THE LEAFLET

August 21 2025

are you rounding up or down?, product thinking vs policy thinking, when trusting your gut isn’t working

ARE YOU ROUNDING UP OR DOWN?

When you’re building a new product, you may be looking for a niche the market hasn’t served yet. Often this means your new thing is a variation on an existing thing. 

I’ve found it useful to look at existing products and ask if I’m rounding up or rounding down from one of those. When you round up, you add features or you increase the quality of existing features. When you round down, you remove features, or decrease the quality / intensity of existing features. This rounding decision can guide your design choices.

You may discover as you listen to your customers/community that you thought you were rounding up one version of the thing, but your audience is drawn to a rounded down version of something else. 

At COVIDCheck, we originally thought we were rounding up on a bundle of public health tools - offering school districts the insight and power of a public health agency in a slick, all-in-one tech platform. Over and over again, we found that the schools and businesses who wanted our service wanted a rounded down version of urgent care. They wanted reliable COVID testing their people could access via drive-thru, with results returned the next day. They didn’t want to manage contact tracing systems and symptom attestations and sophisticated data dashboards. 

Once we realized this, we were able to focus on delivering that rounded down thing cheaper, faster, and better. That wasn’t easy or self-evident but it meant our effort (which we were going to pour in either way) was more useful to our customers and had a greater impact on our mission.

-eric 

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PRODUCT THINKING VS POLICY THINKING

Leaders of organizations often need to design products and policies, especially if they are building their organizations from scratch. I often find that “product” and “policy” are ill-defined terms and that leaders make mistakes trying to design both these things the same way.

• A product serves the needs of a particular kind of user in a particular kind of situation. It's useful and demanded to the extent that it meets those needs. Customization may be its great virtue. Often the best products thrill and delight their users. 

• A policy often serves multiple kinds of audiences in multiple situations. It may even need to account for ~everyone. It’s useful to the extent that it reckons with hard tradeoffs, externalities, and changes in incentives. Often the best policies leave everyone a little disgruntled or at least challenged.

If you bring policy thinking to your product design, you may end up making something that’s not very useful or demanded (despite its elaborate array of features). If you apply product thinking to your policy design, you may run roughshod over important groups or impose unfair debts on the system you’re designing for. 

A product move that’s worth trying in both cases is prototyping. See if you can limit your risk by testing a small, cheap version for an early audience.

-eric

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WHEN TRUSTING YOUR GUT ISN’T WORKING

A wise therapist once told me that when she works with couples, she tells them, “You’re either staying together, breaking up, or discerning. I make the most money from couples that are discerning.”

If you’re in a job now and you’re uncertain about whether or not you’re going to stick around, it can be really helpful to you and to the organization for you to get out of discernment mode. Ambivalence, “feeling stuck”, trying to figure out what your gut says so that you can then trust your gut – all of these can trap you in an unhappy holding pattern. One path out of such a pattern is data collection. Instead of trying to intuit an answer to a fraught question, commit to gathering more information within a finite window of time. 

That information could take many forms. You could rate how you feel at the beginning and end of each work day on a scale from 1 (“depressed”) to 10 (“elated”). You could track how many meaningful (to you) accomplishments you rack up in a given week or month. 

While you’re doing this tracking, hold aside the question of whether you’re staying or going. Don’t ruminate on that, if you can help it. Instead, invest yourself as fully as you can in the work and relationships at hand. 

The idea here is to give you something to look at outside of yourself that is at least a little more proofed against your emotional weather than your inner monologue. Instead of waiting for an epiphany, you’re running an experiment. 

The way you show up while running the experiment is likely healthier for you and better for the team around you than the alternative.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

AI observer Zvi Mowshowitz on emotions:

The correct stance towards experiencing an emotion is to ask what information it actually provides you. A strong emotion is trying to tell you something is important, but you have to figure out what is the proper something.

Hobby store Wild Birds Unlimited on noticing:

You may not notice them during the day, but at night, a massive aerial river of birds is passing over us.

Couples therapist Terry Real on overreacting:

I believe there’s no such thing as overreacting; it’s just that what someone is reacting to may no longer be what’s in front of them.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric