Clarity is a Feature. Ship It.
No one works with ambiguity (Not even you)
My last article was about fundraising without purpose and how that can basically ruin your life. But there's this deeper thing that's been bugging me, something that destroys product teams way more often than bad funding rounds.
We're all completely obsessed with speed.
Build fast! Ship faster! Stay ahead of the competition!
There are entire religions built around this. Methodologies, tools, and motivational Instagram posts. We act as if you just run fast enough, somehow everything will work out.
Plot twist: I used to believe this, too. Has that changed? Well... let me tell you what I've learned the hard way.
Most of what slows down product teams isn't some gnarly technical problem. It's that nobody knows what the hell they're actually building.
Requirements that change faster than a toddler's mood
Problem statements are so vague that they could mean literally anything
Priorities that contradict each other every single day
Missing context that leaves everyone just... guessing
You can't sprint if you're lost. Trust me, I've tried.
Here are a couple of things I know about clarity today:
Clarity is a Superpower
Here's the thing: clear goals don't just make decisions easier, they make the right decisions obvious. When your team actually understands why something matters (not just what to build), they start giving a damn. Real autonomy happens. And accountability stops feeling like your manager breathing down your neck.
Check out these two ways to ask for the same thing:
The vague way: "We need to improve conversion."
The way that actually works: "Our onboarding is bleeding 60% of users at step 3. Let's run three experiments next sprint to get that under 40%."
Same goal. But one of these gets your team excited to solve a real problem, and the other gets you a series of threads with 52 messages asking, "What do you mean by improve?"
Clarity Saves You From Expensive Disasters
Most of those painful rewrites, pivot-every-two-weeks situations, and missed deadlines? They're not from technical failures. They're from building the wrong thing because nobody was clear about what the right thing was supposed to be.
We love talking about being "agile," but constantly changing direction isn't agile - it's just expensive chaos. The fix isn't more meetings. It's getting clear about what you're doing before you do it.
Real talk: I once spent months being absolutely furious with my growth team. Nothing they shipped moved the needle. I was ready to fire everyone and hire some "real growth experts" who would show them how it's done.
The problem wasn't them. It was me being a terrible communicator.
I hadn't given them any clarity about what we were actually trying to achieve. Once I figured out what I wanted (and could explain it like a normal human), they started crushing it.
Here's the uncomfortable truth that took me way too long to learn: Great marketing can't fix a confused product. Amazing engineers can't fix unclear requirements. Perfect execution can't fix a strategy that makes no sense.
Clarity Doesn't Just Happen (Unfortunately)
The paradox of clarity is that it's not free. It takes effort to ask better questions, write precise specs, and challenge your own assumptions. But the payoff is immediate and compounds.
Story time: My co-founders and I once had this amazing idea. We were so high on our own genius that we kept dodging the world's most boring question: "But like... how do we actually make money?"
We'd go on to say something like: "If you build it, they will come!"
Spoiler alert: They didn't come. Our business died faster than a phone battery at 1%.
These days, I'd literally rather take a nap than move without clarity. And look, I'm not asking for a PhD thesis on the future, but if someone asks "How's this gonna work?" and your answer is "Uh... we’ll figure that out…" then congratulations, you're about to learn some expensive lessons.
Your landlord doesn't accept vision boards as payment. Your credit card company is not moved by your passion. The real world runs on boring stuff like... actual plans.
There's this old design thing that's basically true everywhere: simple is brutally hard, complex is embarrassingly easy. Any developer can add seventeen new features by lunch. It takes actual skill to look at your product and go: "You know what? Half of this is garbage" and delete it.
Kill ambiguity before it kills your velocity. And your bank account. And your sanity.
Treat Clarity Like Code
Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: Clarity isn't just nice communication. It's a feature of your development and growth process. Build it in. Maintain it like you do your test suite. When clarity breaks, everything else breaks with it.
When you're not sure what to do next? Ship something small. Measure what happens. Learn from the real data instead of your assumptions. Then fix both your code and your thinking.
That's how you build stuff that actually moves forward instead of just... moving.
Clarity isn't about having all the answers. It's about asking the right questions before you waste six months building the wrong thing. (Don’t worry, I have done it on your behalf, so you don’t have to.)