Why most ideas shouldn't be built
The hardest and most valuable thing a product partner can do is help you decide what not to build.
Every founder arrives with an idea they're convinced the world needs. Most of the time, they're partly right and mostly wrong — not about the problem, but about the specific thing they've decided to build to solve it.
The instinct is to start building immediately. Momentum feels like progress. But building the wrong thing quickly is just arriving at the wrong destination faster, having spent your runway to get there.
Killing an idea is a service, not a failure
When we push back on a feature, a product, or an entire direction, it isn't obstruction — it's the most leveraged work we do. A week of hard questions can save six months of engineering. The goal is never to ship; the goal is to build a company that endures.
So before we design a screen or write a line of code, we ask the uncomfortable questions: Who exactly is this for? What happens if we don't build it? What's the smallest version that would tell us we're wrong? If an idea survives that, it's worth building. If it doesn't, we've just saved you a fortune.