Product Thinking

2026-07-05 by Tomas Tulka

With the technology mostly solved, we can finally focus on what’s important: user needs.

Okay, don’t get mad just yet; I know how provocative that sounds. I also know that things are not that simple. Engineering is still a crucial part of software development, and that isn’t going to change. However, we have long left behind the early days of computer science, where hypotheses had to be evaluated by slow experimentation, and entirely new problems popped up constantly, demanding novel solutions.

Indeed, we already know how to build software. The likelihood that your specific technical problem has already been solved by someone else is approaching certainty. Thanks to AI assistants, we can now collaborate with the collective knowledge of the entire community and profit from it instantaneously on demand. Writing complex code is just a prompt away, freeing engineers from tedious, repetitive work.

This is a fortunate shift because technology was never meant to be an end in itself, but rather a vehicle to solve real-world problems. Like crossing a river, it still requires engineers and builders, but at the end of the day, we get the bridge we need. The most critical questions are no longer how to build it, but rather where it is needed most, what its load capacity should be, and who it serves.

Because building software has become so cheap and fast, we must shift our focus heavily toward user needs. What actual problems do our users face, and how can we solve them? Paying attention to outputs (such as the number of new features shipped) instead of outcomes (how happy our customers are) can harm revenue more than ever. Overloading users with a rapid flood of half-baked features will frustrate them quickly, potentially killing a product overnight.

More than ever before, every member of the team must adopt product thinking, as opposed to a narrow-minded focus on pure technology. Furthermore, deep technical knowledge can unlock entirely new perspectives because users (and often also business people) frequently don’t know what is technologically possible. When product thinking becomes a shared mindset across every role, everyone on the team benefits, as the success of the product ultimately determines the success of the organization as a whole.

The Mindset Shift

Product thinking requires adopting this mindset at every level of the organization, starting right at the top with the CEO. This is harder than it sounds. Measuring output over outcome is incredibly satisfying; the number of features or releases, team velocity, and lines of code per developer are easy to evaluate and show. On the other hand, the real value delivered to a customer is rarely immediately visible.

When comparing two teams, one that delivered twenty features and another that delivered only three, managers instinctively tend to praise the former. However, those twenty features might easily confuse users, frustrate them, and push them away. Meanwhile, the three features developed by the second team might delight users and ultimately drive higher revenue. The difference is that the second team spent far more time understanding the users’ actual problems and developing a thoughtful solution, rather than mindlessly shipping overcomplicated features that nobody needs or wants.

To escape this trap, an organization needs an anchor point to align daily work with actual customer value. A clearly defined vision and strategy serve as a compass to verify that development is heading in the right direction and to ensure teams are working on the right things. This also addresses a common organizational issue: having too many or misaligned priorities, which often leads to prioritizing features favored by the most important person in the company rather than the customer.

A good vision sets the long-term direction for the organization. It should be brief, punchy, and easy to memorize. A good strategy acts as a decision-making framework, guiding choices regardless of the specific problem at hand. Together, they establish the company’s core value proposition: what it does, why it does it, and how it achieves it.

To reality-check the alignment within your organization, try asking the following questions. If you receive wildly different answers, your vision and strategy are either non-existent or poorly communicated. Either way, you have a problem:

Conclusion

Let me close with this quote by Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA:

For companies with imagination, you will do more with less. For companies that... when the leadership is just out of ideas, they have nothing else to do, they have no reason to imagine greater than they are. Then when they have more capability, they don’t do more.

It’s a great line because it clearly expresses the shift to product thinking as a survival imperative. An excellent development team loses its competitive advantage when it is misaligned with the overall goals and the core purpose of the product they are building.

Everyone on the team must focus on producing real value for customers, understanding the broader business, and continuously learning through user feedback.

Further Reading

These are great books to get started with product thinking: