The Pulse [Signals]: Why Most Products Lose Utility as They Grow
Your weekly digest of hand-picked, high-impact perspectives from Beehiiv, Reddit, Medium, Substack and online voices, curated for SME resilience in a fast-changing world.
Tuesday 20th January 2026
[3 min read]
The Signals This Week
Product teams aren’t failing because they lack ideas. They’re failing because they struggle to say no. Across founders, product leaders and operators, the same tension shows up: features are easy to add, but focus is hard to protect. Real utility comes from discipline, not ambition.
The strongest products win by doing less, better and with intent. That matters to SME’s regardless of industry, stage and success.
1. Signal - Medium: Linear’s Focus-First Product Strategy
Source: Aakash Gupta | https://aakashgupta.medium.com/linear-hit-1-25b-with-100-employees-heres-how-they-did-it-54e168a5145f
The Gist: Gupta breaks down how Linear reached a $1.25bn valuation with a lean team by aggressively prioritising simplicity. Instead of chasing feature parity, Linear removed friction, resisted bloat and doubled down on a small set of workflows that genuinely improved how teams worked.
The [Pulse] Interpretation: Utility scales when products solve a narrow problem exceptionally well. SMEs should treat every new feature as a liability unless it clearly strengthens the core job the product exists to do.
2. Signal - Linkedin: Incremental Development Is Quietly Killing Products
Source: Dan F. | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dafnz_in-an-environment-where-features-are-cheap-activity-7413941268025651201-nFOc/
The Gist: Dan F. argues that incremental development often leads to bloated products. Features get added because they’re easy to justify individually, even when they dilute clarity and overwhelm users. Over time, the product becomes harder to explain, harder to maintain and harder to love.
The [Pulse] Interpretation: Most product failure isn’t dramatic. It’s slow erosion. SMEs need governance over product decisions, not just delivery velocity, or utility gets traded for activity.
3. Signal - X: The 10x, 1x, 0x Product Discipline
Source: Jason Cohen | https://x.com/asmartbear/status/2002451440397127741
The Gist: Cohen suggests forcing product choices into three buckets: 10x areas to dominate relentlessly, 1x areas to keep functional and 0x areas to ignore entirely. His point is blunt. Small teams cannot afford to be excellent at everything.
The [Pulse] Interpretation: Utility is a consequence of trade-offs. SMEs that don’t explicitly decide what they will not compete on end up spreading effort thin and delivering average outcomes everywhere.
4. Signal - Reddit: Making Product Decisions With Incomplete Data
Source: r/ProductManagement | https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/1ib27zf/how_do_you_approach_product_decisions_with/
The Gist: Product managers discuss how they make strategic decisions when data is limited, noisy, or slow to validate. Many rely on user conversations, patterns of pain and principled judgment rather than waiting for perfect evidence.
The [Pulse] Interpretation: Waiting for certainty is itself a decision. SMEs that anchor decisions to clear product principles make better calls under ambiguity than those hiding behind dashboards.
Florido Recommends - This Week’s Strategic Action:
Run a Product Utility Review:
Write down the single job your product must do better than any alternative
List your current features and mark which ones directly strengthen that job
Identify one feature you would remove without weakening the core promise
If removing something makes the product clearer, it probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Stay tuned. Keep your finger on The Pulse.
Don't just react to the market. Anticipate it.