Product Management is Brand Management, Now.

There’s a shift happening that a lot of teams can feel but still can’t name without reaching for a buzzword. Growth used to be about finding a channel that worked, feeding it money, and pretending your retention problems are “a later sprint” problem. Now, the channels are fickle, the market is loud, and AI keeps handing everyone the same baseline competence (and hive-mind, but that is for a different post). When everything starts to look similar from a distance, the thing people use to decide is whether they trust you, and the only place that trust can be earned consistently is inside the product.

I read a recent post by Elena Verna about growth turning into a trust problem. She also points at the part that lands hardest for product teams: product has become brand. That idea gets repeated like it’s a clever line (I’m kind of guilty for repeating it right now). The problem is that it’s also a set of consequences. Once you accept it, you have to run the whole operation differently.

Growth has to be believable.

The old growth era rewarded volume. You could brute-force awareness, rent distribution, and a lot of companies built their entire identity on that rhythm: market loudly, ship quickly, patch the rough edges, repeat.

That rhythm is collapsing. Channels are messy and attention is expensive. Switching is easy, now, and AI made “good enough” so cheap your customers can find an alternative in the time it takes you to schedule a meeting about whether alternatives exist. The market isn’t hungry for novelty. It’s tired. Customers want a tool that behaves, and they want to know they won’t get punished for trusting it.

This is where trust starts behaving like a growth constraint. If people don’t trust you, you’re on a Peleton fast-track to nowhere. People want to know that a company isn’t trying to take advantage of them, and this hasn’t happened in years…

Big tech stopped being a useful blueprint

This is where I’m going to gently kick over a sacred cow. A lot of product thinking is still haunted by the big tech era, where the MAANG companies became the default reference point for how to build, how to scale, how to hire, how to measure, and how to “do product.” That mythology is losing relevance in this new world, not because those companies disappeared, but because their conditions aren’t portable.

Those businesses were built in an environment where distribution was unusually powerful, attention was cheaper, and scale advantages were so strong that process could be inefficient and still look brilliant from the outside. They also had the luxury of setting the rules for entire categories. That shaped a generation of product leaders who learned to optimize for internal machinery: frameworks, ladders, rituals, and metrics that made sense in a company where the default outcome was growth.

Now, look at where they have come…

Meta

Open any Meta product and you can tell, immediately, who the customer is, and it isn’t you. The app greets you the way a magician greets a volunteer, with warmth and a smile and the quiet understanding that you’re about to be used as a prop. Within minutes, you’re in a brightly lit corridor of little temptations, all carefully arranged to keep you scrolling past whatever you meant to do in the first place.

What did you do to everyone’s grandparents, Mark?!

The whole thing feels like a slot machine that learned how to talk. The feed keeps interrupting itself like it’s allergic to stillness, the loading stutters just enough to keep you hovering, and the ads show up like a Kramer-esque neighbor who “just wanted to stop by to say hi,” except they don’t leave, and they keep asking you personal questions.

Please leave me alone, mister.

Nobody’s shocked there are studies linking heavy social media use to mental health harms. If you spend long enough in an environment engineered to tug at your attention, your mood, and your sense of social standing, you don’t walk away feeling connected. You walk away feeling a little hollow, like you just ate a whole bag of chips and somehow still feel hungry.

Amazon

The Amazon shopping app works, in the same way a crowded airport works. You eventually get where you’re going, but you’ll arrive overstimulated and strangely disappointed in yourself. Yes, you can find what you need. You’ll just have to pay a small cognitive toll at every turn because every pixel is fighting for custody of your eyeballs like it’s a contested divorce.

It doesn’t feel like shopping. It feels like an escape room designed by advertisers, where the clues are sponsored, the exits keep relocating, and somebody keeps shouting “Customers also bought!” as if that’s a personality trait. You open it with a simple intention and then spend the next ten minutes being herded, redirected, and upsold until you forget why you came, remember you have a finite lifespan, and close the app like you’re escaping a small fire. For some reason, we have become so accustomed to it, we act like it is normal.

It was this or an adorable dog telling you there is an error. I still trust the dog, but not the company.

I’m not convinced there are designers in the building. If there are, I picture them behind glass like rare birds, while an assembly line shovels interface decisions into an incinerator and measures success by the smoke. This is what happens when “product” turns into program in disguise: the experience stops being the point, and the conveyor belt becomes the point. Suddenly you’re not building a product, you’re running a shipping operation with a UI taped to the front like a smiley face sticker. Everything is “on track,” every dependency has its own doc, and the customer experience becomes the place where all compromises go to live out their retirement. The team celebrates velocity while the user quietly develops new coping skills, like closing the app and going outside. Speaking of retirement, many of the Amazon folks I have met make the joke that they are going to work at Microsoft when they retire, so let’s talk about them for a minute…

Apple

Apple sells serenity. The hardware looks like it was designed by someone who irons their jeans, and for a while you believe you’ve joined a simpler life where nothing breaks and everything glides. Then you try to do one mildly advanced thing, like manage storage or move photos between devices, and you discover an ecosystem of polite little traps. iCloud is either a guardian angel or a haunted attic, and which one you get depends on the phase of the moon and whether you clicked the wrong toggle three years ago.

