The squeeze, from three directions
External noise, organizational paranoia, and private inexperience — named as shared and structural, not personal failure.
Coming soon from Technics Publications
Permanently
Unfinished
Field notes for the uncertain, on AI and product management
A field notebook for product managers and the engineers, designers, and leaders working alongside them — written from inside a transition imposed by AI, which hasn't yet finished and, the book argues, never fully will.
Publishing with Technics Publications
The book
Written from inside the transition, not after it
Permanently Unfinished is a field notebook for product managers learning to work inside a squeeze that AI has made permanent: relentless external noise insisting AI changes everything; competitive paranoia flowing from the boardrooms of companies down through the ranks; and the private uncertainty of not knowing what you're capable of with these tools, or what's expected of you to stay relevant.
This is not a guide to the tools and AI models. It is a reflection of the author's personal lived experience inside one of the world's largest software companies, on boundaries between product, engineering, and design dissolving, roles inevitably reforming, and AI's economics landing on the product manager's desk as a matter of responsibility along with new kinds of design decisions. It's about finding signal in the noise, reading silence, and navigating uncertainty when shipping AI features early as continuous experiments, and embracing the discomfort of burying the Minimum Viable Product concept. The book will ask as many questions as it tries to answer, and mostly it empowers the reader with a sense of agency and methods for making peace with ever growing uncertainty in an AI-hyped world, where value is real but requires experimentation, where the key skill is becoming knowing what to build, and where AI pushes us to stay relevant in new, unexplored ways. Permanently Unfinished is a human story see through the lens of product management, told from inside a transition still underway.
“No honest mason would claim to be a hammer expert under those conditions. They would tell you what they know about stone, and stay humble about the tools.”
— from the Author's Note
What's inside
Permission to explore
Why simply telling people to "adopt AI" doesn't work — and what actually builds usable skill.
AI economics as a PM's responsibility
Retry behavior, unit economics, and token cost as design decisions — not just engineering's problem.
Signal abundance vs. signal absence
What AI changes about customer research — and the harder problem of interpreting what was never said at all.
Dissolving role boundaries
What happens to product, engineering, and design as the lines between them stop holding.
Agency in a thousand small choices
Not a framework for certainty, but a way to keep working — and keep shipping — without it.
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What early readers are saying
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FAQ
Good questions
Is this an official Microsoft book?
No. Søren works at Microsoft, but Permanently Unfinished is an independent, personal project. The views in the book are his own.
Who is publishing this book?
Permanently Unfinished is being published by Technics Publications, a publisher known for its data management, architecture, and enterprise strategy titles (including the DMBOK).
When will the book be available?
Publication is scheduled for early 2027, but may be published sooner. Join the notify list above and you'll hear the moment it's available.
What formats will be available?
E-book and paperback are planned. Details will be confirmed closer to publication.
Who is this book for?
Product managers, primarily — plus the engineers, designers, architects, and consultants working alongside them, who are navigating the same shift in how software gets built.
Does this book teach me how to use specific AI tools?
No. The tools will be outdated by the time you read this — that's the point. The book is about the judgment underneath the tools, which doesn't expire with the next model release.