Early in my career as a founder, I fell into a trap that ensnares many engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. Every month, like clockwork, I'd ship a new feature. The code was pristine, the UI was carefully crafted, and the deployment was seamless. Yet month after month, the usage metrics told the same disappointing story: flat.
I was caught in what I now recognize as the builder's paradox. Coming from an engineering background, writing code felt like real work. It was tangible, measurable, and satisfying. Planning, by contrast, felt like procrastination dressed up as strategy. So I did what felt natural: I built first and asked questions later.
Over time, I accumulated roughly 10,000 lines of code that never made it to production, or worse, features that shipped but were never used. That unused code represents the best work I ever did, not because of its quality, but because I eventually learned not to write it at all.
The Illusion of Productivity
The fundamental issue with the "just build it" mentality is that it confuses motion with progress. When I was writing code, deploying features, and iterating on designs, I felt productive. My commit history was active, my task board was moving, and I was checking boxes. But those features didn't drive the metrics that actually mattered for my business. I was simply building faster in the wrong direction.
This problem has only intensified with modern development tools. AI coding assistants, low-code platforms, and robust frameworks have made implementation faster than ever before. What used to take weeks can now be built in days or even hours. While this seems like an unambiguous win, it actually makes the underlying problem worse. I could now build the wrong thing three times faster than before.
The real failure point for most products isn't technical execution. It's not that the code is buggy or the design is poor. Most products fail because they're targeting the wrong customer segment, or they're solving problems that don't actually exist, or the problems they solve aren't painful enough to warrant the solution's cost or complexity.
When the fundamental direction is wrong, implementation quality becomes largely irrelevant. The most elegant code, the most beautiful interface, and zero-downtime deployments don't matter if nobody wants what's being built.
The Scientific Method for Software
My approach changed completely when I started thinking about product development less like coding and more like science.
Scientists don't randomly mix chemicals in beakers hoping to stumble upon a cure. They begin with a hypothesis grounded in theory and existing research. They design experiments to test specific aspects of that hypothesis. They collect data methodically. And they're willing to abandon approaches when the evidence suggests they're not working.
Yet I, like many software founders, skipped this disciplined approach entirely. I had a hunch about what users might want, and I immediately started building. I confused my assumptions with facts. I treated my initial intuition as validated truth rather than as a hypothesis that needed testing.
The gap between assumption and reality is where months of work and thousands of lines of code go to die.
The Product Charter Framework
Adopting a practice I initially resisted transformed everything: writing a product charter before writing any code. My mentor Eric used to tell me "measure twice, cut once," an old carpenter's maxim. As a software person, I dismissed this as outdated hardware thinking. After all, software is malleable. It can always be refactored, pivoted, or rebuilt.
But I was wrong. The cost of building the wrong thing is measured in months of opportunity cost, team morale, and momentum. And there's a specific reason why writing works where thinking alone doesn't: bad assumptions have nowhere to hide when they're written down explicitly.
A product charter forces articulation of:
The Vision: What does success look like? Not just for this feature, but for where this fits in the broader product strategy. If this can't be articulated, that's a red flag.
Target Personas: Who specifically is this for? And I mean specifically. Not "small business owners" but "solo marketing consultants at B2B SaaS companies with 10-50 employees who are managing content marketing without a full team." The more specific, the better the evaluation of whether this solves a real problem.
Problems They Face: What are the specific pain points this customer segment experiences? Not imagined problems, but problems validated through conversations, observations, or data. Each problem should be articulated clearly enough that a customer would recognize it immediately.
How We'll Solve Them: What is the proposed solution? Why is this approach better than existing alternatives? What makes this likely to work? This is where the hypothesis gets articulated.
The Single Metric That Determines Success: What is the one number that needs to move to prove this was worth building? Not a vanity metric, but something tied directly to customer value and business outcomes.
The charter takes a few hours to create. Sometimes a full day for something substantial. But those hours can save months of building in the wrong direction.
Writing Forces Clarity
There's something powerful about the act of writing that goes beyond just documenting thoughts. When ideas live only in my head, they remain fuzzy and untested. They can coexist with contradictions because I never have to reconcile them explicitly.
But writing forces precision. "We'll target the right customers" can't be written without defining who those customers are. "We'll solve their biggest pain points" can't be written without naming those pain points. "This will be successful" can't be written without defining what success means.
The discipline of writing exposes logical gaps, untested assumptions, and wishful thinking. Often, I've started writing a charter only to realize halfway through that I can't actually articulate why we're building something or how we'll measure success. That uncomfortable realization is precisely the point. Better to discover it before writing code than after shipping a feature nobody uses.
The New Productivity Equation
My productivity today looks different than it did when I was shipping code frantically every month. I spend less time writing code and more time writing charters, conducting customer interviews, analyzing usage data, and pressure-testing assumptions.
Ironically, this approach means I ship fewer features than I used to. But the features I do ship have a dramatically higher success rate. They move the metrics that matter. They get adopted. They create customer value.
The old version of productivity was measured in lines of code written and features shipped. The new version is measured in problems solved and value created. These are not the same thing.
The Counterintuitive Truth
Something I learned that still feels counterintuitive: the time spent thinking through what to build is minimal compared to the months spent building the wrong thing.
A day spent planning and validating can save three months of implementation time. An uncomfortable customer conversation that invalidates assumptions is a gift, not a setback. And the best code is often the code that never gets written because it wasn't needed.
The 10,000 lines I never shipped represent all the wrong turns I didn't take, the dead ends I didn't explore, and the wasted months I got back. They represent the shift from confusing motion with progress to actually driving outcomes that matter.
When I feel the urge to jump straight into coding now, I force myself to write the charter first. Sometimes the charter takes an hour. Sometimes it reveals that we shouldn't build anything at all. And sometimes, after writing it, the path forward is so clear that the implementation becomes straightforward.
Measure twice, cut once. Eric was right all along.
