Tags: Product Development
2025

Jeff Foxworthy and Being a Product Company

”… you might be a redneck” wasn’t Jeff Foxworthy’s only bit, but it’s the one that caught fire. Looking at the slew of product announcements, I realized I have a checklist for whether your company… might be a product company.

Not every company needs to be a product company

It’s OK. In games, we used to joke that everybody wants to be the game designer. It’s not that there’s only one — great game teams were often filled with incredibly talented game designers — but the number of people at game companies who were comfortable overlooking their lack of interest, experience, or talent in game design to weigh in was legion. Experts in any field experience this, I’m sure, but game design really seems to create space for opinions.

In the world of product development, it’s clear that not every company needs to be a product company. Just like companies that use technology (or AI) but aren’t tech companies, if the success of your company’s products are fully constrained by price, reach, marketing, security, stability, or really anything other than the experience of using the product, it might be OK for you to not be a product company. By all means, hire great product leaders, have customer empathy, and nurture taste, but you’re probably not a product company.

So, with apologies to Jeff

  • If your products thrive despite stability or usability challenges…

  • If your executive team demonstrates and rewards great taste…

  • If the CEO’s directs include product and design thinkers1…

  • If the company’s mission and vision are communicated and evaluated through a user lens…

  • If your products have both fans and haters…

  • If your company’s key products are led by product thinkers2 who report to the CEO…

  • If even critical products and teams don’t take themselves too seriously…

  • If you nurture people and teams who can deliver the impossible but will also swing and miss3…

  • If no idea is above critique but people are respected…

  • If you focus on making new mistakes instead of safely making the same ones…

  • If leaders are able to truly ignore sunk costs4…

  • If plans only exist to create new, better plans…

Then you might be a product company.

Necessary but insufficient

Might is doing a lot of work there, because of course you also need o11y to understand if your products are doing what you think they are, a solid tech, design, and product base, etc. But it’s a start.

But what if you just realized your entire product is now working for someone who wouldn’t know a great product if it dropped from orbit and bonked them on the head? Well, maybe you’re not at a product company. That can be fine. More than fine. Plenty of multi-billion and trillion dollar companies are built on infra, hardware, operations, and non-product functions.

But if what you care about is delivering great products, working at a product company is the way to go.

Footnotes

  1. It doesn’t have to be a designer, it’s the skill not the title. I do think designers — like engineers and PMs — benefit from leaders in their specialty. ↩

  2. It really doesn’t have to be a PM. Some of the best product thinkers I’ve ever worked with have been engineers, designers, and data scientists by training. See prior point for cultural health reasons for it to be a PM, but again skill not title. ↩

  3. A related point — the highest perfoming product creators I know have wild variability in their impact. As you manage your performance review process, consider how to handle 6-month periods of Outstanding bracketed by below average impact. It’s not laziness — product development is an inherently challenging creative act. Nobody can just excel at it constantly. ↩

  4. Mark was the best at this I’ve ever seen. We used to joke that he seemed to fully recompute state every morning. It made for a wild time as a leader working for him but we didn’t throw good money after bad. ↩

Product Development