Drew Barontini

Product Builder

Issue #69 •
• 21m read

2025 Review

As the Earth completes another rotation around the sun, I’d like to reflect on 2025 and share my wins, learnings, and takeaways going into the new year. I re-read every issue published this year to extract key insights to inform takeaways for next year.

Wins

But first, some wins! Some of these are directly related to the newsletter, but all of them affect it. And this isn’t an exhaustive list. They are just some of the most important from the year.

It’s easy to move onto the next thing without pausing and reflecting. Pay special attention to your wins, big and small, along the way. It makes end-of-year reviews easier. Because I don’t know about you, but it’s difficult to remember what happened in January.

Let’s get to it!

Milestones

Here are three key milestones:

Stats

Here are some fun stats:

Favorites

My three favorite books this year:

  1. Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson — Leonardo da Vinci is one of my favorite thinkers and creators. His story is a timeless example of creative supremacy through generalism.
  2. Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton — A beautiful meditation on a serendipitous connection and relationship with a wild hare in the English countryside.
  3. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros — An engaging book about walking, great thinkers that walked, and how walking is more than just a physical activity.

My three favorite movies this year:

  1. Train Dreams — A beautiful meditation on life, love, and loss.
  2. Sing Sing — A story of finding meaning and purpose in the bleakest of situations.
  3. Flow — A transfixing animated movie about survival and rebirth.

My three favorite TV shows this year:

  1. Andor (full series) — One of my favorite shows of all time. Incredible.
  2. The Pitt (season one) — Yet another medical drama, but very well done.
  3. The Studio (season one) — An inventive and entertaining show about Hollywood.

My three favorite songs from this year:

  1. Mr. Miracle by Kid Cudi
  2. Go Robot by The Red Hot Chili Peppers
  3. Distant Suns by Thrice

My three favorite quotes this year:

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

— James Joyce

Walking folds the body over the landscape (and vice versa), just as philosophy folds the soul over thought. The walker and philosopher contend with the same enigma: that of presence. They resolve to remain in that space for a long time, to plunge forever further into it, and to inhabit it. The philosopher entertains the same relationship to concepts as the walker does to the landscape. The sole reward that can be expected is familiarity.

— Frédéric Gros

No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.

— Haruki Murakami

Learnings & Takeaways

Issue #18: Principles First

I think of principles like the branches of a tree. They help form the structure, even as the weather and seasons change the amount and color of the leaves. The processes are the leaves. They change, evolve, and even die when they’ve outlived their usefulness. But the principles remain.

Takeaway: Keep focusing on the principles over the process. Don’t get caught up in the how before you understand the why.

Issue #19: Knowledge Alchemy

Finding principles is about recognizing emerging patterns, reflecting on the meaning to identify the core truth, and repeating the principle as a mantra.

Takeaway: To find and integrate principles, be mindful and intentional with what you pay attention to, think about, and discuss.

Issue #20: Seeking Discomfort

When given the option, choose the harder path whenever possible. If you succeed, you win. If you don’t, you learn. Either way, you win. You’re making an active choice to be a participant in your personal growth. Make it a challenge.

Takeaway: Don’t shy away from challenges. If you want to grow, you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Issue #21: Tension Guides

Holding the opposites in tension doesn’t make it a zero-sum game. The tension creates a dynamic balance where both sides can coexist and even strengthen each other.

Takeaway: Not every tension is a problem to solve. Sometimes it’s a vessel of understanding to inform how you create balance.

Issue #22: Steady Beats

But planning in the absence of reviewing is like a weak heartbeat—it doesn’t generate enough energy into the system to work effectively. And a plan without a review risks misdirection.

Takeaway: If you want to look ahead, you need to look back. Taking stock of where you’ve been informs where you’re going.

Issue #23: Feedback Loops

By identifying the inputs and outputs, I know the levers I can pull. If we’re not generating the right outputs, then we need to check we’re capturing the right inputs through the right process.

Takeaway: Always look for feedback loops to understand the flow of information and how you can create better outcomes.

