Drew Barontini

Product Builder

Issue #63 •
• 12m read

Product Heartbeat

When I started my new job, I looked for the pulse of work. I wanted to know how context is shared. Why? Because context is the fuel that drives progress and impact. And tracing the path of context flow will show you:

Context dictates the operational pulse of an organization like the heart pumps blood through the human body. You find the pulse, you find the heartbeat. But there wasn’t a clear pulse I could find because work was shared when it was ready, not where it currently was. That’s an important distinction. If you only share progress when you feel the work is ready—or when a stakeholder asks—then you miss an opportunity to regulate progress. The specific cadence of updates creates a barometer for measuring progress—for understanding where the work is, how it’s moving, and what’s holding it back.

That is all glorious, wonderful context.

Once I developed a solid understanding of the product and business, I started posting Weekly Updates. If you know me, you know I love recording Loom videos. Why? Context; it’s a simple and effective way to share information in an easily replicable way. You can create a Loom and share the link, embed the video, and let the information spread without your continued involvement. That’s leverage.

In the process of creating a Weekly Update, you, the creator, are forced to synthesize information and explain it. To gain that knowledge requires focus, intention, and a deep understanding of the work. It’s a great example of good friction. You intentionally pause, reflect, and adapt at a specific time each week. And this creates a cadence.

But this isn’t just about Weekly Updates. They are a small part of the rich tapestry of context to help teams work more effectively. That larger tapestry is what we’ll explore.

The Product Heartbeat is ****context delivered on a cadence to create consistency, which builds momentum. Sharing context on an intentional cadence compounds clarity.

The three pillars are:

  1. Alignment to focus the context.
  2. Visibility to share the context.
  3. Momentum to compound progress.

We’ll also talk about a specific expression of the Product Heartbeat I use as the standard cadence for product teams I lead.

Alignment

There are two beats in a single pulse of the Product Heartbeat. The first is Alignment, which is how context is discussed and distilled into its most meaningful form.

Alignment lives at the end of interpretation. It’s how context is shaped into a shared understanding of what something is. Your team adopts a mental model to represent the work, a decision, or a strategy.

When I’m on a video call and we’re discussing something, I’m quick to share my screen. I do this so we’re all looking at the same thing—the first stage of alignment. Now, just because we’re looking at the same thing doesn’t mean we all understand it. That’s where discussion comes in. Each person shares their perspective to generate inputs into the model. This is the context. The higher the fidelity of context (input), the better the model (output). Your goal is to build a mental model everyone understands. They need to know it well enough to explain it to someone else in the same, repeatable way. It’s like those game shows where two people write the answer to the same question and then reveal their answer. Alignment is writing the same thing.

I am sensitive to meetings, especially in a culture of remote knowledge work where meetings tend to be the default. Sometimes it’s optimal to meet and discuss to gain alignment, but sometimes it’s better to let understanding emerge in another vessel: writing. Writing is thinking, and it’s how you formulate an understanding into language in real-time. The words are the mental model. So if you want to reason against your understanding of something, write it out, share it, and collect feedback to further refine it. Writing is a tool for critical thinking, which is why I refuse to let AI write for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told ChatGPT to stop trying to write a newsletter draft. It’s a thinking partner, not a thinking replacement.

When writing alone won’t suffice—or when it’s time to come together for a decision—video calls or in-person meetings are useful. And when it comes to the Product Heartbeat, a rhythm of regular alignment maintains a steady and healthy flow of context. What matters is that you create the mental model and maintain its structure regularly. But a meeting doesn’t create alignment until it catalyzes into a tangible output. You must find the unique method of alignment for your team.

To drive Alignment, follow these principles:

  1. See the same thing. Everyone needs to see the same thing to understand it the same way.
  2. Raise the fidelity. High-fidelity context drives high-fidelity understanding.
  3. Keep the rhythm. Left unchecked, alignment fades and needs to be refreshed.

Visibility

The second beat of the Product Heartbeat is Visibility, which is how you amplify alignment. To gain alignment, you need the minimum amount of people who hold the full picture of context. But once you’ve bottled up and concentrated the alignment, you need to extend its impact. Share it widely.

When I share Weekly Updates, it creates micro interactions with each person. They all hear the same message and see the same thing—just like when creating alignment. Alignment is a messier endeavor that requires discussion, debate, and tension. But the concentrated artifact you broadcast is a neatly wrapped package of context. It’s all value, no fluff. You did the hard work to surface valuable context, and now you share it transparently.

Visibility is a targeted spread of information so you work in the open.

When you create visibility:

The most challenging part is making sure people read, watch, and listen. You need to find the format that works best for your team, but I’ve found the most success with Loom videos paired with a visual. When I record Weekly Updates, I share a FigJam board with pleasing and easy-to-understand visuals. It organizes the information and forms that same shared mental model from alignment. And the benefit of Loom videos, specifically, is the stats for seeing who watched it and how long. The shorter, the better. Like creating a simple logo to communicate a complex idea, your artifacts should be simple by design.

Seeing another human face when watching a screencast-style video taps into our evolved mechanisms for social bonding and interaction. This is backed by research in psychology and neuroscience, but I’m sure you’ve experienced it yourself. I’m always more engaged with an update video when I see the person’s face. You may feel awkward at first, but the exposure and practice has the helpful side-effect of improving your presentation and communication skills. It made me more comfortable leading meetings and giving presentations. And watching the videos back—while sometimes painful—highlights ticks and areas of improvement.