Apple support voice: “Your photos are safe in iCloud.”

That’s where the trust starts to wobble. The whole Apple deal is built on confidence. You’re paying for the feeling that you won’t have to think about it. The moment you have to think about it, the spell breaks. You start watching your photos like they’re tenants who might skip town, and you start treating storage warnings like prophecies. The UI stays calm and pleasant while you’re quietly panicking, which somehow makes it worse. It’s like being told everything’s fine by a person standing in front of a burning toaster.

Apple also perfected the art of removing ports and selling you the feeling of progress. You start your day with a beautiful device and end it with a pouch full of adapters like you’re a traveling magician whose specialty is cables. It’s premium, sure, but it’s also a recurring tax on normal behavior, and the tax is paid in dongles, subscriptions, and small moments of indignity at the worst possible times, like when you’re trying to present something and realize you forgot the correct ceremonial adapter.

Apple’s Liquid Glass rollout, sponsored by my charging cable’s will to live.

And now we have Liquid Glass, which sounds like a perfume and behaves like a design decision made by someone who really missed reflective surfaces. Everything is shiny and translucent, as if your phone has decided it’s a high-end cocktail bar. It looks cool for about eight seconds, and then you realize you’re reading text on top of a moving blur like you’re trying to check directions through a wet windshield. When the aesthetic starts interfering with clarity, it doesn’t feel luxurious. It feels like the product is asking you to admire it instead of use it.

Apple’s brand promise is calm, coherent, and reliable, so every confusing iCloud moment, every missing port, every glossy layer that makes things harder to read lands as a small betrayal. You don’t lose trust because one thing is annoying. You lose trust because the annoyances start forming a pattern, and the pattern says, “You’ll adapt. You’ll pay. You’ll keep up.”

Netflix

Netflix has a special talent for taking a massive library and making it feel like you’ve only got twelve options. The algorithm doesn’t guide you through possibility. It herds you into a small fenced-in yard filled with slightly different versions of whatever you watched last week, and then it stands there proudly like it invented choice. If the original pitch of streaming was “endless selection,” the lived experience is starting to feel like “endless selection of the same three moods.”

“What if we show you the same five shows again… but in a new row?”

Watch one documentary and suddenly you’re trapped in Documentary World. Watch one romantic comedy and you’ll be escorted into a hallway of smiling thumbnails forever. Watch a crime series and congratulations, you now live in Crime Town, where everything looks like it was shot through the same gray filter and everyone is always one episode away from “a shocking twist.” The library can be enormous, but if the system keeps serving you a loop based on your last few clicks, the size stops mattering. Discovery turns into reruns of your own behavior, which defeats the entire point of paying for variety in the first place.

Then you hit the pricing side of the trust problem, where the rules keep shifting in ways that feel convenient for Netflix and exhausting for everyone else. The tiers change, the price creeps up, ads sneak in, household rules tighten, device limits start acting strange, and add-ons appear like a new toll booth on a road you already paid to drive on. It’s all packaged in cheerful, reassuring language that frames it as an improvement, even though what you’re actually experiencing is a moving target. You’re paying for access, but the terms of that access can be rewritten whenever Netflix decides it wants a narrower funnel and a higher rent.

None of this is catastrophic on its own, which is exactly why it works. Trust usually doesn’t blow up in one dramatic moment. It wears down through a steady drip of small signals. The algorithm keeps narrowing your world instead of opening it up, and the pricing and plan changes keep shifting the ground under your feet while the copy smiles and calls it an improvement. Eventually you stop opening Netflix with any real excitement and start opening it the way you check the fridge, hoping something new showed up while you weren’t looking.

Google

Google is what happens when a company builds half the modern internet and then leaves all the doors unlocked. The individual products can be excellent, and the overall experience can still feel like living in a house where every room was remodeled by a different contractor who refuses to speak to the others. You open settings and it turns into a choose your own adventure novel, except every ending leads to another settings page, and some of them are duplicated just to keep things exciting. The Winchester House. It is the tech version of the Winchester House.

I tried to change my settings and ended up three doors deep with no exit sign.

Search is the weirdest one now because it’s still powerful, but the experience has started to feel like you’re trying to ask a simple question while an overconfident assistant keeps interrupting to “help.” You came for an answer, and instead you get an AI summary that speaks with the certainty of a person who didn’t do the reading, followed by a collage of links that may or may not relate to what you asked in the first place. Sometimes it’s useful, and sometimes it’s confidently wrong in a way that makes you trust your own memory less, which is a fascinating product outcome if you’re into psychological horror.

This is also why traditional SEO is dead, or at least on life support with a tube full of nostalgia. The old game was ranking: keywords, backlinks, pages engineered to satisfy the algorithm, and an entire industry dedicated to turning the internet into a landfill of “Top 10” lists written by nobody for no one. Now the AI layer is eating the click, summarizing the content, and handing users an answer-shaped object before they ever reach the site. Even when your page ranks, you’re competing with a machine-generated response that sits above you like a bouncer. The result is grim: brands and publishers pay to create content, and the platform captures the value without sending the traffic, which makes the whole ecosystem feel less like search and more like extraction.

