Essay / Product & Entrepreneurship
Building in Public Is Useful Only If You Know What You’re Learning
Public updates can create conversations, but attention alone cannot validate a product. Define the learning goal, audience and evidence before sharing work.
A public update can receive a warm response and leave the underlying product question untouched. People like the screenshot. Other builders recognize the effort. The post travels further than expected. None of that necessarily tells you whether the intended customer has the problem or would change their behavior to solve it.
I still think sharing work can be useful. It creates opportunities for feedback, makes decisions explainable, and can help people discover a project. The mistake is treating all of those benefits as the same kind of evidence.
Before publishing an update, I want to know what I hope to learn and which response could actually teach it. Sometimes the honest purpose is simply to show progress. That is fine. It does not need to be disguised as product validation.
Visibility is not evidence.Three different reasons to share
One reason is documentation. A public note can explain why a project changed, preserve a technical decision, or make a release easier to understand. Its value does not depend on generating a large response. It may help one future reader solve a relevant problem.
Another reason is connection. Sharing unfinished thinking can attract people who care about similar questions. Those conversations may become useful relationships even when they do not provide immediate product evidence. This is a legitimate outcome, but it should not be counted as demand for a particular feature.
A third reason is learning about a specific uncertainty. Here the post needs a sharper design. Who should respond? What experience should they have? Which observation would support or challenge the assumption? Without those questions, the response will be difficult to interpret.
The categories can overlap. A technical article may document a decision and start a useful conversation. Keeping the purposes distinct still helps prevent an attractive engagement number from becoming an unsupported claim about the market.
The audience may be wrong for the question
Suppose someone is building a scheduling tool for small service businesses and shares its interface with other software developers. The feedback may be excellent on visual hierarchy, implementation, or interaction details. It may be weak evidence about how a receptionist handles a last-minute cancellation.
That does not make the audience unhelpful. It makes the limits of its feedback important. People can assess what they understand from their own experience, and a public platform may disproportionately show the post to people similar to the builder.
A useful feedback record therefore includes who responded and what makes their experience relevant. Avoid collecting unnecessary personal details; the point is to understand the context of the observation. A working role, a recent example, and the situation being discussed may be enough.
If the intended users are absent, public sharing can still help find them. A clear request for an introduction or a conversation may be more useful than asking a broad audience to vote on features it would never use.
Turn an update into a small experiment
Strategyzer’s Test Card separates an assumption, a test, a measurement, and a threshold for interpreting the result. That structure is useful because it asks for the decision rule before the feedback arrives. A public post can adopt the same discipline without turning every conversation into a rigid survey.
For the scheduling example, the assumption might be that operators lose track of cancellations because information arrives through several channels. A useful update could describe the problem in plain language and invite people to explain their most recent cancellation workflow.
The evidence sought would be concrete accounts of the work, not agreement with a leading statement. Before sharing, decide what would justify a deeper investigation and what would suggest reframing the problem. The threshold should reflect the small, exploratory nature of the exercise rather than pretending to establish a population-wide result.
Keep the experiment separate from the product announcement. If every question is wrapped in a sales pitch, respondents may react to the pitch instead of describing their actual behavior. Learning sometimes requires leaving the proposed solution out of the first conversation.
Record the quiet evidence
Public platforms make visible reactions easy to count. They are less effective at showing why somebody did not respond, why a trial stalled, or what happened after a private conversation. Those quieter events may matter more to the product decision.
A simple evidence log can connect the original assumption to the resulting conversations and actions. Record what was observed, what was inferred, and what remains unknown. Keeping those categories separate prevents a plausible interpretation from becoming a remembered fact.
For example, three people may ask for early access. One may complete the intended workflow. Another may stop during setup. A third may never begin. The useful next question is not whether three is an impressive number. It is what those different behaviors reveal about fit, onboarding, and timing.
Avoid explaining every disappointing result as insufficient reach. Sometimes distribution is the constraint; sometimes the offer is unclear; sometimes the problem is not compelling enough. Go-to-market discovery helps separate those possibilities by examining the path into actual use.
Do not let the update schedule become the roadmap
Public sharing creates an incentive to produce visible changes. A new screen is easier to show than a clarified recovery procedure. A feature announcement may attract more attention than removing a confusing option. That difference can quietly steer the work.
The risk is not dishonesty so much as selection. If progress is defined by what makes a good post, the project may accumulate demonstrable additions while neglecting reliability, documentation, or an unresolved customer problem.
I would keep the product decision log separate from the publishing calendar. An update can explain an invisible improvement, a negative result, or a decision to stop. It does not need a new feature every time. The learning goal should determine the work; the communication should make that work understandable.
This is especially useful when a hypothesis fails. A failed experiment can be a good outcome if it prevents a larger commitment. The public explanation should describe what the evidence supports without manufacturing a triumphant narrative around every change.
Transparency still needs boundaries
Building in public does not mean publishing every detail. Customer information, credentials, private agreements, and unfinished work involving other people require appropriate boundaries. A useful update can explain a technical decision without exposing the underlying sensitive material.
The same restraint applies to claims about collaborators. Describe the work accurately and obtain the relevant permission before sharing someone else’s material or identifying details. Public enthusiasm does not create authorization on their behalf.
There is also a boundary between uncertainty and unreliability. It is reasonable to say that a feature is experimental or that an approach is being evaluated. It is less reasonable to advertise a capability as ready while privately relying on manual work that the user does not understand.
A clear public record distinguishes shipped behavior, prototypes, and ideas. That distinction protects the reader’s ability to assess the project and makes later updates easier to interpret. It also removes pressure to defend a provisional idea as though it were a permanent commitment.
The most useful update may explain what you decided not to build and the evidence behind that decision.
Review what sharing is doing for the project
After several updates, look at the pattern. Are the conversations becoming more relevant? Are you learning about the intended users? Are technical explanations helping people understand the work? Or is maintaining visibility consuming time without improving the project or the relationships around it?
Different answers suggest different adjustments. A documentation habit may be worth keeping even with a small audience. A product-learning campaign may need a different channel. A publishing cadence may need to slow down so that the work has time to produce something meaningful to discuss.
The goal is not to strip public work of personality or curiosity. Those qualities make it worth reading. The goal is to preserve a clear distinction between attention, connection, and evidence. Once that distinction is explicit, building in public can support the project without becoming the system that decides what the project should be.