Reflections on Building Products at Scale
After years of building products and leading teams across different companies and domains, I've collected some hard-won insights about what actually matters when building products at scale. These aren't the polished lessons from business school—they're the messy, practical truths I wish I'd known earlier.
The Myth of Perfect Planning
Early in my career, I believed that thorough planning was the key to product success. I would spend weeks creating detailed roadmaps, user journey maps, and feature specifications. The reality is that products evolve through contact with users, not through planning in isolation.
What Actually Works
The most successful products I've worked on followed a pattern:
1. Start with a strong hypothesis about user needs 2. Build the smallest possible version that tests that hypothesis 3. Get it in front of users immediately 4. Learn and iterate rapidly
This isn't groundbreaking advice, but the devil is in the execution. "Learning rapidly" means setting up systems to capture and analyze user feedback, not just launching and hoping for the best.
The People Problem
Products are built by people, and people problems are usually the biggest obstacle to success. Technical challenges are often easier to solve than alignment issues between team members with different priorities and perspectives.
Building Effective Teams
The best product teams I've been part of shared several characteristics:
- Shared context: Everyone understood not just what we were building, but why
- Clear decision-making processes: Ambiguity about who makes decisions kills momentum
- Regular communication rhythms: Structured ways to share progress and challenges
- Psychological safety: Team members felt safe to disagree and share concerns
The Feature Trap
It's tempting to equate product progress with feature development. More features feel like more value. But I've seen too many products collapse under the weight of feature bloat.
Focus as a Competitive Advantage
Some of the most successful products I've worked on succeeded because of what they didn't do:
- Saying no to customer requests that didn't align with core use cases
- Removing features that weren't being used
- Resisting the urge to copy competitors feature-for-feature
This requires discipline and clear vision from leadership. It's easier to add features than to maintain focus.
Measuring What Matters
Early in my career, I was obsessed with vanity metrics—user counts, page views, time on site. These metrics felt important because they were easy to improve and impressive in presentations.
Beyond Vanity Metrics
The metrics that actually predicted product success were usually more specific and harder to game:
- User retention over specific time periods (not just daily or monthly actives)
- Feature adoption rates among target user segments
- Customer satisfaction scores that correlated with renewal rates
- Time to value for new users
The Technology Trap
As someone who came to product management from an engineering background, I initially overvalued technical elegance and undervalued user experience. Beautiful code doesn't matter if users can't figure out how to use your product.
Balancing Technical and User Needs
The most successful products found ways to align technical excellence with user value:
- Technical decisions that improved user experience (performance, reliability, security)
- Architecture that enabled rapid experimentation
- Developer experience that translated to better user experience
Looking Forward
Product management continues to evolve, especially with AI changing how we think about user interfaces and product capabilities. But the fundamental challenges remain the same: understanding users, building great teams, and maintaining focus while executing rapidly.
The best product managers I know are lifelong learners who adapt their approaches based on new information while holding onto proven principles. That's the kind of product manager I aspire to be.