You can see the next move already happening. Companies are routing around Google altogether by building AI-first front doors where the “search” happens inside their own ecosystem. Retailers, especially, don’t want to rent attention from an algorithm and hope the customer finds them. They want to answer the question directly and keep the journey end-to-end, which is why you’re seeing partnerships and integrations that push people toward conversational discovery inside apps instead of classic web search. Hell, Google is even rerouting around Google. We live in wild times.

Your product is already your brand, even if nobody wants to admit it…

Once upon a time, brand lived in marketing and people would say it was “expressed” through the product or service. During that time, housing was affordable, and everyone would send messages to their friends on their shiny new Nokia phones.

I’m being sarcastic, but seriously: your product is your brand, and frankly, it’s been that way for a while now. We just pretended like it wasn’t this way because the big tech companies were paying a lot of money.

The truth that we all knew but were too ambitious to admit is that the customers don’t live in your org chart. They don’t live in your brand guidelines. They definitely don’t live in that slide where everyone agreed you’re “premium, but approachable” right before shipping three different versions of the same button. They live in the product.

They notice how quickly they can get to the thing they came for, or how quickly they get redirected into a maze of setup steps, popups, and helpful hints that are only helpful if you already know what they mean. They notice whether the interface does the polite thing and explains itself, or whether it expects them to earn a minor in your internal terminology before they’re allowed to proceed.

“I don’t want to talk to your AI…where are my grandma’s 85th birthday pics?”

Then reality shows up, because reality always shows up. Something fails, a flow breaks, a page loads forever, an edge case appears, and suddenly your product reveals who it really is. You either help people recover like you respect their time, or you hand them an error message that feels like a smirk. The billing moment arrives, too, which is where a lot of companies mysteriously develop selective memory about their “values.” Customers can tell whether pricing is a fair exchange or a puzzle box designed to see what you can get away with.

And when support enters the picture, customers learn the truth about your company structure. Do they feel like they’re talking to one coordinated team, or like they’ve been dropped into a relay race where everyone passes the baton back and forth? Yeah, customers can feel that…

If you’re a PM, you’re the one shaping that answer. You can call it activation, retention, engagement, or whatever else makes it sound appropriately scientific. Hell, you can call it “experience,” “retention,” or “activation” if it helps you sleep at night. It’s still brand work. Customers, on the other hand, experience it as trust, and trust is brand. Marketing hasn’t owned this in a long time.

Let’s get another thing straight: trust isn’t abstract. It’s a physical sensation. You can feel it when you’re using a product and you’re not bracing for impact. That’s why I pay attention to the products I trust, because they’ve earned a place in my life through behavior, not through marketing. Elena mentioned a few she trusts in her post, and I think it si a great idea to share in the event any of you feel the same (and maybe you will be inclined to share the ones you trust, too).

Spotify: Spotify keeps me moving and the experience feels personalized without feeling intrusive. I don’t feel like I’m fighting it to get an experience I was promised, but can’t find.

ChatGPT: ChatGPT stays responsive in the messy middle of thinking, which is where most tools abandon you. There are quirks that come with new (ish) products, but this one doesn’t hide it. I like the honesty.

Miro: Miro makes complexity feel navigable instead of punishing. Unlike Mural, it doesn’t feel like it is trying to be complicated to prove something (or because of feature creep).

Canva: Canva lets me create without making me pay an entrance fee in confusion. It is a replacement for lower thought design that has been obsolete for some time, now.

Lovable: Lovable is newer on my list, and what stands out is how quickly it gets me to something real without making me learn a private language first. While thsi is the entire point of it, it doesn’t make me feel like I should have learned anything prior to using it. The complete lack of condescension is what makes it, well, Lovable.

Substack: Substack is the more emotionally mature sibling of Medium. I abandoned Medium shortly after writing two articles, and never returned. Partly out of lack of interest in the experience, but mostly because it reminded me of a cleaned up Lotus Notes interface had a baby with WordPress and then put makeup on it.

None of these products are perfect. They’ve earned trust by being consistent enough that I can relax, and I don’t feel like I am being personally insulted by outages or sneaky pricing practices. That relaxation is what product teams earn with the way the product behaves over time.

So, where do we go from here?

Take Action

Here are so me actionable changes for Product Managers to make to ensure trust is embedded in the product:

• Pick 3 trust metrics and ship against them. Time to value, key-flow success rate, support contacts per task, pricing confusion rate. If you can’t measure it yet, add instrumentation and treat it like product work.
• Run a “trust review” before every release. What promise did we just make, where can it break, what does failure look like, and what will support say when it does?
• Stop shipping program work in a product costume. Every roadmap item needs a customer-facing outcome and a quality bar, not just a dependency plan and a deadline.
• Make pricing behave like a feature opposed to a surprise. No hidden fees, no puzzle-box packaging, no “friendly” copy that’s really a trap. If it’d feel gross in person, it’ll feel gross in the product.
• Kill handoffs and build together. If design shows up after decisions are “final,” you’re manufacturing seams. Seams lead to confusion and confusion becomes churn.