Product Mindset Is Not What We Do
I’ve been running product strategy & mindset workshops with product leaders and teams over the past few weeks. In each one, I ask a version of the same question: what is your product, who is it for, and how do you know if it’s working?
The silence is always longer than anyone expects.
These are experienced people. They are experts in their domain, their technology, and their stakeholders. They can tell me what they shipped last quarter and what’s coming next. But when the question is “why does your product exist?” the room gets quiet. And when I ask platform teams, “Who is your user?” — someone will (and did) say “everyone” and mean it.
I sit with that silence. The gap is not their knowledge or expertise. These teams could walk me through their architecture, recite their OKRs, and explain the roadmap. But none of that had ever been connected to the purpose of the company, their organization, their product, or their team.
We talk about product mindset constantly — in job descriptions, in leadership principles, in the training we send people to. There’s a whole market of courses now promising to teach product mindset with AI. But when asked to define it, most people default to surface-level descriptions of customer centricity and delivering business value.
The way I see it, product mindset is a function of clarity. And it has three parts.
The equation
Product Mindset = f(Clarity)
Where Clarity is the Clarity of Purpose × Clarity of Users × Clarity of Impact
Purpose — what problem does our product solve? Not the feature we’re building or the project we’re delivering. The product. Why does it exist?
Users — who are we solving for? A specific segment with a specific struggling moment, not “all American consumers” or “all developers.” When we say “everyone,” we’re saying we haven’t decided yet.
Impact — does it produce value? Did the product idea we built change behavior in a way that mattered — for the user, the business, or both? If we shipped it and nothing changed, we had activity, not impact.
The reason this is multiplication: if any factor is zero, the whole thing zeros out. Without clarity of purpose, we are solving the wrong problem. Without clarity of users, we are not sure whose problems we are solving. Without clarity of impact, we don’t know whether our most important metric moved. All three have to be present, and all three have to be re-examined regularly, because purpose shifts, users evolve, and what counted as impact last year may be a vanity metric this year.
The equation is not scientific. Purpose, users, and impact are each measurable, but with different metrics and at different altitudes. The multiplication framing matters for one reason: when any one of them is zero, the whole thing is zero.
Where it breaks down
Treating clarity of purpose, users, and impact as a one-time exercise. In practice, all three evolve as the product matures, as the team’s understanding deepens, and as the ecosystem around them changes. The equation is a starting point, not a finished answer.
Users default to “everyone.” This comes up constantly on platform teams, where the user is another internal team. They resist narrowing it down because they serve multiple consumers. But serving multiple consumers and being clear about each one’s struggling moment are two different things. “We serve five teams” is a starting point. “We serve everyone” means we haven’t done the work.
Impact gets confused with output. We shipped it. We hit the deadline. We completed the epic. But did the user’s experience change? Did we reduce calls to customer care? Did adoption go up? Impact asks the “so what” question we skip when we’re already planning the next sprint.
Clarity requires honest conversations that most teams avoid. Large enterprises may fill in the equation with comfortable answers, skip the difficult conversations, and call it clarity. A team can write a purpose statement, name their users, and pick a metric — and still have zero clarity. If the purpose is aspirational copy from three years ago, if the user segments haven’t been validated, if the metric sits on a dashboard nobody checks, the equation looks complete, but nothing in it is real.
Clarity decays without accountability. Having clarity and acting on it are not the same thing. A team can define its purpose, name its users, and pick an impact, but use none of it. The equation only works if someone is responsible for keeping it honest.
Product mindset is not what we do. It’s who we are
Product mindset isn’t a personality trait or a title. It’s how clear we are about why the product exists, who it serves, and whether it’s working. When the clarity is there, decisions get easier. When it’s missing, we fill the gap with process, meetings, and opinions, and then we wonder why we’re so busy without feeling like we’re making progress.