a tiny (but special) jolt of feeling. Never because it is polished, or insightful, or even useful much of the time. But because it contains an observation only a fellow human could make. A throwaway line about something weird they liked in the 80s. An unusual scent...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Speed only helps if you are aiming in the right direction. I was reading a recent Consumer Goods piece quoting James Quincey, CEO of The Coca-Cola Co., and one line stuck with me. “If you put AI on top of a bad process, you just get to a bad place faster and cheaper.” That is the message most product teams seem to nod and forget. Coca-Cola is seeing real gains from AI. Faster, cheaper marketing assets. (Like that Christmas commercial we all saw.) More customization. Smarter suggested orders...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Almost everything we call a “need” is a story our mind learned to believe. In I Need That, I talk about how quickly our definition of “need” shifts. Indoor plumbing was once a luxury … not all that long ago. My grandparents’ farm still had an outhouse and a hand-pump well when I was a kid. And they felt perfectly satisfied. Air-conditioning used to be something you bragged about until the 1990s. Today even the cheapest cars include it because if you live somewhere hot, you need that. But...
10 days ago • 1 min read
