Insights
Five things I keep coming back to.
Every piece here sits inside one of five frames. If a piece does not fit one of them, it belongs to someone else and I have not written it.
The tiger
MVP tells you what to cut. MLP tells you what to aim for. Neither says how a product gets a person over the line. Games have known for forty years, and a seven-year-old with a purple crayon showed me on a kitchen table.
The question UX has never had to answer
Agentic software is about to ask UX to take responsibility for an experience nobody authored. Game designers have done nothing else for forty years. We should borrow from them rather than reinvent it.
“The engineering team is slow” is never the problem
It arrives in a board meeting or a Slack message at 11pm, and it is almost never true. What makes it worth taking seriously is that a reasonable person looked at the system, felt something was wrong, and reached for the only explanation visible…
At some point, the founder becomes the constraint
Not because they got worse. The thing they are extremely good at, holding the whole business in one head and deciding fast, is exactly the thing that stops scaling at a certain size.
Your activation metric is measuring setup, not value
Almost every activation definition I have been shown measures whether someone finished configuring the product. Retention is decided two steps later, at the point where the customer gets a result they recognize as a result.
Every product you did not kill is a decision you did not make
Nobody chose to spend three quarters of engineering capacity on maintenance. It is the accumulated weight of every product that was kept, every segment that was not exited, and every integration promised to close a deal.
Inference is a variable cost. Your pricing model is not.
Software had a marginal cost close to zero for twenty years, and every pricing instinct we have was built on that. Generative features broke it, and most flat-rate plans have not caught up.
The planning cycle is where strategy goes to die
Nobody rejects the strategy. It is diluted by a sequence of locally reasonable decisions until what reaches a customer bears only a family resemblance to what leadership agreed.
Three questions that decide whether your organization compounds
Intrapreneurial leaders, open cultures, and knowing which kind of problem you are actually facing. Structure keeps presenting itself as the answer because it is the part you can see.