Building got cheap. Thinking didn’t.
A compilation of principles, methodologies and processes to do product for startups in the AI era. Now that anyone can build, the hard part is deciding what to build. Based on a decade of work with founders and teams. Written and designed by Andrés Campo.
What is Product Thinking?
Product thinking is the discipline of deciding what to build under uncertainty. It begins with a problem someone actually has, not a solution someone wants to build. It earns insight from what people do rather than what they say, turns ideas into evidence at the lowest fidelity that can fail, and closes: it chooses a direction, states what has to be true for the business, and leaves things out. Then it keeps experimenting, because the first version is a hypothesis too.
At a startup it is not a role. It is a responsibility one person holds, whether a solo founder or someone on a team of five, across strategy, vision and execution at once. Since AI made building nearly free, everyone now starts at zero: anyone can build. The scarce work moved to what comes before, deciding what is worth building, and to getting the first version right. That is what product thinking is now, and it is the whole of the work.
Seven whitepapers, read in order or by the state you are in.
Each whitepaper is a section of one book. It stands alone, but the argument runs through all seven: understand, then test, then commit, then keep experimenting, with AI as leverage on every step.
About the author
Andrés Campo is a product builder and educator: founding partner of Pygma, a startup incubator whose startups raised from Y Combinator, 500 Global and Techstars, faculty at Rotterdam Business School for nearly seven years, and now CEO of a VC-backed health startup.
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