# Four product principles

In the relentless pursuit of product-market fit, most product managers fall into a predictable trap. They become seduced by the allure of addition. More features, more capabilities, more options for users. It's an understandable impulse, particularly when building feels like progress and saying yes feels collaborative.

But the best product managers I've known operate by entirely different rules. They understand that sustainable product growth often comes not from what you add, but from what you have the courage to remove. They've mastered four principles that seem counterintuitive but prove themselves repeatedly in practice.

## Kill your darlings

William Faulkner once advised, "In writing, you must kill your darlings." He meant that sometimes the sentences you're most proud of—the clever turns of phrase, the elaborate metaphors—are precisely what's making your writing worse. Product management demands the same ruthless editorial discipline.

I learned this lesson firsthand while working on Sero. Early in the platform's development, we spent three months—a significant chunk of time for our small team—building what we thought would be a cornerstone feature. We built a sophisticated forum system, a full Reddit-style implementation with threaded conversations, mentions, image uploads, everything you'd expect from a modern discussion platform.

The feature was technically impressive. It worked exactly as designed. And it was completely wrong for our users.

Despite our investment in building it, users made their preferences clear through their behavior. They didn't want another place to post online. What they actually wanted was aggregation, a way to bring together the social graphs they already had.

Deleting that forum feature was painful. Three months of development work, gone. But removing it made the product stronger, more focused, and ultimately more useful to the people we were trying to serve. The lesson was clear to me then, and it remains clear now. Good product managers add features that users might want, but great product managers remove features that stop users from getting what they actually need.

Often, the best way to make your product grow is by removing the parts that are holding it back.

## It's all temporary

Here's a sobering truth about startups that most people don't want to acknowledge. The companies that spend too much time over-optimizing in the beginning don't survive long enough for us to study their mistakes.

When you're searching for product-market fit, every hour not spent directly pursuing that goal represents waste. Some companies get lucky—they happen to over-optimize on the right things and stumble into success despite themselves. But for every one of those stories, there are dozens of companies that perfected solutions to the wrong problems and quietly disappeared.

Consider the timeline honestly. In ten years, your startup will either be out of business, in which case your optimization efforts won't matter, or it will be 1000x the size it is today. Nothing you build today will scale to 1000x, so don't over-optimize for scale you don't have.

This isn't an argument for building carelessly—it's an argument for building pragmatically. Solve the problem for today's users with today's constraints, then move on to the next problem. If all goes well, you'll have the resources to rebuild it properly in 18 months anyway. If things don't go well, you can rip it out and move on to a new idea without much lost.

## Simple systems first

Most of finance can be figured out with basic arithmetic. A simple four-function calculator can handle ~80% of financial math. Add an exponential function and you've added another 15%. The complicated math only appears at the edges, and even then, it's usually just simple math combined together in clever ways.

This pattern repeats across every discipline I've encountered. Music, art, business—the complex things that work are always variations and combinations of simple, working things.

Yet product managers consistently try to skip this step. Look at the wreckage of decentralized autonomous organizations for a perfect example. Instead of starting with simple, working governance mechanisms and building up, DAOs tried to solve governance, incentives, and coordination simultaneously. The (lack of) results speak for themselves.

Every working complex system starts as a working simple system. You cannot create a working complex system from scratch—not because it's technically impossible, but because you won't understand what you're building until you've built something simpler first. (^Gall's law)

Start small, find something that works, nurture it. You will not solve everything at once, and that's exactly the point.

## When in doubt, act

George Patton understood something about decision-making that applies as much to product management as it does to warfare. "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

Action generates information, and information enables progress. Analysis has its place, but analysis without action is just expensive procrastination.

As a product manager, sitting idle is the worst possible choice you can make. Even imperfect action teaches you something about your users, your market, or your assumptions. Perfect action teaches you nothing because it doesn't exist.

This doesn't mean being reckless—it means being decisive. When you're facing uncertainty, which as a PM you always are, bias toward action. Build the minimum viable test. Ship the simpler version. Talk to one more customer instead of reading one more report.

The market will teach you what dashboards never could.

These four principles run counter to many instincts that feel natural in product management. It feels wrong to delete features you worked hard to build. It feels irresponsible to build temporary solutions. It feels inefficient to start small when you can see the complex solution you'll eventually need. It feels risky to act on incomplete information.

But feelings, as any good PM knows, are poor guides to user behavior. What works is what works, regardless of how it feels. And what works, time and again, is the discipline to subtract, the wisdom to build for today, the patience to start simple, and the courage to act.

The companies (and people) that master these principles don't just build better products—they build them faster, with less waste, and with deeper understanding of what their users actually need. In a world where most product management advice focuses on what to add, the real competitive advantage lies in knowing what to take away.