Welcome to Product Scratch.
I've spent most of my career building products the way most product people do — roadmaps, sprints, PRDs, stakeholder reviews. The craft felt well-understood. Then I became CPO at Dstillery and took on something I had no real playbook for: building an agentic AI product from scratch, for an industry that is itself still figuring out what AI even means.
The experience has been humbling in the best way. Building with an AI-native mindset is genuinely different from anything I had done before. The feedback loops are faster, the failure modes are stranger, and the product intuitions I had built over years turned out to be only partially applicable. I found myself learning in real time — about the technology, about how to build a team around it, about how to communicate its value to people who are skeptical or confused or both.
I started writing these notes for the same reason most people start writing things down: I didn't want to forget what I was learning. But the more I wrote, the more I realized two things. First, writing is a discipline I want to get better at. I've always been a clearer thinker than a writer, and I think the gap between what I understand and what I can communicate is worth closing. Second, I kept running into other product leaders — smart, experienced people — who were in similar situations. Building something new on top of technology they didn't fully understand yet. Managing teams who were just as uncertain. Trying to make product decisions without a clear prior to draw on.
This is for them. And for me.
These are scratch notes — rough, honest, still being figured out. Some are about building the product. Some are about building the org. All of them are written by someone who is genuinely in the middle of it.
Taejin