Author Archives: Dan Schmidt

The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining ourContinue reading “The Brain’s Guide to Product Development”

In common corporate discourse it is taken as a given that redundancy is bad. It’s bad, people think, for a company to have two people perform the same job function or to have two similar products undifferentiated in the market place. Redundancy, so this line of thought goes, is economic waste that must be eliminated in the form ofContinue reading “The Rise of Redundancy”

For those of you who follow this blog and not my Quora answers, here are two of my latest Quora answers on product management: What are the pros and cons of becoming a product manager? Why has product management become such a popular role? I haven’t published much else in a while because I’ve been workingContinue reading “Two of my latest Quora answers with good traction”

In an abstract sense, the goal of product building is clear: you must find fit between a technology, customer base, and a business. As Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO puts it (according to the Design Thinking Wikipedia page), you must “[match] people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy.” A representation ofContinue reading “A System for Designing Startup Teams”

You can do a great deal to test market fit without building an actual product. However, until you’ve shipped something real, you can’t be certain you will have success. You could find yourself at a dead end. To elaborate, I’d like to parse what “product/market fit” means. PMF requires a product that’s technically feasible toContinue reading “Testing Product Fit Without a Product”

(Also available in Japanese) There is not a formula that product builders can apply to create thriving products. This is, in part, because the particulars of product building are dictated heavily by the product’s changing context. A successful strategy for one product may be utterly inappropriate for another. A builder focused on developing an enterprise serviceContinue reading “A Visual Vocabulary for Product Building”

A commercial software product is not a thing; it’s an evolving relationship between a code base,  people, and the business that funds its production. An abstract representation of a product looks something like the figure below — a triangle-shaped graph I call “The Product Triangle.” Everyone that works for a company that makes a product shouldContinue reading “Three Types of Product Builders: Vertex Builders, Edge Builders, and Full-Triangle Builders”

The only role that software companies absolutely need to ship product are engineers. You need people to write and deploy code or there literally will be no product. It is a common pattern for companies to get off the ground with a pair of technical co-founders. While companies can ship product while only employing engineers, this leavesContinue reading “MVPs are built by MVTs (minimum viable teams)”

A company’s leader must act like a game designer. Before a CEO can lead their company to “win,” they must define the game that their company is playing.  A well designed game must meet the following criteria: It must have clear rules, objectives, and boundaries. Any game that does not have these elements, regardless of domain, cannot beContinue reading “Company Leaders are Game Designers”

As a parent of two young kids and product manager for GoodGuide, my cognitive surplus is limited. I normally get an hour or two every night after everyone’s asleep to do what I want. My drive is to be creative and to produce (sometimes at the cost of entering a manic state where I can’t fall asleep). WhileContinue reading “My Writing Hypotheses”