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A library of case studies about how products were built, who they were for, what mattered, and why some bets were worth making.
PM diagnosis, step one: observe behavior. By 2006, Facebook had a growing real-identity graph, but discovery still looked like a directory workflow. If you wanted to know what friends were doing, you clicked into profiles and scanned the Wall, photos, or recent changes one by one.
By 2022, OpenAI had highly capable language models, but the main interfaces were built for developers and prompt experimenters rather than ordinary users.
Smartphones force users to look down, interrupt flow, and pull information out of a pocket even for lightweight tasks like navigation, notifications, or quick capture.
High-end gaming traditionally requires expensive consoles or PCs, long downloads, frequent updates, and hardware upgrade cycles that create friction for many potential players.
The main Instagram feed rewarded polished, permanent posts. That made the product culturally powerful, but it also raised the social pressure of posting.
Traditional brokerages made small investors feel out of place. Commissions, intimidating interfaces, and slow account setup all added friction before a user could even test the product.