Issue #24: Understanding Energy

No matter how much time you have, it means nothing if you don’t have the energy to use it. Time is a treasure chest and energy is the gold that fills it.

Takeaway: Focus on your energy far more than you focus on your time. Manage it well.

Issue #25: Thought Lab

I don’t believe you can truly understand your thinking until you put words down. You have to interrogate your thoughts, and writing is the best method of mental interrogation.

Takeaway: Create space to write on anything you’re wrestling with. Writing is thinking.

Issue #26: Rebuilding Energy

Each day, we have a chance to balance our energy and work in our optimal state. But in order to get there, we need to make mindful decisions to support that effort.

Takeaway: Fighting against your energy is an unproductive battle. Find ways to rebuild your energy and regain momentum.

Issue #27: Collaborative Clarity

Each participant is actively attempting to understand what they are seeing, and it’s your job to guide the conversation, asking questions and surfacing insights to drive alignment.

Takeaway: Make sure everyone on your team is sharing the same contextual mental model of work. Share your screen, share language, and always show visuals.

Issue #28: The Fieldbook

Cultivate a life of curiosity, experimentation, and iteration, and you’ll unlock new opportunities that naturally fall along a progressive life path.

Takeaway: Small steps, taken intentionally, yield outsized rewards. The only way you know is to put it to the test. Learn by doing.

Issue #29: Reframe Unlocks

Language is powerful. Be mindful and intentional with the words you use, the tone, and the phrasing. Often, a simple reframe can unlock new perspectives and move you forward.

Takeaway: When you feel stuck, try a shift in language. Sometimes a subtle language shift is all it takes to unlock new insights.

Issue #30: Surface Control

Surface area is a variable. You can control it up or down, expanding to increase the signal, or contracting to create focus. Used wisely, you can control the surface to shape the outcome.

Takeaway: Pay attention to how much information you’re working with. Strategically control it to increase your overall effectiveness.

Issue #31: Better Defaults

When you have the wrong default behaviors, it’s easy to fall into bad habits without even realizing it. You say yes to opportunities that steal your focus; you work on projects without understanding their value; you get pulled into work that is messy.

Takeaway: If you regularly repeat a behavior, make sure it’s one that serves your goals. Set better defaults to inform better results.

Issue #32: PM Rounds

PM Rounds is a system and a practice that heightens your awareness, keeps the team moving, and allows you to strategically focus on key issues that drive impact.

Takeaway: Sometimes the best process is one in which you generate continuous movement and use your intuition as a compass.

Issue #33: Reverse Refinement

Starting with a prototype helps validate the solution and uncover the work to do; organizing the work establishes priorities; and building in tight feedback loops rapidly refines the work, creating a time-lapse effect as each iteration improves on the one before it.

Takeaway: Never fool yourself into thinking that a document or mockup is a replacement for making the real thing. Work quickly, iteratively, and close to the metal.

Issue #34: Signal Practice

Make the tasks as small as you can. Each one becomes a tiny experiment to help you reach your outcome and deliver on your priorities. And the smaller, the better. The reduced scope limits the time and energy requirement, and each small step generates momentum.

Takeaway: Before you place a larger bet, start small and tune your ability to identify the right signals to follow.

Issue #35: Artifact Mining

It’s not just the end product. I want to see the works in progress—the early seeds of thoughts, the messy iterations, the evolution of the work. I want to see the artifacts—the tangible items that form the tapestry of work.

Takeaway: Keep track of your work and how it evolves over time. The beauty is in the story.

Issue #36: Infinite Iteration

Iteration is the connective tissue between speed and quality; between where we are today, and the infinite progress ahead.

Takeaway: If you want to increase the quality of your output, increase the speed of iteration.

Issue #37: Emergent Environments

Focus on creating an environment where healthy behaviors naturally emerge. Think of it like gardening. You’re not shouting at the plants. You’re making sure there’s healthy soil, adequate sunlight, and enough water. You are creating an environment, not controlling it.

Takeaway: Control comes from leveraging the system that surrounds the work.

