by Redwin Tursor
Most Product Managers are trained to chase trends. You know the pattern: orbit whatever's working elsewhere—Netflix, Figma, Slack. Every quarterly pivot points toward the emergent problem. Every strategy becomes a hunt for asymmetric advantage. The mistake isn't in seeing trends exist. Trends are real. The mistake is mistaking trend-spotting for thinking. When you build your reputation on surface velocity instead of fundamental understanding, you damage your brand without realizing it. You look adaptive. What you've actually built is the opposite: a reputation for never staying committed to anything long enough to understand it deeply.
Netflix understood streaming was coming. They didn't chase it frantically—they transitioned strategically, killed their own core business before the market could, and became the company they wanted to be. They survived two massive market disruptions because they optimize for longevity, not velocity. They don't chase blond in a room full of equilibria. They look at what they're fundamentally good at and they protect it.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has the better technology but a weaker institutional position. They're so busy chasing the emergent opportunity—corporate deals, new alliances, edge cases—that they've damaged the core user experience. Over-eager safety filters. Miserable power users. Partnerships with companies like Oracle that kill brand reputation on contact. OpenAI isn't leaking users yet. But it's when, not if. Netflix has the cred and cash to protect their brand while scaling. OpenAI doesn't. And you can see the cost accumulating in real time.
Google is a blue chip company running startup culture. They release products. Developers adopt them. Then Google kills them. Or pivots. Or folds them into something else without migration support. Experienced engineers learned the pattern years ago: if Google's chasing the trend—AI disruption, search disruption, whatever's hot this quarter—the product isn't built for longevity. It's built for optionality. That's not a staffing problem for Google. That's an institutional signal that travels through every technical community faster than any internal memo.
The same pattern is starting to show at OpenAI. Users see the product pivots, the partnerships that seem desperate rather than strategic, the safety theater that pleases no one. The smart money watches and recalibrates trust. This is how brand damage actually happens: not with one catastrophic failure, but with a thousand small signals that the company doesn't know what it is anymore. And once that signal starts, it's hard to stop.
When you build your professional reputation on trend-spotting instead of fundamental thinking, you become known as the person who's always pivoting. Always reaching for the next asymmetric advantage. Always restructuring around what emerged last quarter. You look adaptive. You look forward-thinking. What you've actually built is a reputation for never staying committed to anything long enough to understand it deeply.
Hiring managers see your resume and think: "This person moves fast." What they're actually reading is: "This person doesn't think systematically about constraints. They chase signals instead of building foundations." And in the roles that actually matter—the ones where you need to see institutional contradictions before they become crises, where you need to understand what's actually broken at a systemic level—that reputation becomes a liability. You've optimized for looking smart in the moment. You've damaged your credibility for the work that requires depth.
So how do you actually build longevity? By becoming a systemic thinker. It means replacing the hunt for asymmetric advantage with institutional forensics: a deep understanding of what the company is already fundamentally good at. It's the work of finding the core constraint—the thing that's currently broken but, once fixed, unlocks compounding value.
This work isn't fast. It doesn't look like a trendy pivot. It certainly won't get you a vanity metric headline. But when you anchor your brand in solving fundamental problems instead of chasing emergent signals, you build the kind of credibility that lasts. You become the person who sees the crisis coming, not the person who helped cause it with a frantic, short-lived "solution."
That's the difference between looking adaptive and building an enduring core brand.
