I recently put a name to a kind of product design I care about: functional elegance. It means putting care into design where that care materially helps the user, without adding ornament that competes with the job.
Saggar is the clearest example I’ve built.
I've never heard a paying SaaS customer complain that their subscription subsidizes free users.
That's just the model. Those who can pay cover those who can't, or won't. Everyone gets access, and the whole system becomes more useful.
A Product Manager is supposed to be the great connector, the person who brings engineering, design, and business together. PMs are expected to be curious, collaborative, and customer-obsessed. They align stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and create clarity from chaos. They're not the boss, but they lead. Not the expert, but the glue.
As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.
The push to remove feelings from product management is misguided. We've somehow convinced ourselves that good product decisions must be purely rational, backed by data, stripped of intuition. This is mad.
Most PM hiring is broken. Companies copy generic interview processes, ask "tell me about a time when..." questions, and end up with people who can talk about product but can't actually do it.
The problem starts with not knowing what you actually need.
I recently found the first ever design document I created, from back in 2000.
A Product Manager is supposed to be the great connector, the person who brings engineering, design, and business together. PMs are expected to be curious, collaborative, and customer-obsessed. They align stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and create clarity from chaos. They're not the boss, but they lead. Not the expert, but the glue.
Prioritization has a structural problem. If every piece of work competes in the same backlog, large, high-impact projects will always beat small improvements. That's usually the right outcome for each decision, but the wrong outcome for the product over time.
Minor bugs, inconsistent spacing, awkward copy, and other small flaws rarely become important enough to win on their own. So they linger.
Have you ever tried to create a language from scratch? I began creating one for fun a while ago, and I've been trying to teach it to ChatGPT,. Langaf is a fictional language that is similar to English and uses a base twelve counting system.