Free · Product Decision Record
You're building. You're not sure it's the right thing.
And you haven't checked, because the honest answer might cost you months of work. That's not laziness — it's arithmetic. This makes looking cheaper than not looking.
What you walk away with
A dated record of the decision, and the evidence under it.
Not advice about how to decide. The decision itself, written down — what you believed, the rule you set before you looked, what five real people told you, and the call you made. Good enough to defend to a cofounder, to an investor, or to yourself in three months when you've forgotten why.
You write down the bet. What has to be true for this to work — and which one of those, if it's false, kills the whole thing.
You set the rule first. Stop if, change direction if, keep building if. Written before any evidence arrives, then timestamped and locked. Nothing here can edit it afterwards, including you.
You go and ask five people. Five questions that are hard to answer politely, and the rules for asking them. This part takes days, not an afternoon.
You make the call. Your own rule, quoted back with its date, beside what you actually heard. Stop, change, or keep building — and one line on why.
Five conversations is not a market. This is a decision you can defend, not a decision that is right.Why the rule comes first
Written afterwards, a rule is just a way to agree with yourself.
Everyone who goes out and talks to customers comes back able to explain why what they heard supports what they were already building. That isn't dishonesty; it's how people work.
The only defence is deciding what would change your mind while you still don't know the answer. So the rule gets written and timestamped before the first conversation, and it comes back to you unedited.
Who this is for. An idea you haven't started building. Something you've been building for months. Something you launched that nobody much uses.
Who it isn't for. A product that is live with real, regular users and isn't growing — the Product Health Scorecard reads that across ten dimensions in about five minutes.
Nothing you write is shown to anyone. One email sends: your record link and the questions.Before another month goes in