The Product Game

Field notes for product leaders: see the game, make better moves.

The newsletter is my ongoing attempt to describe how good product work unfolds. 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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I want to help you understand the situation, anticipate predictable patterns, and make better moves. I try to draw and model what we're exploring.

Here are two key ideas that form a conceptual backbone for product game series. The broad view (top, and left-bottom), and the 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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