Product Equilibrium

For the past several weeks, we’ve held a weekly brainstorming meeting. We use the time to review the product, discuss what’s working and not working, and how we can make it better. But instead of thinking about what we can add, we focus on what we can remove, simplify, and subtract. We’re editors. We redline changes in the product, seeking out any part not serving a clear purpose. Because every product suffers from the same tension: you add new value or improve the quality.

Adding new value is what customers and stakeholders want. It’s the sexy new features and improved functionality that crowds up the roadmap. But if you’re always adding, building, and growing, what happens to those same neglected features you previously built? Sure, they get a few fixes and improvements here and there, but are you really working to improve them—to increase the quality?

Not usually; or at least not enough. And that’s what separates a good product from an exceptional one. It’s the difference between products like Jira and products like Linear. I’ve experienced first-hand the gap in quality at every level between the two products. They both functionally do the same thing, serve the same users, and operate with similar talent and resources. Yet, in using them, you can feel the difference. Jira built itself into a complex amalgamation of Frankenstein software. It’s slow, clumsy, and disconnected. That’s the vibe. But Linear? It’s made purposefully, intentionally, and with an emphasis on quality and attention to detail. To get there not only requires taste and caring about the craft, but understanding the delicate balance software requires—adding and subtracting; multiplying and dividing; forging and refining.

It’s an equilibrium.

My product philosophy is a belief in:

1. Intuition to sense and interpret information into clear signals.
2. Integration to bridge disciplines into a holistic and coherent whole.
3. Iteration to make small changes quickly and efficiently to build momentum.

These are expressed through three pillars:

1. Value Creation: Forging new paths by identifying signals, seeking and answering unknowns, and delivering new value.
2. Quality Cultivation: Refining quality by removing what’s unnecessary, simplifying what’s necessary, and improving what’s working to amplify value.
3. Strategic Momentum: Accelerating output by aligning rhythms, focus, and energy into a unifying output that compounds through sustained momentum.

Together, they form a Product Equilibrium.

In Build Dynamics, I talked about Forging, Refining, and Accelerating as the forces of work for engineering, specifically. That’s the micro lens, but the same forces apply to product work more holistically. Over the past several issues of this newsletter, I’ve explored concepts that, until writing this one, were related, yet independent. But here they come together to form a rich tapestry that is the foundation of how I do product work—one in alignment with how AI is changing technology, software, and the way we work.

This is both a way of thinking and a unique expression of that thinking as a framework. Like the Claritorium as the living force of clarity, this is the living force of making exceptional software. It’s not like other frameworks because product work has degraded into an illusion of progress. Teams perform ceremonies without making real, measurable impact. I want to change that.

Let’s change that together.

Equilio

Today, I’m introducing a new living system for building software. It’s called Equilio, an operating system for product builders. It’s a modern rethinking of software development in an age of AI collapsing the conventional stack. It comes directly from my lived experience as a product builder in different environments.

Stepping into a new product role and company forced me to articulate my philosophy. In the process, the divides between my evolving philosophy and the prior art of Agile, Lean, and Shape Up became more apparent. While I never really got along with capital-A Agile, I have found alignment and success with the principles and process of Shape Up. But I’ve also found my own flavor over the years, shifting from the process to the principles and how those are uniquely expressed. Each team, company, and product is different. Shape Up is how 37Signals does product development. They have a unique culture, team composition, and philosophy of work. Those elements inform the process (as they should).

Most frameworks are rigid mental models masquerading as flexible systems anyone can implement. But that’s not how software works, which is exactly why I’ve created my own mode of thinking. Instead of processes, I care about hidden structures, invisible forces, and emergent environments underpinning the process—the Claritorium. Why? Because that thinking is the real leverage to help you create your own systems, processes, and frameworks.

So Equilio came to life. You’ve been hearing about the concepts in this newsletter. All of my newsletters map to the Claritorium and/or Equilio, and several recent newsletters are foundational to Equilio directly:

• Product Forge
• Value Engine
• Build Dynamics
• Product Builders
• Adaptive Habitat
• Product Heartbeat

Each of the three pillars of Equilio are independent, yet weave together in an alchemy of healthy tension—the natural push and pull of product that creates exceptional work. A healthy tension is natural and wonderful when it comes to product work. You debate and represent your unique perspectives, all in service of the larger idea.

Each Equilio pillar has:

1. A formula that represents its essence.
2. A set of principles that guide behavior.
3. A set of practices as evolving expressions.

Value Creation

Creating value requires intuition. You sense signals, translate those signals into clear problems, and iteratively build solutions while answering unknowns in the work.

