You’re reading the first edition of our new exec memo called “The Take.” Over the last year of experimenting, we’ve learned that being helpful means getting specific. After a decade collaborating with PMs, Design, and Eng to launch products at places like Google and Twitter, we’re sharing the honest perspectives we’re finding in the trenches today. We want to help you cut through and build things people actually love. Glad you’re here.

Right now, the industry is obsessed with being lean. We’ve all seen what that actually looks like: PMs doing the work of five people, research budgets and teams getting slashed, and a mandate from the Board that’s just three words: Ship more, faster.

But there’s a hidden cost to this "velocity at all costs" culture that likely feels deeply familiar to anyone reading this. When we strip away the rigor just to show momentum, we stop building products and start launching theater. We’re launching features to prove we’re busy, while the actual path to PMF stays a blur.

The Reframe: In a lean year, the most expensive thing you can do is ship a feature that doesn't work. Real momentum isn't about the volume of code, it’s about the velocity of insight. Every week spent building the wrong thing is a week of burn you never get back (also, you’ll likely need to erase the tech debt in the future).

The View From the Room

In high-pressure environments, “Minimum Viable Clarity” has become a survival tactic. Executives are working on horizons where the customer is a moving target and the data is thin or even mere hallucinations. To keep the lights on, they’re forced to make gut calls and call them “agile pivots.” It’s a tough spot.

But guessing isn’t a strategy. When you ship without a deep understanding of the customer, you aren’t learning fast, you’re just failing at scale. You end up with a product that is a mile wide and an inch deep, satisfying no one and confusing the market.

The Reality Check: Are You Drifting?

If the pressure to perform is outweighing your actual insight, look for these three signs of “drift”:

1. Stop celebrating ship dates that don’t matter. It’s easy to feel productive when the Gantt chart turns green (oooh, that dopamine hit), but if your retention numbers aren’t budging, you aren’t building a product, you’re just running a feature factory. Output is not the same as outcome.

2. “Internal Vibes” are a dangerous proxy for a customer. If your roadmap is being driven by the loudest stakeholder in the room (e.g. “CEO said so”) or a general “feeling” about the market, you’re building for a biased ghost. Without actual evidence, you’re just decorating a guess.

3. Mind the Rigor Gap. In the rush to answer “How fast can we build this?”, we’ve collectively stopped asking the only question that matters: “Should we build this at all, and for whom?” Speed without direction is just a faster way to get lost.

The Playbook: Finding the Truth (Fast)

To escape the velocity trap, you have to stop trying to predict the future and start mastering the signals right in front of you. Here is how we’re advising teams to move right now:

• Go find the people who hate you: Don't just look for who should use your product. Talk to the people who actively chose a competitor or who recently walked away. That is where the actual friction—and the real truth about your PMF—is buried.

• Demographics are a distraction: Stop chasing "Marketing Managers, 35-45". That tells you nothing about their intent. Target the specific behavior you want to cause, like "People who have switched their CRM in the last 6 months". If you can't name the moment of change, you're just guessing.

• If you can't name the human, don't ship: We often ship features just to hit a date on a roadmap. But if you can't clearly articulate the specific person you are serving and the friction you are removing for them, you aren't ready to build. Don’t burn resources until you can define the human result you expect to see after launch.

That’s my two cents,

Steph

Former Big Tech Research Exec (Twitter, Google, Pinterest). Now your secret weapon for board-ready insights and navigating the tech chaos.