What Are Your Nouns?

Questions I ask product teams when I first meet them:

• “What are the nouns in your system?”
• “What are the verbs and what nouns do they map to?”
• “Who are the actors and what nouns/verbs do they need access to?”
• “What are your failure points? Meaning: When there is a failure, who sees it and how do they recover? Were these points part of the design or were they emergent?”

There are numerous more, but the answers to those four questions reveal volumes about a team and their product.

Note: these questions are not just for engineers. Both PM and Design should know these answers by heart as well.

I find these boring basics far more predictive of success than which AI tool a team is using this week and whether they can spout pros/cons of agentic vs prompting usage.

There is a time for those things, but if a team has not landed their basics, they will fail regardless of how cool their tools are.

Steve Jobs on simplicity