2025 Reflections & 2026 Plans
Annually, I summarize my writing and review plans for the upcoming year. But before doing this, I want to thank all of you for being my readers. Whether you have been following me for a few years or just joined after my recent posts (welcome, by the way), thank you!
Writing and observing how people react to it is my source of dopamine. It really motivates me to keep going and do my best. I am learning by reflecting on and writing about my experience, and I want everyone to learn from it too.
Now, let's take a look at my journey as a writer in 2025.
2025 by the Numbers
On "2024 Reflection & 2025 Plans," I said that in 2025, there will be 12 articles vs. 24 I wrote in 2024. You are currently reading that 12th article in 2025, so I kept my promise.
Less content led to a greater impact, but not across all platforms. Medium is on the rise, LinkedIn is almost dead compared to previous years, and my Blog is thriving.
Blog Performance
For the Blog, there are 1.9K unique visitors vs 700 in 2024 and 300 in 2023 on ilyazakharau.com. The growing readership spans continents, with substantial numbers coming from Southeast Asia. I am very glad that the geography of my readers is growing.
I changed the blog engine (for the 4th time, see my previous journey here) to Docusaurus. With vibe-coding, I was able to migrate all the content from MKDocs in one day and then arrange the blog redesign.
Also, I launched my own email subscription to maintain some independence from publishing platforms. The subscription numbers are not staggering, but slowly growing, and I am happy about that.
Medium Growth
On Medium, the number of followers doubled, and the number of email subscribers tripled. I put my last Medium articles behind a paywall (keeping them free on my blog), so I started earning real money from them. Not a large amount, but it is pleasant to start getting something out of it.
LinkedIn Reality Check
LinkedIn plunged because I wasn't posting consistently. Even those occasional posts had fewer engagements than before. I followed the advice to clean up your network to remove dead weight periodically. I conducted a thorough LinkedIn purge of recruiters, salespeople, people from my university, and others.
And it did work. My posts, which mainly contain text and links to my other resources, are not well-liked by the algorithm and receive low but stable engagement. Maybe because of that, traffic from LinkedIn to my blog and Medium increased by 20%, even though engagement with the platform is not impressive.
But I am satisfied with that.
Most people agree that LinkedIn has become a trash can, but we still need to keep using it. So I don't have any intention of investing my time there except for announcement posts.
What Worked in 2025
Most of that success was due to my recent articles on AI. In 2025, I worked to deploy a proof-of-concept AI-based feature into production. I did not plan to write about it mainly because I did not want to be part of the AI hype train.
I completed my successful Requirements & API series and planned to write mainly about product management and design systems. But I felt the need to reflect on that recent writing experience, which resulted in a first, pretty generic article, "Embedding AI Features: The Messy Middle Between POC and MVP". Then I decided to change my strategy and share more personal, practical stories in "From Product Manager to Context Dealer: How AI Changed My Role" and "How I stopped doing Product Management and became obsessed with AI evals," instead of abstract theorisation. They got a boost on Medium and got a little moment of glory.
Hidden Gems Worth Revisiting
However, I think there is a bunch of overlooked articles I will be glad you give a first or second chance:
The Product Manager's View on Composability
My take on MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud native, Headless) & Composable architecture approaches. That is an interesting topic on which I spent a lot of time researching. When published, it underperformed widely. It is still a worthy material, so give it a try.
How to Build and Maintain Stakeholder Trust as a Product Owner
It is a follow-up to the highly successful "Stakeholder Alignment: The Underrated Skill Every Product Manager Needs," offering practical advice on rebuilding and maintaining trust among stakeholders on your project. It didn't meet the expectations of its predecessor, but it's still a great article.
Resolving Chronic Systemic Problems is Not Helpful for Your Career
My thoughts on focusing solely on resolving systemic, complex business problems may leave me with nothing and hinder your career. It is one of the best pieces of my writing to date.
What's Coming in 2026
The content strategy will be the same: an article per month. They will be published as free content on my blog via email subscription and on Medium, behind a paywall.
I want to grow my subscriber base: my target number is 100 readers on both.
Planned Topics
In terms of the content itself:
- Prompt Pipelines - There is one more AI-related article on building prompt pipelines. Initially planned for 2025, but I couldn't make it.
- Impact-First Book Review - I have some thoughts to share about Matt LeMay's recent book "Impact-first Product Teams".
- UI Design Systems - Last year, I teased one or two articles on UI Design Systems. I still stick to that idea.
- Career Reflections - There will be at least one related to my future career prospects.
- Requirements & API E-book - And I will be back to the API! I want to expand and repackage my "Requirements & API" series as an e-book and give it away at a symbolic price.
So I have some plans for the first half of 2026 and then see what happens next.
Again, thanks for reading me this year. I wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2026. Take care.