The Product Game

Field notes for product leaders. See the game and improve your play.

The newsletter is my ongoing attempt to understand what makes good product work possible. We consider how teams make decisions, how organizations shape what they see, how strategy enables or stifles good gameplay, and how a sequence of small moves can change a much larger situation.

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The goal is to help you understand the field, anticipate predictable patterns, and make better moves. I try to draw and model what I'm learning and exploring.

Here are two key ideas that form a conceptual backbone for product game series. There's a broad view (top, and left-bottom), and then a fine-grained view of the field (right bottom).

You don't change peoples' behavior: you change the games they're playing and how they see the playing field.
You can only judge the quality of the move by the game-specific information you have available.

Newsletter details

  • I send an update each Monday, building on prior weeks' thinking
  • Past updates are in the Product Game index
  • (Before early '26, the list was named "Loops and Cycles," after this article)

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