Talking with Dani Diestre about digital product

I was lucky enough that Dani Diestre invited me onto his podcast Product Leaders. In this first conversation we talked mainly about the challenges facing companies whose main asset is a digital product.

What follows are some of the threads we pulled on, written down more to order my own thinking than to summarise the conversation.

An asset that refuses to be inventoried

A company whose main asset is a factory knows how to talk about it. It has installed capacity, a maintenance cost, a useful life, a depreciation schedule. The vocabulary exists and it works: you can take it to a board meeting and everyone understands what is being discussed.

Digital product resists that vocabulary. It does not wear out, but it decays. Its capacity is not installed; it is renegotiated every quarter. And its value does not sit in the code, but in the relationship the code sustains with the people who use it — a relationship that can break without anyone touching a single line.

When an organisation tries to manage that asset with categories inherited from the factory, it is not getting the numbers wrong. It is getting the object wrong. It is the same confusion that surfaces whenever someone asks how long something will take, as though industrial time translated into digital terrain without loss — something I have written about in "Industrialism".

The question being asked is not the one that is needed

Almost every organisation arrives with the same diagnosis: we are slow, we need to go faster. It is a comfortable diagnosis, because it requires nothing else to be revisited. Speed can be promised without changing any beliefs.

The useful question is a different one: how much do we learn per unit of time? A team that ships a lot and learns little is accelerating in a direction it does not know. And it will do so with a clear conscience, because every activity indicator will be green.

That is where the tension running through these companies appears. They need to commit outwards — to customers, to investors, to the market itself — in a language of certainties, while working inwards in a language of conjectures. There is no way to eliminate that double bookkeeping. There are only more or less honest ways of inhabiting it.

Leading is not refereeing

There is a reading of the product leadership role that reduces it to refereeing: mediating between what the business wants, what engineering can do and what design proposes. It is an administrative reading and, at bottom, a comfortable one. A referee needs no judgement of their own, only a procedure.

Leading digital product means keeping judgement in play. It means holding a point of view on which problem is worth solving and why, putting it in writing, defending it out loud, and revising it when reality contradicts it. It is a craft, not a box on an org chart.

We left topics on the table, so we met again shortly afterwards to keep pulling on the thread, this time crossing digital product with teaching.