Someone calculated that a $3,000 MIT certificate in design thinking was teaching people what they already knew how to do.

I went through 8 years of Product Coalition articles to trace how we got from Stanford d.school reverence to… nobody using the phrase anymore. The pattern is wild. In 2016, people wrote about it like they’d found religion. By 2023, someone wrote “you can learn 90% of it in five minutes.”

The best PMs I talk to on the podcast empathize with users, prototype quickly, iterate constantly. They just call it product management. No framework required.

When was the last time you heard someone say “design thinking” in a meeting without everyone quietly wincing?