The Rock Tumbler
#5 | What strategy consulting didn’t teach me about product
After my first year at Amazon, I was nearly fired. I wrote clear strategy documents, drove alignment, and followed up with global teams. Everything a consultant is trained to do. The feedback was blunt: “We don’t need another follow-up on the plan. Build something. Ship it. Find concrete ways to help us grow the business in our market.”
The hardest part wasn’t learning Amazon’s processes: the PR/FAQ, single-threaded leadership, working backwards from the customer. The hardest part was coming to terms with the gap between my stated servant-leadership philosophy and my actual behavior.
The second hardest part was unlearning the instinct that the plan is the product.
There’s a clip from a 1996 Steve Jobs interview that I recommend to anyone building product. The whole clip is worth the time, but here’s an essential bit from Steve:
One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it, too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And that if you just tell all these other people, “Here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.
And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.
Steve goes on to tell a childhood story about a neighbor who introduced him to a rock tumbler, a coffee can with a motor that polishes ugly stones into something beautiful through friction and grit. He uses it as a metaphor for great teams: talented people bumping against each other, arguing, making noise, and producing something none of them could have produced alone.
1. Impact > Features
A delivery team gets a spec: “build this feature, ship it by Q3.” Then they move on to the next feature. An empowered product team gets a problem: “reduce churn among small business customers” — and owns figuring out what to build, not just how. They own the outcome, not just the output. It’s what separates companies like Amazon and Netflix from the pack.
One of my main missions at AT&T was to help people appreciate this difference. When I arrived, every product idea was debated and prioritized and then handed to a “factory” (yes, that was the language) to build it, which often meant a vendor.
For new sw-based products, we replaced the legacy approach with empowered teams: small dedicated teams given clear mandates and the right talent to solve a customer problem, incremental success-based funding, and then regular executive reviews designed like startup board meetings. The result: concept-to-MVP timelines dropped drastically, innovation velocity increased, and we got to be right more often. Not because the people changed. Because the tumbler changed.
2. Obsess small.
If you start with a technology, the first job is figuring out whose pressing problem it solves. Ideally, the team comes back with a story about a specific person with a specific problem. You then know they’re on to something and can figure out how many people share it.
Ironically, AI has made this discipline harder, not easier. The cost of building has collapsed, which makes it more tempting than ever to build first and ask questions later. It’s easier than ever to believe you can just ship and iterate your way to product-market fit. Too often, we trade thinking for building.
At AT&T, we had a big vision for the Digital Receptionist from the outset: a ‘web of AIs’: personal AIs interacting with brand AIs to book flights, make reservations, coordinate on your behalf. That’s exciting. It also didn’t tell the team what to build on Monday morning. They had to find the specific pain point felt by real users. They did: people hate answering spam calls but are afraid of missing important ones. The UXR, Design, and Product team then iterated relentlessly on that user problem and its nuances. What they built was an AI voice agent that answers calls and takes action based on your preferences. The constraints (solve an existing problem, easy setup, leverage the network advantage) are what made it usable and compelling.
In big companies, distance from the user is a drag on craft; it increases the chances we build the wrong thing. It’s why Tobi Lütke still runs a Shopify store and codes alongside his engineers at a $130 billion company. No one wants the distance; it just accumulates meeting by meeting. Employees gather around a table or Zoom screen and look at their colleagues, not customers. Focus drifts inward.
3. What gives you the right?
Compelling product vision moves people in ways that strategy alone cannot. It carries a startup through the months when nothing works. It aligns a large company to invest in a future that doesn’t have a business case yet. Marty Cagan clarifies that a mission is a slogan about purpose; a true product vision gives teams a concrete picture of the future they’re building toward.
But you have to earn the right to set one. At AT&T, I learned we could not start with vision, especially when new to the company. We had to earn trust by shipping. That started with demos, not slides, and then prototypes with feedback from real users. That trust earned funding. As products gained traction, we gained the credibility to step back and answer a bigger question.
What role will our products play in the lives of our customers 3-4 years from now? The best product visions answer this concretely. Ours was to be the greatest simplifier of connected life. Every product could be tested against that vision and the stories supporting it: does this simplify the connected life of our customers? They’ll be wrong by some degree. That’s fine. The point is alignment, not prediction.
Back to the tumbler
Since leaving AT&T and building on my own again with Claude and Cursor, I’ve been humbled by the rock tumbler. It doesn’t care how senior you are, what you shipped in the past, or what businesses you’ve scaled. It just asks: are you willing to put in the ugly rocks, add the grit, and stay close enough to hear the rattling?
Empowered teams. A specific customer with a specific problem. A vision you earned the right to set. The 5,000 things are the grit. And the craft, the daily tradeoffs, the judgment calls, the willingness to subtract, is what turns common stones into something worth using.
Dan Grimm writes AI for Human Flourishing, a weekly Substack on building AI that serves people. He previously led new product development at AT&T, built new products inside well-established businesses, co-founded startups, and expanded Amazon Kindle globally.