To drive Visibility, follow these principles:

  1. Share what you see. Extend the alignment you’ve already created to distribute the refined version of it. Share it and show it so everyone else sees it.
  2. Design for clarity. Information only spreads if it’s digestible. Use visuals, writing, or videos to shape the information so it’s clear, concise, and emotionally engaging.
  3. Work in the open. Share updates, decisions, and learnings where everyone can find them. Thinking out loud lets context flow naturally.

Momentum

Small changes, done consistently, build forward motion that compounds. At the micro level, it seems infinitesimal and fruitless to keep making such small changes. But then, slowly and surely, momentum builds into an unstoppable force of progress.

If you write 200 words per day, you have a 70,000-word novel in a year.

If you have one 30-minute 1:1 with someone each week, you get 26 hours of meaningful connection in a year.

If you share one idea publicly each week, you create a body of work with 52 unique ideas.

Progress is an infinite pursuit. There’s no endgame. And the best way to start is by making small, meaningful actions with consistency to build momentum. Because repetition creates acceleration, and the unseen force of compounding exponentially expands your impact. Writing 200 words per day doesn’t only net you a novel—each set of 200 words each day feeds back into itself by stimulating neural pathways in your brain, mixing with other ideas, and creating a base of knowledge to surface new insights.

Momentum is the product of context, cadence, and commitment . It’s context delivered on a committed cadence.

For writing 200 words:

Most of the success in my career came from caring enough about the craft to show up, do the work, and do it with consistency. If I was out on a Monday, I recorded the Weekly Update on the Friday before and scheduled the post ahead of time. I could have skipped, but it’s a commitment I believe is worth it.

Starting a new job, I watched first-hand as the Weekly Updates, which were new to this organization, steadily change the perspective and culture of the team. One of my colleagues who started doing the same updates wasn’t sure at first: “I don’t think anyone is watching them,” they said. “Just stick with it,” I told them. Because that’s the thing about consistency and discipline—it means doing it even when it doesn’t immediately show results. It’s like working out once every six months and expecting your body to change. It won’t. And it also won’t change after one, or even several, workouts. You keep doing it—steadily, consistently—and then the results start to show (and grow!). But it requires consistency and discipline.

Yes, there’s a flip side: you don’t want to keep doing something that’s not working. It requires a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish, and a mindful eye toward measuring the progress. But I know from experience the Weekly Updates, once consistency compounds, turn the corner and change how context is shared and understood. When you don’t have the benefit of experience, just be mindful and lean on experimentation.

Remember how, in Adaptive Habitat, we talked about bamboo and its underground network, the rhizome? And how the steady work of building the network of roots is what enabled the rapid progression of the bamboo grove? It’s the same thing here. Staying consistent in your efforts to drive alignment and share it visibly creates momentum, and momentum compounds into transformative clarity, progress, and impact.

The Expression

This is the standard Product Heartbeat I like for product teams. I’ve experimented with it across multiple teams and companies, and it works well. As always, you should find the expression that works for you and your team. Experiment and find your own process.

Each pulse has its own inputs, process, and output.

There is an activity for alignment and an artifact for visibility.

Weekly Sync → Weekly Update

Each Monday morning, I lead a meeting with the design and engineering leaders. I share my screen to show a FigJam board, roadmap spreadsheet, and Linear. We talk through all the active work and share context to align on:

  1. Where the works stands.
  2. What’s most important to focus on.
  3. Open questions and challenges to address.

The output of the meeting is updated work status to drive the Weekly Update Loom video. After the meeting, I record the Loom and post it in the appropriate channels.

Weekly Sync Rhythm

Weekly Review → Weekly Demos

At the end of the week, I meet with the product, design, and engineering teams. Each person shares context about what they worked on during the week. I encourage everyone to share their screen and demo something they worked on. I go last and share more context about active projects, new priorities, and any necessary context to share. The context is important because everyone in this group is responsible for making decisions every day. And the more context they hold, the better equipped they are to make decisions.

The Weekly Demos are shared live or as Loom videos, and are included in the project updates that happen each Friday in Linear. I collect the videos and screenshots and organize them in weekly folders to maintain a historical log of product process. This also feeds into the Weekly Update as inputs to improve what’s shared in the video.

Weekly Review Rhythm

Monthly Planning → Monthly Release

In my opinion, the week is the perfect unit of measurement for progress. But when you need to zoom out and look through the macro lens of product planning, a month is a better time unit. You can bring stakeholders into a larger conversation to make sure priorities are aligned before you commit to specific bets of work.

The output of the alignment meeting is the Monthly Release. In it, you share a snapshot of all the key changes in the product, as well as directions you’re heading. Instead of a roadmap, per se, think about it as a list of strategic directions over the coming months, which will continue to be refined and validated in the next Monthly Planning meeting.

Monthly Planning Rhythm

Find Your Rhythm

The Product Heartbeat is about finding your own rhythm. A pulse is a double-beat of alignment and visibility. Alignment is an activity where you come together to form a shared interpretation of the work. Visibility is an artifact that spreads the alignment through shared context across the team. Together, they form a pulse, a rhythm, a heartbeat.

Now find your Product Heartbeat.

Clarity Current Strategic Momentum

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