About
What is The New Product Playbook?
The New Product Playbook explores how relationship-centered products are outperforming metrics-obsessed competitors in today's market. As technical parity continues to be made more commoditized through AI and rapid development cycles, the quality of the relationship products cultivate with the people they serve becomes the only sustainable competitive advantage.
The future belongs to products people don't just use, but feel connected to. This playbook shows you how to build them.
Who is it for?
Founders, product leaders, and teams who believe there's a better way to build products people truly care about.
As far as the story...
The New Product Playbook story is inseperable from my own.
Online I'm recognizable as Jacob's Blue. At work I'm known as Jacob. And if you see me in public it's cool to call me Jake.
I did not want to write this essay.
I'm a father, product designer, and musician/songwriter based in Ventura, CA by way of Brooklyn, NY.
I'm also a Christopher Alexander, Dieter Rams and Rick Rubin championing craftsman who tries to create w/ care.
This essay was born out of frustration.
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The gleam in my eyes born of craft, excellence and service has dulled in direct relationship to growth in my design career.
As I took on more strategic responsibility the core friction between business and user incentives took on a more insidious light. Like many designers I was used to designing with both in mind, but it took me following this idea up the ladder to the strategic layer before I realized its deeply wrong implication: That we must choose between serving people and making money.
Realization in hand the plaguing effects of this false-truth on not only my team but most modern product teams became obvious, clearly explaining our shortcomings and the rarity of magical products.
Many times over we actively chose business metrics at the expense of great user experiences, despite company values of "user first", "champion the user", etc.
I found myself searching for the perfect thing to say to convince stakeholders that we need this feature or these parts of MVP can't be descoped because we won't "come back to it." If only I had a way to prevent us from rolling back succesful features from a user perspective because of immediate and short term impact to busines metrics by way of an isolated A/B test.
Not only did I not have the vocabulary to advocate for inter-feature needs, I struggled to get purely user-centric initiatives on the roadmap, always losing the fight of a clear KPI being tied to someone else's promotional structure and struggling to tie user-centric problems to business outcomes.
The implicit attitude amounted to: "user centric needs are hard to quantify, so we just won't prioritize them."
(Update: we didn't "come back to it"...)
As a craft driven product maker this friction felt wrong. As an artist this approach was backwards. And as the son of a hospitality industry business owner I knew in at least some industries it was possible to thread the needle between business and user needs in a much more fulfilling way, for consumers and makers alike.
I was keenly aware that this friction is not real in the indivdual experience of making.
I personally know plenty of people that owe their commercial success to making a damn good thing and doing it over and over again. But I wasn't sure if that was true about making at scale. Was it true about making software?
In hopes to make my work more enjoyable I set out to answer that question.
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For nearly 8 months I braved an unfolding journey of research, discovery, writing, presenting, gathering feedback, refining, and trying again...
along the way learning more about myself then any amount of research could teach me.
The ideas started to resonate with more and more people. The work grew larger in scope then I could have predicted. Something different but more cohererant started to form. I learned that the best organization felt the same way. I also learned I wasn't the only software maker running into these struggles internally.
From all of this The New Product Playbook was born. It's now clear to me that across industries that the most resilient businesses find business success through user-centricity.
If your goal is to make a sustainably profitable business that solves a real problem for real people in a way that fulfills it’s makers and members alike, The New Product Playbook can help you, in some small way, get there.
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It will always be easier to start fresh than to change the direction of a moving organism. I wrote The New Product Playbook in order to answer these questions on a blank page.
For founders and leadrs alike I hope it helps. Use these principles to help make excellent products that matter to people.
But personally there's something about trying to turn a cruise ship that feels noble. The good news is I'm starting to think my effort, based off of these principles, hasn't been in vein. At the time of writing this,I'm starting to see the result of ripple effects created months ago.
Despite the shared principles of solving for this problem on blank page and rewriting an existing one, I've learned the hard way that context greatly shapes how you approach affecting change within an organization.
Hopefully my efforts take hold. Whether they're successful or not, I plan to share learnings from the journey soon.
How to Turn a Cruise Ship Coming soon
Despite it's selfish and frustrated origins The New Product Playbook is a gift to you made in love. If you'd like to contribute or chat about these ideas I'd love your input.
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Scrap
The story of the new product playbook
This false belief is padded by seemingly endless examples proving of the merit of the approach by quoting some dollar figure. Many products make money but what of the feeling these products illicit?
I've been fortunate enough to The perverse effects becoming more and more obvious.