Issue #38: Product Mindset

The best skills to develop are the ones that help you adapt in real time. While I like to plan, I’m under no illusion that the planning will affect the outcome more than the work itself. Planning helps prepare, not predict.

Takeaway: The best plan is the one that prepares you for the inevitable changes.

Issue #39: Project Compass

Like a brain, a project requires a holistic understanding of distinct areas to function, with its own unique structure and pathways to drive communication and progress. The parietal lobe in the brain deals with real-time processing (the status); the frontal lobe deals with decision-making (the strategy); the hippocampus deals with memory (the storage).

Takeaway: Think about projects in their component parts to drive understanding.

Issue #40: Alignment Pillars

Words are the raw material of clarity. Use them wisely, and you create filters for alignment to prosper and grow. With alignment you have energy; with energy you have momentum. And momentum is everything.

Takeaway: Make sure you can draw a clear line between your actions and what you believe in.

Issue #41: Leveraged Thinking

You can either give into the easy comfort of dopamine that mindlessly sets you on a hamster wheel of emptiness, or you can engage in your work, think critically, and put focused effort into high-leverage activities.

Takeaway: Never sacrifice critical thinking for the facade of efficiency. You’ll always lose.

Issue #42: Feedback Protocol

Feedback is a conversation. It’s never a one-way equation. It requires multiple parties to engage in dialogue to achieve its goal: improvement. Feedback is the fuel of iteration and continuous improvement.

Takeaway: Never shy away from feedback, good or bad. It’s all valuable information.

Issue #43: Context Windows

Like LLMs, higher-quality input creates higher-quality output. Understanding context is how you adjust the conditions necessary to make better decisions. It will help you, your team, and your company work smarter. The clarity of the input determines the quality of the output.

Takeaway: Making good decisions is about the quantity and quality of context you have.

Issue #44: Edge Environments

The strength of routines is in their ability to fortify behaviors. Their weakness is when the routines trigger automatic responses instead of creating room for creative thinking. It’s in this tension that innovation and efficiency thrive. Push yourself by finding the edge of your activities and what work you do; the environment and spaces where you do your work; and the ways you complete the work.

Takeaway: Build strong rhythms to create space for serendipity and creativity.

Issue #45: Mindful Detours

No matter how much you plan, unknowns will be waiting for you as you execute the plan. The secret lies in embracing the uncertainty—that’s the element to plan for.

Takeaway: Create plans as a means of preparation. The act of planning is more important than the plan itself.

Issue #46: Generative Loops

Creating high-quality work, no matter the domain, requires oscillation between slow depth and rapid execution. Artistry operates on its own timetable, much to the frustration of societal and workplace expectations.

Takeaway: Find ways to oscillate your pace of work such that you can run fast and walk slow, timing the rhythm to the needs of intuition.

Issue #47: Creative Cycle

Insights are personal. When you read something, watch something, or talk to someone, the information resonates because of the intricate medley happening in your mind. The information connects to a childhood memory; the specific phrasing reminds you of something an old boss used to say; the thought maps directly to one of your own. These are personal moments. And they are moments that create clarity, the purest form of knowledge.

Takeaway: You can’t prompt insights. They’re born from the labor of the creative process.

Issue #48: Design Levels

The deeper design pays dividends when the work begins. Upstream thinking informs downstream decisions. A high-fidelity mockup with pretty surface design is a facade of thoughtful design. It’s only when you look at the structure and the system do you understand how the solution will work. And even with this design thinking, the inevitable unknowns in the work still surface. Be adaptable during the process, but know that early thinking improves later decision-making.

Takeaway: Design is a holistic understanding of how things work, not just how they look.

Issue #49: Working Rhythms

When you think out loud, your thoughts often come out unfiltered. You share unfinished ideas and place trust in your teammates. All great teams are built on trust. And when you trust one another, you share vulnerability. You think together.

Takeaway: Working with the garage door open is the best way to bring a team together.

Issue #50: 50 Insights

Nothing is ever done. When you create a plan, it changes when you start. When you share an idea, it evolves. When you build a product, it changes. Life is about the process of change. Because all the best processes catalyze change. They forge new growth.

