As 2025 wraps up, I’ve been thinking less about “Did I do enough?” and more about “Where did the year go?”

ICYMI - I got a new PM job. 

At the start of the year, I moved into a new role within IBM Asset Lifecycle Management (formerly IBM Sustainability). The full story of that transition (and its chaos) is a post for January, but there’s one piece I want to share now: 2025 reshaped how I think about ownership, learning, and ambition.

When I joined Asset Lifecycle Management, I signed on to work on a product that, turns out, didn’t really have a market. Three months in and my manager told me that the product was being cut. 

But there was a silver lining. My department was rolling out an initiative called Single Threaded Ownership (STO) (inspired by this book). Under STO, I was given a new product: IBM Outage Prediction.

This product shift became the biggest curveball—and the biggest growth driver—of 2025. I had the chance to be the product manager for an entire SaaS platform inside an enterprise (which is quite rare in enterprise companies!). 

I stood up the team, set up our sprint planning and playback rituals, and aligned design, data science, and engineering around a roadmap. We shipped meaningful features, including wildfire risk prediction. 

But the thing I’m proudest of isn’t any single feature; it’s getting an entirely new, cross-functional team moving in the same direction.

And all of this was happening while I was learning a completely new industry, energy & utilities (E&U).

E&U is a far cry from the Data & AI world I came from. I had to learn the language of power grid operators and understand that a lot of our customers operate pretty old school.

The other quiet shift this year was outside of work: I stepped back from creating content.

Creating content simply stopped making me happy. I was tired of turning every experience into something “postable,” so I gave myself permission to learn and build offline. I bought a Cricut. I learned volleyball. I went to a local makerspace and did crafts with zero intent to sell anything. 

I’m proud of what I accomplished in 2025—new product, new industry, and a healthier relationship with ambition. And I hope you’re proud of yourself, too.

In the next post, I’ll be sharing my 2026 goals (which I’m low key scared to do!) 

And let me know, what are you most proud of for 2025? Is there anything in this newsletter you want to learn more about? Just reply to this email. 

See you in the next one,