The Product Game

Field notes for product leaders: see the game and improve your play.

The newsletter is my ongoing attempt to understand what makes good product work possible: how teams make decisions, how organizations shape what they see, how strategy enables or stifles good gameplay, and how a sequence of small moves can change a much larger situation.

Sign up for Monday updates

The goal is to help you understand the field, anticipate predictable patterns, and make better moves. I try to draw and model what I'm learning and exploring.

Here are two key ideas that will do work for us, throughout the life of this newsletter.

You don't change peoples' behavior: you change the games they're playing and how they see the playing field.
There's a broad view (left, and image above), and then a fine-grained view of the field. You can only judge the quality of the move by the game-specific information you have available.

Newsletter details

  • I send an update each Monday, building on prior weeks' thinking
  • Past updates are in the Product Game index
  • (Before early '26, the list was named "Loops and Cycles," after this article)

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to Dave's Research Co..

Your link has expired.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.