Product

Type: Concepts (24) · Dualities (14) · Principles (15) · Advice (21) · Tools (20)

Concepts

Affordances — An object's design should signal how it is used.
Brand Association — The ideas a customer links to your name before they've even used the product.
Collectors Fallacy — Saving something is not the same as learning it.
Commodity Products — Products where buyers can't tell one supplier from another, so price wins.
Content-Driven Products — Products whose value comes from the content inside them, not the container.
Crowd Wisdom — Aggregated judgement from many independent people often beats any single expert.
Data Structure-Driven Products — Products whose power comes from the shape of the data they store.
Economy of Scale — Unit costs fall as volume rises — bigger players win on price.
Hammock Driven Development — Hard problems need time lying in a hammock, not more time at the keyboard.
Horseless Carriage — When a new technology arrives, we first use it to copy the old thing.
Jobs to Be Done — People don't buy products; they hire them to do a job.
Methodology-Driven Products — Products whose value is the way of working they impose.
Mimetic Theory — People don't want things independently. They want what others want.
Minimum Viable Audience — Don't try to reach everyone. Find the smallest audience that could sustain you.
Minimum Viable Product — The smallest thing you can build to learn whether the idea is worth pursuing.
Network Effects — A product that gets more valuable as more people use it.
Opportunity Cost — Every yes is a no to something else.
Product-Founder Fit — The best products come from founders whose life and interests match the problem.
Product-Market Fit — The moment your product is what a real market actually wants.
Products Beyond Real World Objects — Digital products don't have to imitate physical things.
Self-Service Model — The customer gets value without talking to you.
Shape Up — Basecamp's product development method: six-week cycles, shaped work, no backlog.
Solutionism — Treating every situation as a problem that technology can solve.
The Toyota Way — A production philosophy built on continuous improvement and respect for people.

Dualities

Attention vs Privacy Online — Getting noticed online usually means giving up something about yourself.
Cathedral vs Bazaar — Two models for building software: the closed cathedral or the open bazaar.
Correlation vs Causation — Two things moving together doesn't mean one caused the other.
Demand-Side and Supply-Side — Most companies think from the supply side. The best ones think from the demand side.
Needs vs Wants — People say they need one thing and buy another.
Organic vs Mechanic Growth — You can grow by pumping fuel or by building an engine.
Principles Over Processes — Strong principles let you skip most process. Weak principles demand heavy process.
Push vs Pull — You can push products onto users or pull users toward them.
Service vs Product — Services scale with headcount. Products scale without it.
Simple vs Easy — Simple means few moving parts. Easy means familiar and close at hand.
Startup vs Small Business Growth — Two legitimate paths — and conflating them ruins both.
Visualisation vs Documentation — If you can show the logic in the UI, don't just describe it in the docs.
What the Thing IS vs What the Thing DOES — Describing a product by its parts is not the same as describing what it does for people.
Wide vs Narrow Positioning — Be something to many, or everything to few.

Principles

10x Rule — To unseat the incumbent, be ten times better — not marginally better.
Build Measure Learn Repeat — The core loop of lean product development.
Bundling and Unbundling of Products — Every product is either being bundled together or torn apart.
Code Is Data — Treat your code, configs, and content as data that can be inspected and transformed.
Customer Experience Success Effort Emotion — A good experience is judged on three things: did it work, how hard was it, and how did it feel?
Doing Everything In-House — Build what's core. Buy the rest. Owning everything isn't a virtue.
Dont Make Me Think — Steve Krug's law of usability: the product should be obvious.
Less but Better — Dieter Rams' design principle: fewer things, done exceptionally.
Less Is More — Constraint breeds clarity. Abundance breeds clutter.
Make It Work Make It Fast Make It Pretty — Three phases, in order: correctness, performance, polish.
Products Lower Cost or Increase Revenue — Every product ultimately sells one of two things to its buyer: save money or make money.
Responding to Change Over Following a Plan — Plans are useful until reality arrives. Then adaptation beats sticking to the plan.
Single Responsibility Principle — One thing, done well. From Unix — do one thing and do it right.
Stop Starting Start Finishing — Limit work in progress. Finish what you start before starting more.
Ways to Dominate Market — Peter Thiel's Zero to One: monopoly comes from one of four moats.

Advice

Avoid Being a Feature Factory — Don't measure your team by the features it ships.
Avoid Re-Design Without a Clear Goal — Don't redesign because it's stale. Redesign to fix something specific.
Build Product for Yourself — Being your own user is the fastest feedback loop that exists.
Build Tools to Shape Your Own Workflows — Don't just use tools. Build the ones that make your work easier.
Check If You Are Working on an Outdated Idea — The world moves. The problem you started on may no longer exist.
Come Up With Multiple Solutions — Never pick the first solution you think of. Generate several, then choose.
Create Something New Dont Compete — Head-to-head competition is a losing game. Find a category you can own.
Diversify Everything — Single points of failure break businesses. Spread your dependencies.
Do Things That Dont Scale — Before automation, do it by hand. Manual effort teaches what to automate.
Dont Sell Your Time Sell Your Expertise — Trading hours for money has a ceiling. Trading knowledge for value doesn't.
Exceed Expectations — Deliver more than promised, not less.
Hold Regular Retrospectives — Learning happens when teams stop and reflect. Not by accident.
Ignoring Complexity Slows You Down Long-Term — Skipping complexity now borrows against your future velocity.
Keep a List of Problems Not Just Ideas — Ideas are cheap. Well-understood problems are the raw material.
Making Information Visible Changes Behavior — Show the number and behaviour shifts. You don't need rules, just visibility.
Only Build Core Product — Spend your team's time on what makes your product yours. Buy everything else.
Optimise Time to Market — Ship fast, learn fast. The longer the loop, the worse your odds.
Solve Problems Dont Build Features — Start with the user's problem. Features are one possible answer.
Test High-Risk Hypothesis First — Attack the assumption most likely to kill you. Everything else can wait.
Turn Experience Into Product — If you've done something hard many times, there may be a product in it.
Use Your Own Product — If you don't use it, why would anyone else?

Tools

5 Whys — Ask "why" five times to find the root cause.
Decomposition — Break a big problem into smaller, independent ones.
Event Storming — A workshop technique for mapping a business domain using sticky notes.
First Principles Thinking — Reason from what you know is true, not from analogies.
Form Context and Fit — Christopher Alexander: good design is when the form fits its context.
Impact Mapping — A mind map that connects goals to features through actors and behaviours.
Improvement Kata — A four-step pattern for continuous, bounded improvement.
Interrelational Diagram — Map how problems cause each other to find the root driver.
Kano Model — Classify features by how they affect customer satisfaction.
Naming Things Last — Don't name the thing until you understand it.
Obvious Easy Possible — Three tiers for what users can do in your product. Coined by Jason Fried in The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible.
Pattern Languages — Reusable design patterns with names, forms, and contexts where they fit.
Post-It Notes — Small, cheap, movable. The unreasonable effectiveness of sticky notes.
Prototyping to Learn — Prototypes are for learning, not for shipping.
Right-to-Left Thinking — Start with the outcome. Work backwards to the steps.
Sequencing and Step by Step Unfolding — Complex things grow in the right order, one step at a time.
Slippery Slopes — Small decisions that commit you to directions you'll regret.
Theory of Centers — Christopher Alexander: wholes are made of centers that strengthen each other.
User Experience Iceberg — UX is not what the user sees. It's everything underneath.
Visualisations and Models — Making the invisible visible changes how teams think.

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