Before it becomes obvious, it usually looks like a mess.
I've spent the last ten years in tech, first as a software engineer and now in Product Management, making sense of complicated systems, messy decisions, and problems that rarely show up neatly.
I'm Marina Mitan. I write about what I learn while trying to understand what's actually producing the outcomes we see.
The Flamingo Lens
Selected writing
Most problems don't arrive as problems. They arrive as symptoms, workarounds, conflicting explanations, vague requests, and decisions that somehow keep getting reopened.
The Flamingo Lens is where I write about looking underneath all of that: systems, product, decisions, constraints, bottlenecks, incentives, and the patterns that keep producing the outcomes we see.
- 0126 August 2026
I became delusional at work
And that changed how I chose my next move.
SubstackRead it→ - 0219 August 2026
Someone just has to look at the whole thing
Why Product Management still matters when engineering, design, marketing and sales are all doing their jobs well.
SubstackRead it→ - 0312 August 2026
What if the hardest part isn't mandatory?
Sometimes the thing slowing you down is only there because nobody has questioned it in years.
SubstackRead it→
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A littleabout me
I've spent most of my career walking into complicated situations and trying to work out how the pieces actually fit together.
I started as a software engineer and eventually moved into Product Management, where I found myself doing more and more of the work I naturally gravitated towards anyway: understanding systems, finding the problem underneath the visible problem, and figuring out what needs to change to get a different outcome.
At some point, I realised I was using the same way of thinking everywhere, not just in software.
That's where The Flamingo Lens came from.
The Flamingo Lens
Writing about systems, product, messy problems, and what's actually going on underneath the obvious answer.
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