Takeaway: You pick up nuggets of wisdom on your life’s journey, but you should never clutch them too tight to learn something new.

Issue #51: The Claritorium

The Claritorium is the living force of clarity. It’s a system, a space, an ecosystem. It’s where you better understand yourself, share knowledge with your team, and affect change in the world by seeing the hidden structures—the patterns of holism connecting all things. It’s where you generate motion and construct an invisible force that drives focus and intention. It’s where you build an emergent environment that makes clarity an inevitable outcome. It’s powerful. And it will change how you see the world, operate within it, and impact those you work with. You will work at another level others will seek to attain. You will thrive.

Takeaway: Tapping into the hidden force of work is how you unlock clarity.

Issue #52: Concept Translation

Trying to replicate a process across teams is difficult. If you simply copy it exactly, you risk losing the essence of the concept. Context matters. So where you add the process (the context) has a direct impact on its success. Without a fundamental knowledge of the motivation behind the process—the reason it exists—you can’t easily adapt it in a new context.

Takeaway: Understanding the surrounding context is the key to doing impactful work.

Issue #53: System Maps

When you understand the hidden structures, interconnections, and feedback loops at play, you gain X-ray vision into the skeleton of the process. When something breaks, you not only know how to fix it, but what second-order effects can occur. You see complex structures in new ways, viewing the world through a new lens.

Takeaway: Find the system underneath, and you’ll see things others don’t (and can’t).

Issue #54: Product Codex

While I was looking closer at the core features of the product, I had an idea to create a text notation to describe the functionality of the features. It could show the affordances on each page and help me spot inconsistencies and improvements in the product.

Takeaway: Notational data is a helpful way to describe the nature of complex concepts.

Issue #55: Trust Loop

Software has bugs. It’s normal and expected. It’s less about the presence of bugs than about how you handle resolving them. Do you seek them out and fix them when they’re reported? Or do you perpetually “put them in the backlog” never to be seen again?

Takeaway: Doing what you say is one of the best ways to earn trust and confidence.

Issue #56: Immediate Action

The pluralization of “priority” into “priorities” creates a paradox. If everything is a priority, then nothing truly is. The word lost its significance. Yet here we are, constantly listing, shifting, and managing priorities. We maintain endless backlogs and pretend it’s possible to sort a list of a hundred items into a defined order.

Takeaway: Sometimes the task is worth doing right away. And sometimes it saves you time when you don’t put it off until later.

Issue #57: Signal Alignment

The scope was fixed, so we increased the time on the competing project. I reminded stakeholders that, by saying yes to this work, we’re saying no to the other work (for now); an important reminder that priority is a continuously evolving current of negotiation. If everything is a priority, nothing is. It’s a sea of noise.

Takeaway: Don’t let others translate meaning. Say it clearly and plainly to drive alignment.

Issue #58: Build Dynamics

Rather than define the roles by function, we should look at the different perspectives and dynamics of work. How an engineer approaches the work tells you more about their focus than an arbitrary full-stack distinction. In this case, the stack is periphery to the function it represents.

Takeaway: Think of building software as forging, refining, and accelerating.

Issue #59: Product Forge

When building products, there’s no shortage of what you can do. Feedback pours in every direction, forming an endless cacophony of ideas, problems, and opportunities. The challenge is determining what you should build, how to build it, and delivering it on time with excellence.

Takeaway: Find a system that helps you map possibilities, track bets and experiments, and execute the work effectively.

Issue #60: Value Engine

The best product organizations are ones where Product is a system, not a silo; a place where everyone contributes to value—from creating value to connecting value to amplifying value.

Takeaway: Don’t treat “Product” as a siloed entity for only those deemed worthy. Bring your whole team into the value chain.

Issue #61: Product Builders

The translation—the connective tissue between disciplines—is what makes a Product Builder.And in a world of rapidly advancing AI blurring the lines between disciplines, you must move forward as a holistic thinker, builder, and craftsperson.

Takeaway: Develop experience in design, engineering, and strategy. Learn how to go wide and deep to create quality work.

