Product and Strategy
The choices behind a product: who it serves, why someone would choose it, how it creates value and where it could grow.
Essays in this collection
Human Systems
Where Product Strategy Actually Starts
Most product strategy work starts too late. It begins at the roadmap, inside a set of assumptions that were never properly examined. The harder work sits earlier, at the level of the system the product is trying to move.
Human Systems
How to build a great MVP and its not just a tiny version
Using tooth brushing as a way to demonstrate the importance of early, felt value in an MVP.
Human Systems
Part One: What If You Just Stopped Building Features for a While?
Not because you’ve failed — but because the thing you’re building doesn’t quite match what you now know to be true. When Progress Starts to Feel Heavy There’s a point in every product’s life when it starts to feel harder to move.You’re still building. Still releasing. Still solving things, more or less.But if you’re honest, each new feature lands with less clarity than it used to.The impact gets muddier. The outcomes get harder to track.And somehow the whole thing starts to feel... heavier....
Human Systems
Part Two: The Courage to Pause: And the Systems You'll Need to Rebuild Well
A practical guide for product and strategy leaders ready to rebuild with clarity, care, and systems that last. Introduction: The Courage to Pause If you’re struggling to get any meaningful new enhancements or features through to customers not because you lack ideas, but because the process is stuck, bloated, political, or brittle, then this guide may help. If your roadmap is full but your momentum is low, and you find yourself wondering why everything feels so hard now, this is for you. You...
Human Systems
How founder-led companies scale without losing what made them work
A reflection on founder-led companies, why scaling is not simply about removing the founder from the system, and how the original energy, taste and urgency of a company can move into the people and operating rhythms that carry it forward.
Human Systems
The Hare & the Tortoise: The Collaborative Investment Strategy
Do you know the story of the hare and the tortoise? Most people think it's about speed. Really, it's about assumptions. One moves fast, burns out, and loses. The other moves with focus, consistency and wins. Not because it was faster. Because it never lost the plot. In investment, we often play the hare. You buy into a company once it’s attractive enough to justify your capital. And then, almost immediately, you start again. Tear it apart. Bring in your own brigade. Shift the culture, the...
Human Systems
The Operating Model Is the Work
Most product leaders understand that an operating model matters. They just do not think building it is their job. This is the central confusion. The operating model is not infrastructure waiting to be inherited. It is the real work. And if no one is deliberately building it, it builds itself. Badly.
Human Systems
The Hidden Work of a Product Operating Model
Most product organisations don't struggle because their teams lack talent, frameworks, or motivation. They struggle because the environment around those teams is unclear. There's usually a strategy somewhere. People broadly understand the ambition. The roadmap is full, everyone is working hard, and from the outside things look productive. And yet decisions keep drifting upward. Teams check things with leadership more than they expected. Priorities move around more often than anyone planned....
Product Leadership
Why Do We Resist Foresight?
Foresight isn’t rare. It’s just hard to absorb when it threatens what we’re invested in.There’s a pattern I’ve lived inside for years:You see something You speak it.You offer a way through.And people nod… and then wait.They wait for more evidence.They wait for someone else to say it louder.They wait
Product Leadership
Post Product World.
The End of Products: Rethinking Value in a Post-Product World | Spark Space