DanielMagowan

02How I think about product

1. Become the user.

   Don't study users from a distance, become one. I trained for multi-day stage races to build for cyclists, and moved my whole portfolio into crypto. Their problems become yours.

2. Users owe you nothing.

   You're one of a hundred products they touch. Nobody reads the docs or files the bug report, they just leave. Build like every session is a trial about to expire.

3. Run the roadmap like a portfolio.

   Trading taught me position sizing. Size bets by conviction, cut losers fast without ego, add to the winners. Most roadmaps do the opposite: equal bets, kept alive too long, starved the moment they start working.

4. Embrace AI, reject slop.

   I build from the terminal with AI all day, agents running in parallel. That's not the edge; soon everyone works this way. The edge is knowing what good looks like before the model does. Use AI for leverage, never for judgment.

5. Be opinionated.

   If it needs configuring before it's useful, you skipped the hard decision. Ship the default you'd pick yourself, and let the few who care override it.

6. Marketing is part of the product.

   Half the product failures I've seen were narrative failures. The team built the thing and assumed it would explain itself. If you can't frame why it matters, you've built half a product.

7. Question feedback deeply.

   The most dangerous feedback is articulate feedback from the wrong user. Confident, specific, well-meant, and it quietly steers you away from the people you're actually building for.