Intuition begins with observation. You can’t see what you don’t look for. It requires diligence and persistence as you make observations and decipher why something works or doesn’t work. In that knowing is where intuition lives.

Translation is the work of moving information from one state to another. Once you pick up on the signals, you need to catalyze information into its most useful form. A customer sharing feedback turns into an elegantly solved problem affecting key metrics; a high-fidelity mockup turns into working software; an error report turns into a more robust component. No matter the input signal, translation is the value switch to create an impactful output.

And when it comes to building value—forging ahead into uncharted territory—you must seek out and rapidly answer unknowns. Everything is an assumption until you put it to the test.

It’s all guesswork until you do the work.

Value Creation in Equilio is:

• Using intuition to seek out signals as a deep understanding of the real problem.
• Shaping a clearly defined problem into a solution at the right level of fidelity.
• Delivering value in rapid iterations that increase contrast in tight feedback loops.

Value Formula

The formula for Value Creation is:

Value = Intuition × Forging

Value is created when you use your intuition and forge ahead to create something new.

Principles

The principles of Value Creation serve as instructions for your unique expression.

Name the real problem

Finding the real problem requires intuition and persistence. You ask questions, dig deeper, and suss out the frame of the problem space. In order to increase your understanding of the problem, you need context. The higher the quality of context, the better materials you have to work with. It’s like an archaeological dig, where you keep brushing patiently to reveal the details within. You wouldn’t shout out a dinosaur species after the first sweep of dirt, would you? And you shouldn’t assume you know the problem without all the context.

Getting to the core problem is about understanding what the problem is, why it’s important to solve, and why it’s necessary to solve it right now. There’s always more to do than time to do it. High problem fidelity creates a contrast between problems, making it easier to compare and decide on priorities.

Shape with intention

Once you move out of the problem space, you’re in the solution space. You diverge and converge, moving from discovery to design. And when I say “design” here, I’m referring to design in its most fundamental sense. You’re working on the form and shape of the work—not just how it looks, but how it works. You can think about design as:

• Surface: How should this look?
• Structure: How should this flow?
• System: How should this function?

These are Design Levels. They help you think about design holistically.

Shaping is how you design a solution at the right level of fidelity. Too abstract and you leave room for miscommunication and misinterpretation; too rigid—with high-fidelity mockups and extensive requirements—and you box the team in. You create rigidity when you need fluidity. No matter how much you plan the work ahead of time, the unknowns will still be there. Why? Because it’s all guesswork until you do the work. You can de-risk technical feasibility, but only to an extent. And the biggest mistake you can make is to believe you can answer all the unknowns before you start writing code. Shaping is high-fidelity thinking represented in lower-fidelity artifacts: rough sketches, words, and simple flowcharts.

When you shape with intention, you create constraints to define the lines of the work:

• Knowing the real problem.
• Knowing how much time you want to spend on solving the problem.
• Knowing how to deliver value and focus your energy on the solution.

Ship value early and often

Once you move into the build space and you’re actually writing code, you need to:

1. Build vertical slices of functionality that fully integrate the front-end and back-end.
2. Deliver value in weekly iterations that ship working functionality all the way.
3. Use your intuition to determine what to build and how to ship value quickly.

Building vertical slices is how you avoid the trap of misleading progress. You don’t create a working front-end using dummy data. And you don’t create a working back-end with a shoddy front-end or no front-end at all. Why? Because all the tension and issues happen in the integration between front-end and back-end. Living in that tension is how you deliver real progress. Pretending otherwise ignores the reality of balance. I’ve seen too many front- and back-end pairs work separately and pass work off to one another. It’s like handing off design or strategy—it doesn’t work. A disconnected product creates a disconnected end product and experience.

When it comes to delivering value, you need a fast feedback loop. Working on a six-week project is fine, but only when you’re delivering those vertical slices weekly. Doing so gives you the ability to course-correct and maintain fluidity when you’re building. Let intuition guide you to the appropriate scopes you can independently ship and let customers use.

Practices

The practices of Value Creation are specific expressions of the principles. They’re examples. You should mix, match, and remix them to suit your unique needs.

Product Forge

Product Forge helps you organize the work into clear artifacts to track possibilities, place bets, and deliver the work in rapid increments.

Value Engine

Value Engine is a definition of product as a holistic entity representing design, engineering, and strategy. Product is the system that connects what you create to the value it delivers.

Value Iterations

Value Iterations are isolated weekly releases that deliver end-to-end value to users. You can deliver something new or refine what you’ve already shipped. Value is created and quality is maintained through iteration speed.

