TAG

# Product Judgment

2026-07-13

Kung Fu Women's Soccer only scored 6.6, yet Stephen Chow is the most ruthless product manager I've ever seen

Kung Fu Women's Soccer opened at 6.6 on Douban, with 8.6% of viewers giving it one star. The comments trash it: cheap effects, try-hard acting, a plot that's just Shaolin Soccer with a gender swap — reheated leftovers. Yet it crossed 100 million in 27 minutes on day one, took 76.8% of screenings, and pulled in 500 million over two days, with total box office forecasts revised up from 1.428 billion to 1.865 billion RMB. A product the professional audience flunked is winning big commercially. That's not luck, and it's not as simple as a bad movie cashing in — the critics and the box office are actually scoring two completely different products. And what makes Stephen Chow such a ruthless product manager is that he knows better than anyone which one he's shipping. This piece takes it apart — and takes apart the price of it too.

2026-07-11

Why People Insist That Typhoons Steer Clear of Putuoshan

There's a widely repeated claim — Putuoshan is protected by Guanyin, so typhoons always detour around it. Yet today, Typhoon No. 9 (Bavi) shut down Putuoshan's ferries, canceled 14 flights at its airport, and forced every fishing boat in the district to evacuate overnight; back in 2021, In-Fa flooded 6,000 meters of road across the Putuoshan-Zhujiajian area. Putuoshan is no typhoon-proof zone — it's getting hit today. So why do people still believe the Bodhisattva turns typhoons away? That misattribution — crediting mere "survival" to "mysterious protection" — is the exact same cognitive move as worshipping "great PMs as prophets." This piece takes it apart.

2026-06-23

Becoming an AI-Era PM 04 | Judging "Should We Build It" Now Costs More Than "Can We Build It"

This is the fourth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2025, METR ran a randomized controlled trial: 16 senior developers, five years of experience on average, did 246 real tasks with AI. Beforehand they expected to be 24% faster; afterward they still felt 20% faster; measured, they were 19% slower. Even the simplest judgment — "did AI make me faster" — got called backwards by the people who knew the work best. When building gets fast and cheap, "can we build it" stops filtering any idea out, and the expensive judgment moves to "should we build it." This piece gives you four things you can actually do: stop using difficulty as a gate, ask what happens if you don't build it, write down what becomes true before you start, and let AI lay out options but never trust "feels right."