Guy Reams (00:01.218)
This is day 15, business as product. I had an epiphany today. For months, I've been saying that I'm building a product that sounded tidy and manageable. A product has a set of features, a roadmap, a launch date. Then it hit me. I'm not just building a product. I'm building a company. That shift matters. A product lives on a shelf, even if that shelf is a cloud.
A company is a living system. It thinks, it learns, it makes promises. It keeps them or it does not. When I saw the whole, my decisions started to change. I stopped asking what the next feature should be. I started asking what kind of organization produces value day after day and gets better while doing it. When I saw the company as the product, silos stopped making sense.
waiting for one group to finish so the next can start as a tax on momentum. I began to see work as one ecosystem that shares a schedule and a sprint rhythm. Engineering, marketing, customer support, conversations, sales, finance, operations, all of this moves together. We are not tossing tickets over a wall. We are improving the same organism.
This is not a metaphor for clever slides. It is a practical way to work. The weekly or bi-weekly or whatever sprint becomes the pace in which the entire company learns. The backlog is no longer just a list for developers. It is a queue of experiments and improvements across the entire business. Update the onboarding flow. Clarify the message on the landing pages. Fix the clumsy interval handoff that frustrates our customers.
Write the guide that would have saved you an hour last week. These are all product changes when the company is the product. Treating the company as the product also forces honesty. If I will not use our own system to run our work, then it's really not ready. If a process confuses me, it will confuse a customer. If a message is vague inside the walls, it will be vague outside the walls. The friction I feel is the same friction others will feel.
Guy Reams (02:16.352)
Instead of explaining it away, I can surface it, fix it, and move on a little wiser. There is a rallying effect here. People can gather around a product vision, yes, but they can gather even more around a vision for how we operate. Excellent shifts from a slogan to a habit. Remove a step, reduce confusion, capture what you learned, and make it easy for the next person to apply. Celebrate a win, then ask how to repeat it.
Find the weak spot in the system and strengthen it without a bunch of drama. When the company is the product, improvement becomes daily practice. This mindset invites a simple cadence. Decide what outcomes matter this sprint. Do the work with focus. Review the results without defensiveness. Keep what worked, change what did not, then do it again. Over time, the organism gets stronger. The systems get clearer. The experience for customers becomes smoother.
trustworthy. The work feels lighter because it is aligned. I still care about the software, of course. I care even more about the business that makes and supports the software. The software will ship features. The company will ship reliability, clarity, and a sense that someone thought this through. That is the promise I want to make, and the only way I know to keep it is to treat the company itself as the product that we are building. Today, I choose that mindset.
fewer walls, shared rhythm, continuous improvement across every part of the house, build the product, yes, and build the company that can keep building long after the first burst of energy phase. That is work worth doing.