Quality Refinement

I love designing in the browser. I always have. It’s a core part of my process for adding new value and, more importantly, refining what’s been created to highlight its value.

When you design in the browser, you:

• Create in context by seeing the design directly embedded in its environment.
• See changes in real-time, creating a high contrast to make better decisions.
• Bring together multiple disciplines into a collective intelligence to refine as one.

That’s not to say creating high-fidelity mockups in Figma is necessarily a bad thing. But it’s a shallow reflection of the work’s final form—another illusion of progress. I have watched design teams labor through high-fidelity mockups, capture feedback, and finally get the coveted stakeholder sign-off, only to be let down when they see their work mutated into a low-quality output. It’s another problem in translation. The design is translated by engineers into working code. Through the process, it changes. And that’s natural! But when you disconnect the work, you lose the continuity. Engineers make engineering decisions, or they throw it over the wall to the designers and create a waterfall process. You need to make decisions armed with the full context. And you only get that when it’s shared.

The solution is integration. Bringing together separate disciplines creates a collective intelligence to share context while you make changes. You’re connected in both thinking and creating, delivering value in continuous iterations of forging and refining.

Quality Refinement in Equilio is:

• Finding high-leverage signals of value across the spectrum of product disciplines.
• Sharing context and moving in unison to deliver and highlight product value.
• Cranking up the contrast between what works and what doesn’t to improve taste.

Quality Formula

The formula for Quality Refinement is:

Quality = Integration × Refining

Quality is refined when you integrate disciplines and refine in real-time dynamically.

Principles

The principles of Quality Refinement serve as instructions for your unique expression.

Surface the signal

Information is everywhere. You constantly consume information as raw data simply existing as a human. You look at objects, listen to sounds, and touch things. Sensory information is data. Your brain processes inputs into a signal. Touching a burner sends a signal to your brain that it’s burning your hand, so you respond accordingly and take your hand off the burner. The raw information (data) is translated into an action: the signal.

But there’s also a lot of noise, too. If you pay attention to everything, there’s too many inputs to process. Chaos ensues. It’s like when Superman experiences a flood of information when on Earth. He’s hearing cars, people talking, and sirens all at once. It’s too much. He has to learn to focus, to find the signals in the noise. Because all information is not equal.

Surfacing the signal is, yet again, a game of translation. You translate raw inputs into valuable outputs. When you build software, you’re capturing feedback continuously. The power comes from translating the feedback into a direction to move. That’s the signal. And you get there through integration. Generalists understand wider context because they see across disciplines. Product Builders represent the ideal of integration, sensing emerging signals as a unified whole.

Move with shared context

When information is passed down, you create a game of telephone. Information mutates into an almost unrecognizable state. The customer feedback is misinterpreted; the design solves the wrong problem; the engineers build the wrong solution; the business suffers; stakeholders lose trust in the team. The vicious cycle continues.

Integration allows you to move together, share context, and compound understanding. Now, it’s impossible for everyone to hear every piece of context at the same time. But it’s not impossible to be disciplined in how you document and share context. Write everything down, discuss the context together, and form a shared understanding. Collaborative Clarity is how you can build a shared mental model and move in unison as an integrated team.

Increase the contrast

I recently went to the eye doctor to update my prescription. I sat in the chair, and the optometrist asked me to read the letters. She made an adjustment and asked again. And then we kept doing that to find the optimal adjustments. It was a fast feedback loop, swapping quickly between settings on the machine.

Now, imagine if I looked at the letters, left for a week, and looked again. There’s no way I’d know which settings were clearer. You need to see the changes in near-real-time.

In the same way with product work, you need to increase the contrast. Contrast creates space for comparison. You look at one state, change something, and see how it feels compared to the original version. Going back and forth allows you to quickly contrast the changes against one another, making it easier to see which change you prefer. This is a powerful way to improve your taste and intuition.

Practices

The practices of Quality Refinement are specific expressions of the principles. They’re examples. You should mix, match, and remix them to suit your unique needs.

Editorial Passes

When you review product work—designs, Pull Requests, copy—act like an editor. Bring your red pen and focus on addition by subtraction, removing everything that’s not essential. This is how you highlight the inherent value.

Experience Unification

Over time, products add more and more functionality. Doing so without considering how all the pieces fit together can lead to seams in the product. It drifts. You need to always assess the product and make sure the experience is unified and working as a coherent whole versus disjointed parts.

Quality Iterations

Like Value Iterations, you need to build a cadence of weekly iterations focused on improving the quality of your product. If you don’t, you end up with quality drift. The core focus of Quality Iterations is removing, simplifying, and highlighting existing value.

