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.
02 / 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.
Read The Flamingo Lens- 0123 September 2026
The hidden cost of doing nothing
Aka why platform work looks expensive when nobody priced the alternative.
SubstackRead it→ - 029 September 2026
Prioritization is easy
Six urgent initiatives become a very different roadmap once you stop treating each one as a single block of work.
SubstackRead it→ - 032 September 2026
I Picked the Wrong Solution
And I’m a better PM because of it.
SubstackRead it→
03 / About
A little about 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.
More about me