Product Thinking
A Working View of Product
These are some of my current thoughts on building products, shaped by what I've read, the people I've learned from and, increasingly, my own experience. They'll keep evolving as I do.Good product work to me is largely about judgement: understanding what matters, finding clarity in noisy and incomplete information, making the best bet you can, and learning fast enough to make the next one better.
Make Things Happen
Ultimately the objective is not to have the perfect internal process, produce exhaustive documentation or fill a roadmap.The objective is to solve important problems and make something meaningfully better.Everything else, research, strategy, data and process, is there to help us do that better, not become the work itself. They should sharpen decisions and accelerate delivery, not slow it down.
Set the Direction
A clear vision is fundamental to building a successful product.It gives everyone a clear, tangible, shared picture of the future, creating common context for faster, better and more decentralised decisions.It should be ambitious enough to challenge the status quo, look beyond today's technological constraints, align people across the business, and be exciting enough that they genuinely want to make it real.
Choose how to get there.
Strategy turns ambition into choices: where to focus, which problems matter and what we will leave alone.Those choices connect the future we imagine to the work we do today.
Be Clear on Success
Good outcomes give teams a clear problem to solve, the strategic context to understand why it matters, and the autonomy and accountability to work out how, rather than prescribing a feature.Success can be measured qualitatively or quantitatively; what matters is that it reflects meaningful progress towards the strategy rather than output for its own sake.Metrics need to be carefully defined. They can be noisy, lagging or gameable, creating false precision and encouraging teams to optimise a number at the expense of the product as a whole.Outcomes and metrics should sharpen judgement, not become the goal themselves.
Find What's Worth Building
Discovery is about clarifying the problem, exploring solutions and reducing risk as efficiently as possible.Start by exploring the problem space, the needs, behaviours, frictions and underlying causes behind the outcome, and the solution space, the different ways of addressing them. The problem and solution should sharpen each other as you learn.Then identify the assumptions that could make the idea fail: customer value, usability, technical feasibility, and the needs of the business. Test these proportionally, using the cheapest reliable evidence available. The aim isn't certainty, but reducing uncertainty enough to justify moving forward.
Make It Real
Once you've figured out what's worth building, the next challenge is building it well.Delivery is full of product decisions that require judgement and taste. Technical constraints become real, scope needs cutting, stakeholders raise issues and edge cases emerge.You also learn things you couldn't have known earlier, so discovery and delivery don't move in just one direction. What you learn while building should feed back into discovery when it needs to.Quality should generally come before scope. Keep scope tight, build in small increments and, where necessary, cut scope before quality. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver something you're proud to put in front of users.
Learn What Actually Works
Product work requires humility: your assumptions will sometimes be wrong and customers won't always behave how you expect. You need to be willing to learn, update your understanding and change course.Once something is live, compare your expectations with reality. Use quantitative evidence to understand what changed, qualitative evidence to understand why, and look for unexpected behaviours or second order effects.Data is evidence for judgement, not a replacement for it. Quantitative evidence can be noisy, slow or difficult to isolate, so don't become paralysed trying to prove everything. Learning should be proportional to the risk and feed directly into what you do next.
Making Good Decisions Under Uncertainty
In product, there's very rarely one objectively correct answer, only choices with different upsides, downsides and consequences. You're constantly deciding what matters, which risks are worth taking, where to compromise and when to act.Good judgement is the ability to consistently make good decisions, even when the evidence is incomplete and there is no obvious answer. It should be informed, explainable and challengeable, with enough humility to change when reality proves you wrong.Judgement compounds through context and repetition: understanding customers, the market, technology and the domain deeply, exposing yourself to different perspectives, making real decisions and learning from how they turn out.
Different Perspectives, Better Products
Cross-functional working shouldn't just be a nicety to make everyone feel involved. Different people see different possibilities and opportunities, leading to better ideas and ultimately better products.Good product teams have enough context, ownership and autonomy to make decisions close to the work. When decisions become overly centralised, progress slows and capable people have less room to use their judgement.Context and ideas should move freely across disciplines. Engineers see technical possibilities others might miss, designers bring depth on user needs and experience, and product managers often bring broader customer, commercial and strategic context.No discipline has a monopoly on good ideas. Good ideas should be judged on their merit, not where they came from.
Culture Shapes the Product
The same capable people will behave very differently depending on the environment around them. Culture fills the gaps in ambiguous situations that process cannot.Culture can encourage people to challenge weak thinking, share bad news, care about quality, take ownership and change their minds, or make those behaviours unnecessarily difficult.Bad cultures cause people to optimise for senior approval rather than users, hide uncertainty rather than expose it, suppress disagreement, or settle for average work because that's what was asked for.Good cultures make clear what matters and what good looks like, while trusting people to think independently, disagree openly and use their judgement autonomously.