Answer the questions you can't afford to get wrong.
Research-backed product strategy for software companies deciding what to build next.
You're about to bet a year of the roadmap on a direction you can't yet defend – and right now everything is telling you yes. The AI, the advisors, your own excitement. A yes that's free to give is worth about that much.
The cheap yes is a down payment on an expensive no – the build that failed, a year later. What you actually want is the honest answer early, while acting on it still costs you almost nothing.
That's what I do: research that gets you a direction you can defend, with 20+ years of judgment on the call and my name on it.
Trusted By
The Fieldway System, in five minutes
The same case I'd make across a table from you – the system, why it's a system and not just an expert, and what it looks like in practice. If you'd rather read, keep scrolling; it's all below.
The bet you can't call yet
Months of strategy meetings that produce opinions, not decisions. A board slide stuck “in progress.” The instinct that built the company says ship it and watch the data – but the last few bets moved nothing.
Here's the part that isn't your fault: your team is genuinely great at building, it's just not set up for the research that says what to build – a different discipline entirely. Experimentation can sharpen a direction you already have. It can't hand you one.
Start with Product Strategy, or Fieldway Research if the question is still upstream of “what do we build.”
Running a boutique advisory practice instead? The same engine works behind the scenes on your client documents, and you stay the face of every engagement – here's how that works.
One engine, three stages
Every engagement starts the same way: a question that matters, and a real cost to getting it wrong. The system moves through three stages, and you can enter at any of them.
- 1Answer it once
Fieldway Research
A focused, one-time research engagement. You bring a hard question; I hand back the full corpus, a synthesized executive summary, and a recorded walkthrough of me presenting what I found – the cheapest, lowest-commitment way to work together, and the front door for everything else.
See Fieldway Research - 2Keep it current
Managed Intelligence
Research is a photograph. Intelligence is a live feed – a living deliverable kept current as the market moves, so the next idea gets checked against real evidence before it becomes a build.
See Managed Intelligence - 3Decide what to do
Product Strategy
When the question is “what do we build, and which market do we bet on,” Product Strategy turns the evidence into a validated direction the team can act on – behavioral personas, a problem inventory, and a prioritized roadmap. Including, when the evidence says so, a clear recommendation about what not to build.
See Product Strategy
Why you can trust the answer
Most expert work asks you to buy on faith. This earns trust a different way. You still get one person's judgment – what's different is that you can check it, and someone answers for it.
The system
You can check the work. The same method every time, documented, and the corpus is yours to go deeper in whenever you want.
The judgment
Someone who has made these bets reads what actually matters in the pile – and will tell you when the math doesn't work.
The name
A free tool has no reputation to lose when it's wrong. That's exactly why its yes is worth nothing. Mine is on every call I hand you.
The system shows the work. The judgment makes it right. The name answers for it.
What it looks like in practice
Tallo
A 10-year-old career platform brought me in to reach a new audience. They'd been running experiments and hashing it out internally, but the traction wasn't coming.
The Strategy stage delivered a researched path into that market – two behavioral personas, a market-intelligence guide, 15 problems across six themes, feature concepts, and a go-to-market. The team was shipping a month later, and it landed right out of the gate.
There was a second audience, too – one they were already chasing with programs that weren't working. In an afternoon, the research showed why that bet wouldn't pay off, and they wound those programs down. Tallo has kept the engagement going ever since, each cycle surfacing the next thing to build – and the next not to.
Read the full Tallo case studyTiffany Haynes, Illumea Advisory
Tiffany ran a document-heavy engagement through the intelligence pipeline – roughly 40 research documents that I produced, an additional 50 client documents and interviews, and a 16,000-row CRM export, all on a tight deadline. The synthesis came back about 70% done, in her house style, more thoroughly sourced than her own timeline would have allowed.
She added the 30% only she could – the judgment, the client relationship – and presented it as her own. Which it was.
“I wouldn't do a competitive analysis myself.”Read the full Illumea case study
The goal was never a smarter opinion. It's an answer you can stand behind.
Who's behind it
Matthew Stublefield – 20+ years leading software teams, and eventual author of What a Leader Owes Their Team. I read the documents, run the research, and record the walkthrough myself, and I sign off on every deliverable before it reaches you.
The About and Why Trust Me pages have the longer version.
Tell me the question you're trying to answer and what it costs you to get it wrong. We'll figure out which stage fits – and if Fieldway isn't the right call, I'll tell you that too.
The system is the part you can trust. The judgment is the part you can't get anywhere else.