Field Notes
Practical writing for product leaders and boutique advisors – on deciding what to build, answering the hard questions, and running a sharper practice.
'MBB Depth Without the MBB Team' Is Half an Answer
A wave of vendors offers boutique advisors MBB-depth research without the MBB team. It's real, it's cheap, and it's only half of what the work needs.
How to Research an Audience You've Never Served
Researching an audience you've never served is a different job: the whole task is telling real demand from polite interest. Here's how it's done.
Your Features Shipped. Your Metrics Didn't Move. The Gap Has a Name.
Your team ships on schedule and the numbers stay flat. That's the build trap — and cheap AI building made it easier to fall into and costlier to ignore.
You Don't Choose a Direction Once
You can't set a heading once and walk — the trees pull you off course. Product direction is a bet you re-make, not a decision you make once.
The Highest-Value Answer in Market Validation Is 'No'
Validation isn't a green light. For one client, its most valuable output was a no — before a dollar went into a market that wasn't there.
When Your Research Tool Tells You What You Want to Hear
An AI research tool handed me a confident number that was exactly what I wanted to hear — and wrong. The verification gap is the step cheap answers skip.
I Ran Three Research Projects Through Tavily and Exa. Exa Won All Three.
I ran the same deep-research plan through Tavily and Exa three times, blind-judged and single-variable. Exa won all three — cheaper, faster, more complete.
An 80% Team Beats a 95% Team
Ship at 80% and a learning team compounds past a team that polishes to 95% – because shipping is the loop, and the cost of over-polishing is invisible.
Research Agents Get Less Accurate the More They Read: 42% Worse From 2 Tool Calls to 150
Deep research agents keep link validity above 92% at every depth while fact-check accuracy falls 42%, so here's the order to verify a report in.