Writing about the part that happens before you build: how to define an idea properly, where the useful questions hide, and why the defining is the job. Written by the person who built HewnTree, mostly from getting it wrong first.
4 min read
Most ideas don’t die because they’re bad. They die in the specific distance between having one and knowing exactly what it is. I’ve failed to cross that gap twice — once as an artist, once as a product owner with my own ideas.
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Not a feature tour — how I actually use it when an idea won’t leave me alone. Start messy, get asked the questions you’ve been skidding on, and find out which parts you only thought were finished.
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The PO job isn’t writing things down, it’s asking the right questions first. Where the useful ones hide, why knowing that isn’t enough, and what it takes to ask them at nine in the evening.
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Structure and creativity get filed as opposites. Running writing projects through a requirements tool turned out to free the work rather than flatten it — a runway, not a cage.
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There’s a genre of post where someone vibe-codes a SaaS over a weekend. This is the unglamorous version: what the other two-thirds of the work actually was, and why the spec was the hard part.
Read articleHewnTree asks the targeted questions that turn it into a structured brief. The free plan includes 50,000 tokens — no credit card.
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