Issue #62: Adaptive Habitat

What if the organizational structure could adapt as the surrounding environment shifts? Because in any complex system, survival relies on the ability to adapt, to change, to evolve.

Takeaway: Create adaptability through flexibility. Empower your teams with the right context and autonomy to deliver solutions.

Issue #63: Product Heartbeat

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.

Takeaway: Find your team’s unique rhythm and build your process around it.

Issue #64: Product Equilibrium

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.

Takeaway: Don’t over-index on adding more to your product. Spend as much time (or more) finding what you can remove.

Issue #65: Progress Resolution

When you let go and trust the process by building resilient teams of product builders, you create an environment where progress is measured by the quality of work. Because progress in software development isn’t about quantity or linearity. You’re not moving a pile of rocks from one spot to another. If it were, you could reliably measure progress in percentages.

Takeaway: Forget percentages. Focus on the fidelity of context as a measure of progress.

Issue #66: Design Engineering

The real miss, though, is finding engineers who can truly translate a design into working software. This isn’t about pixel-perfect representations of high-fidelity mockups, either. It’s about understanding design principles—colors, spacing, typography—and unifying them as modular components to enable rapid development and prototyping.

Takeaway: Treat “design engineering” as an activity to level up everyone’s holistic understanding of the design of the product.

Issue #67: Open Rhythm

If you always operate from a perpetually refilling list of work, you never create space. You lose agency and proactivity as the tyranny of the urgent triumphs over what’s important.

Takeaway: Build systems to give you space to find signals. Live in the right tensions.

Issue #68: Project Engine

The work is done with an integrated team of design, engineering, and strategy. They solve the problem end-to-end on a small budget—no hand-offs, no waterfall, no missing context. They start together, stay together, and deliver the final product together.

Takeaway: Remove hand-offs and ceremony in your process. Integrate your team at all levels.

Looking Ahead

I pulled up Linear and looked at some of the issues assigned to me. Work was quiet. It was on the verge of Christmas break. I picked one and tasked an AI coding agent to do the first pass. While it worked, I sat at the desk in the back of my office to sketch ideas on paper. I was working on a different problem, focusing on high-level themes I want to work on in the new year. Two problems in parallel. I got up and checked on the agent’s progress. It completed the first iteration. I reviewed the work, made modifications, and tasked it with additional changes. I sat back down to sketch, walked around to think, and worked this way in a dedicated block of focus time. AI was an amplifier and accelerant, but also a means to create space to work on something deeper. I didn’t need to toil around writing code to fix a bug when higher-leverage work was waiting.

AI is artificial intelligence. It’s not real. It’s artificial, simulated, synthetic. As carbon-based, organic life forms, we possess a human intelligence, formed through a rich tapestry of unique life experiences. We’re each our own.

But that doesn’t mean AI can’t do real work. It can. And it’s getting better with each generation of new models. Using your critical thinking to determine when and how to use the new technology is what matters.

The I Framework

Gaining experience in work and life, I’m trusting my instincts more than ever. Through writing, I’ve unlocked insights to create both Claritorium and Equilio. But those frameworks of thought and work are also the lens of a larger philosophy. It’s how I operate now, and it’s what I’m looking for more of next year.

As I reflected on this year, I sparked an insight:

Claritorium and Equilio are directly related.

They share the same root network:

Clarity Codex maps to Value Engine.

Clarity Current maps to Quality Refinement.

Clarity Climate maps to Strategic Momentum.

The Claritorium is how you scale clarity and Equilio is how you apply it to your team in the context of building software. The shared root network—like that of the bamboo rhizome—is what I’m calling The I Framework:

  1. Intuition to find the signal in the noise.
  2. Integration to build holistic connections.
  3. Iteration to continuously learn by doing.

How you apply this (or not) is up to you. For me, it’s through DrewOS, a personal operating system as an application of these principles.

Create your operating system, your YouOS. Start from principles. Use your intuition to follow your energy, integration to diverge and converge across disciplines, and iteration to put knowledge to the test.

That’s what the year ahead looks like for me.

How will you gain clarity in 2026?

Clarity Codex Strategic Momentum

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