Advising vs. Building: What Product Looks Like From the Outside

For years, I was inside. VP Product. CPO. Deep in execution, living the roadmap, fighting fires, shipping features, and negotiating trade-offs.

Now I sit in a different seat; advising companies while still building my own. And the shift in perspective is profound.

When you’re inside one company, product feels tactical. Urgent. Specific.

When you step outside and see patterns across teams, industries, and stages, product becomes clearer. And often, simpler.

Observation #1: Most Product Problems Aren’t Product Problems

From the inside, everything feels like a product issue:

• “We need better onboarding.”

• “We need more features.”

• “We need to improve retention.”

From the outside, you often see something else.

Most of the time, it’s not a feature gap. It’s a clarity gap.

Clarity about:

• Who the customer really is.

• What the product actually solves.

• What not to build.

• What stage the company is truly in.

I’ve seen this at early-stage companies searching for product-market fit, and at more mature ones trying to reposition.

At one of the startups I work closely with, product-market fit didn’t come from adding features. It came from deep, direct relationships with customers. When your dataset isn’t large enough to extract patterns from behavior alone, you don’t “analyze your way” to clarity.

You talk, listen, launch MVPs fast, commit and pivot.

Clarity beats cleverness.

Observation #2: Founders Underestimate Sequencing

One of the biggest advantages of advising is seeing sequencing mistakes early.

Founders often have strong instincts about the destination, but underestimate the order of steps required to get there.

I’ve seen teams:

• Try to build first-party platforms when social engagement is already high.

• Invest in complex infrastructure before validating the core value loop.

• Add hardware to strengthen IP without validating whether it meaningfully improves the value proposition.

A company with massive social engagement and a passionate audience might think, “Let’s move users into our own app.” But what do users actually want?

Another company combined hardware and software to strengthen differentiation. It did increase defensibility, but it also dramatically increased operational complexity and slowed velocity.

• If hardware meaningfully strengthens the value proposition, insist and master it.

• If it doesn’t, it becomes weight instead of leverage.

Get sequencing wrong, and even great execution won’t save you.

Observation #3: Being a User Is Not the Same as Understanding Users

With EcoMoat, I built something I personally wanted to use. On paper, that sounds ideal. Founder as user. Skin in the game.

But there’s a trap.

Being a user doesn’t mean you represent the market. It doesn’t mean your habits are typical. It doesn’t even mean you represent a large segment or group of users. When you design from your own workflow, you risk optimizing for familiarity instead of value.

I had to catch myself multiple times:

• “I would use it this way” - but would others?

• “This feels intuitive to me” - but is it obvious to someone new?

• “I don’t need that feature” - or is that because I already understand the system deeply?

Advising sharpened this awareness. I’ve seen founders confuse deep personal conviction with product-market validation. Conviction is powerful. But perspective discipline is critical.

Product leadership means separating personal taste from market truth. That’s harder than it sounds.

Observation #4: Features Don’t Compensate for Weak Positioning

Teams often add features to compensate for unclear positioning. More dashboards, toggles, and new AI layers. But if the product narrative isn’t clear, users don’t understand why it exists, then feature velocity doesn’t help.

That’s where advising changes your lens.

• You stop asking: “What can we add?”

• And start asking: “What must be true for this to matter?”

In some industries, the constraint isn’t even technology, it’s regulation, licensing, or capital intensity. In those cases, product innovation alone won’t move the needle. You need proof, scale, and consensus.

Positioning grounded in real-world insight matters, externally for customers, and internally for fundraising and alignment.

Advising vs. Building

Inside one company, product feels messy and complex.

From the outside, it’s often simpler than it looks.

Most problems come down to clarity, sequencing, or positioning.

Execution is rarely the real bottleneck anymore. Judgment is. I previously wrote about judgment becoming the new bottleneck.

That’s what product looks like from the outside.