I’ve been thinking about a question lately: a product’s boundaries—it's not just what you choose to build, but what you choose not to build.
When early teams make product decisions, a lot of their energy goes into the roadmap—what the next feature is, what users are asking for, what competitors are doing. But very few people seriously consider: what are the things we are absolutely unwilling to touch?
This isn’t a resource problem. It’s a stance problem.
When you say, “We don’t do this,” you’re really telling the users, telling the team, and telling yourself—who we are, and what we care about. This kind of refusal is, in fact, a product statement.
I wrote about this in my latest newsletter. Not as a methodology, but as the real tension I’ve encountered when building products myself and helping customers make decisions: the more features you stack up, the more blurry the product becomes; every request from users sounds reasonable, but after you do them all, the product ends up being nothing at all.
A truly opinionated product is often not opinionated because it does a lot, but because there are certain things it simply refuses to do.
If you’re leading a product, or helping your team judge direction, this issue may be worth a read.
https://newsletter.bearliu.com/p/what-you-refuse-to-build
When early teams make product decisions, a lot of their energy goes into the roadmap—what the next feature is, what users are asking for, what competitors are doing. But very few people seriously consider: what are the things we are absolutely unwilling to touch?
This isn’t a resource problem. It’s a stance problem.
When you say, “We don’t do this,” you’re really telling the users, telling the team, and telling yourself—who we are, and what we care about. This kind of refusal is, in fact, a product statement.
I wrote about this in my latest newsletter. Not as a methodology, but as the real tension I’ve encountered when building products myself and helping customers make decisions: the more features you stack up, the more blurry the product becomes; every request from users sounds reasonable, but after you do them all, the product ends up being nothing at all.
A truly opinionated product is often not opinionated because it does a lot, but because there are certain things it simply refuses to do.
If you’re leading a product, or helping your team judge direction, this issue may be worth a read.
https://newsletter.bearliu.com/p/what-you-refuse-to-build