Strategic Momentum

Starlings are small birds recognized for their dazzling plumage, advanced intelligence, and spectacular group behaviors. They perform breathtaking aerial displays called murmurations, where thousands of birds swoop and spiral in tightly coordinated patterns. They respond to the movements of neighboring birds with near-instant precision. It’s a spectacle to behold. I recommend watching a video to see it in action. It’s hypnotic.

The pattern of each murmuration is unique. No two are the same because the pattern emerges as a reaction to the surrounding environment. And there is no leader. The starlings operate as individuals in a collective, forming a single intelligence.

Rapid iterations, on a cadence, with consistent movement. That’s how thousands of starlings move with shocking fluidity. The best teams keep moving in continuous motion with a rhythm custom-fit to their team, product, and business. They create fast feedback loops to review changes and iterate. And when they find what’s working, they double down and amplify the effects to compound growth. Like the starlings, resilient teams move in synchronicity as they deliver value. Movement builds momentum and momentum creates an unstoppable force of unlocking value.

Momentum Formula

The formula for Strategic Momentum is:

Momentum = Iteration × Accelerating

Momentum is built when you iterate continuously in an acceleration of growth.

Principles

The principles of Strategic Momentum serve as instructions for your unique expression.

Find your flow

When I lead product teams, I take time to understand each person’s individual rhythms. I want to know how they work best, and use that to inform the team rhythms. If you’re a remote team, you will operate differently than an in-person team. Again, context matters. Once your team is in rhythm, they need a direction. So you align the work around a shared purpose to generate forward movement and progress.

Finding your team’s flow is how you design a system that lets you operate at your best.

Define your cadences:

• What’s the daily cadence?
• What’s the weekly cadence?
• What’s the monthly cadence?

Define your rituals:

• How do you share updates?
• How do you review the work?
• How do you plan what’s ahead?

Define your tools:

• Where do you review the work?
• Where do you track the work?
• Where do you plan the work?

Move in fast loops

Quality is met through speed of iteration. The faster you can make changes, get feedback, and make more changes, the better your output and the faster you build momentum.

Nothing kills iteration speed like handing off work and ignoring collaboration. Designers should work hand-in-hand with engineers when they build the solution. It not only makes a better product, but it improves the collective intuition and intelligence in the process—an effort that compounds momentum on the next pass. The process and work get better.

Sitting next to each other and sharing feedback in real-time bridges the divide of disciplines. No matter your speciality, you are all part of the single value chain. The faster you iterate, the better your product.

Multiply what works

As you increase your iteration speed, you get more shots on goal. Some work, some don’t. When you find something that really works, you need to double-down and amplify its effects. It’s easy to focus on what’s not working and try to reverse it. But it’s a lot easier—and often more effective—to take what’s working and simply do more of it.

This is where pattern recognition matters. If users love a particular feature in your product, can you identify the underlying reason? Knowing that can guide you to apply the same pattern in another part of the product; or when a team process works really well, you can extend the impact by increasing its usage.

When our team found success with weekly brainstorming sessions to refine the product, we extended that rhythm to another team. If something is working, understand why, and apply the same principle or process elsewhere to amplify its impact.

Practices

The practices of Strategic Momentum are specific expressions of the principles. They’re examples. You should mix, match, and remix them to suit your unique needs.

Product Heartbeat

Product Heartbeat is the two-beat pulse of alignment and visibility. The first beat keeps you aligned; the second beat amplifies the alignment. You do this on a regular and consistent cadence in your team’s flow.

Build Dynamics

Building software moves through key stages: forging, refining, and accelerating. You can also use these to organize the engineering team and map skillsets to the process.

Adaptive Habitat

Adaptive Habitat is how you create resilient teams of product builders, moving in unison against shared outcomes, craft, and rhythms. Bamboo Teams are the new generation of truly integrated product teams working like the starlings in a display of synchronicity.

The Heart of Equilio

Equilio is not a playbook—it’s a foundational thinking framework for product builders. When you start from principles, you operate like the bamboo rhizome, patiently growing a foundational network of roots to enable rapid growth and resiliency. Is a process not working? Look to the principle and redefine your expression, like a bamboo shoot regrowing to join the grove.

Equilio’s philosophy is defined by intuition, integration, and iteration. But the physics stem from context, contrast, and consistency.

Context shapes intuition.

Contrast sharpens integration.

Consistency strengthens iteration.

Together, these components combine into a coherence of value, quality, and momentum.

This is Equilio.

This is the Product Equilibrium.