How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Be genuinely interested, let people own the idea, and never tell someone they are wrong.

Three takeaways for AI PMs

• Be interested before you are interesting
• Let the engineer own the eval idea: Letting the other person feel the idea is theirs is Carnegie's most useful rule for a PM without authority.
• Never criticise a model's output in front of the person who built it: Criticism makes people defend, and ML teams already feel judged by every hallucination screenshot.

Do this Monday

• In your next 1:1 with a cross-functional partner, ask three questions about their quarter before you mention your own project.
• Before the next eval or spec review, rewrite your opening so the problem is stated and the solution is a question to the room.
• At the end of the week, send one specific thank-you to someone on another team, naming the thing they did.