Product

"Build what customers ask for" is good advice that becomes a trap. Customers describe their problems in the language of existing solutions. The best features are often the ones nobody requested — because nobody knew to.

Every product team drowns in good ideas. The teams that build great products aren't the ones with the most ideas — they're the ones that say no to the most. Strategy is mostly subtraction.

Teams present roadmaps as commitments and then feel like failures when reality intervenes. A roadmap isn't a promise; it's a current best guess. Treating it like a guess makes you faster, not less disciplined.

I handed my entire product launch to AI for two weeks — strategy, copy, timeline, the works. Here's what it nailed, what it got embarrassingly wrong, and what I kept.