Product Diagnosis
A one-week engagement for founders and product teams. I go through the product, the evidence behind it, and the decisions already made, and write up what to keep, what to cut, what to change, and what to do next.
Who it is for
Founders and product leaders about to commit more time and money to a direction nobody has pressure-tested. The situations it comes up in:
- Adoption is flat while the team keeps shipping.
- The roadmap holds more than the team can build, and nothing on it is obviously cuttable.
- Two or three directions are on the table and nobody agrees which one is real.
- Complexity has built up to where every change costs more than it should.
- A large piece of engineering work is about to start on an assumption nobody has tested.
What happens in the week
It runs on what already exists: the product itself, whatever research and usage data there is, the roadmap, and the reasoning behind the decisions already made. I work through the user journey as it actually runs, the assumptions holding up the current plan, and the constraints the team builds inside.
Where something cannot be answered from what exists, that gap is itself part of the finding, and it usually turns out to be the expensive one.
What you get
One written document, in four parts.
- Keep. What is working, and what the next round of changes should not be allowed to break.
- Cut. What is absorbing effort and returning nothing.
- Change. What is right in principle and wrong in execution.
- Next. The order the remaining work should happen in, and what to prove before the expensive parts start.
Why do this before more engineering
Product uncertainty gets more expensive the later it is resolved. A direction that turns out to be wrong costs a quarter of engineering time, the hiring built around it, the design work on top of it, and the founder attention spent defending it. A week spent on the decision is cheaper than a quarter spent on the wrong build.
Where the judgement comes from
Fourteen years inside product teams, plus ventures of my own where a wrong call cost me directly. The same work the case studies describe: Deva, 10Planet, Fully AI, Equi, TrustToken / TrueFi.
Starting one
Send a short note about the product and what you are unsure of, to [email protected]. If it is not a fit, I will say so.
Longer engagements, fractional product leadership and ongoing advisory, usually start here too: the diagnosis is what says whether there is a reason to keep going.