There is no shortage of software.

AI can already compare features, prices and reviews across ten competitors in about 30 seconds. If your differentiation isn't immediately readable, it gets skipped.

What stays rare? Trust. Community. Things that are harder to copy than code and I'm not sure I have a complete list. Those are the ones I keep coming back to.

The founders positioned well right now aren't always the ones with the best product. They have a point of view their customers already believe. A reputation that does the trust work before the sales conversation. Something people would follow to the next thing they built.

Figure out the one belief your best customers hold that your product is built around. What do they think is true about how work should get done or what's broken or what matters? If you can't name it, your messaging is probably under-working. People tend to share things they believe in. Start there.

"Wait, I thought we agreed on this..."

You did, but memory is a terrible place to store a decision.

Decisions that live in a meeting disappear.

They flash through a thread on Slack. Everyone agrees. Someone says: "Let's do it." The week goes on.

Someone asks a few weeks later: "Wait, I thought we were doing X?"...and you're back in the room again.

Verbal decisions are shared memory. And memory changes. Especially when things are tough. Especially when the team is moving quickly, there's too much going on, and no one wrote anything down.

I've seen founders talk about the same thing 3 times without realising it, not because the team wasn't paying attention but because there was nothing holding the decision in place.

Putting it in writing changes the rules. You just need one place where choices are saved. What you decided. What you're not doing. Why. Who owns it. Written two minutes after the meeting.

Something changes when it's written down: assumptions surface, trade-offs become visible and (most importanly) people stop debating what was said and start acting on what was decided.

The difference is usually one document that everyone knows about. Clarity builds. So does confusion.

Which one you're feeding right now is the one running your team.

I definitely think twice about it when I'm coming up with a file name.

As the cost of writing code trends toward zero, the backlog explodes. Every feature becomes rent you have to pay.

After more than 10 years of building online products as a product person, here's what I've learned:

Everyone is making guesses.
The CEO is making guesses about the vision and strategy.
Salespeople are guessing what people want.
Investors are making guesses about scale.
You guess how big an impact it will have and what should be built next.

TAM models, the ICE framework, roadmaps and discovery sprints all sound sophisticated, but they're still just a bet.

Your mentor doesn't know if your feature will improve retention.
The 'expert' on LinkedIn can't tell you if your market is big enough.
You don't know if this sprint will make customers behave differently.

The only way is to keep shipping and keep the build cost low.

The best way to get alignment is for someone to own the call, make the decision, and move everyone forward. It doesn't come from talking things through forever.

Long discussions feel safe. They even feel (mistakenly) like progress. But they slow everything down.
Like a slow-mo scene from The Matrix.
I hate it.

Clear decisions are risky and a bit scary. But they give your team the direction it needs.

Do this If you want faster and cleaner decisions:

• End every meeting with one line: “Here's what we're doing.”
• Give every decision a single owner. No committees.
• Set a deadline to review the outcome, not to keep debating.

Some organisations want innovation, but they don't want the risk. They need to show ROI before proceeding.

But that's the true cost of innovation - you don't know if it will result in anything. There's a chance, but it's low.

You can't test, learn, or grow without spending time/money. Without breaking things. Progress looks chaotic up close. And sometimes expensive.

Disagreement is proof you've hired thinkers, not AI bots. If everyone nods along, you've built a cult, not a team.

Debate, decide, act, and make a difference in the world.

Everything a CEO does can be boiled down to 3 main things: Setting direction, enabling people, and driving outcomes.

The best leaders know which of these matters most at any given time, and they shape their schedule around it.

Companies led by someone who understands that balance have a clear edge over those that don't.

When the newborn comes into your life, everything changes. It doesn't matter what your current habits are - your fitness, your diet, your time with your wife - it all kind of goes out the window. Everything starts shifting around the newborn: the schedule, the mayhem, the process of learning their personality and cues - are they hungry or just needy?

Then you start figuring out the schedule. In the first stage, you barely sleep, and both of you attend to the baby, which quickly becomes unsustainable. So you start adjusting, taking turns, shifting things around to make it work.

Everything shifts around the baby, and you end up giving up on the small things - even something as simple as going out for a walk, let alone exercising.

Two weeks in, though, you start to really enjoy the moment. You realise it's a new life - a new person with their own personality, thoughts, and habits. It's amazing to watch it unfold.

But it's also important not to forget everything else. Once you've got a bit more structure in your schedule, start bringing back those other habits - eating properly, going out, spending time with your wife, exercising, looking after yourself, and maybe spending a bit more time on your side projects too.

Only recently, I thought I didn't have time. I knew that would change soon, and I also knew I'd adapt - especially since I've done it twice before.

My third daughter (yep, I'm a girl dad) was recently born and already seems to be the boss.

In between naps, feeding, and endless nappy changes that look suspiciously like mustard, I'm doing a couple of extra things:

• building a community of product managers and;
• creating a flashcard system in Notion to help me memorise things I want to learn, from historical dates to topics related to my job - assuming I can stay awake long enough to use it.