In digital assets, product decisions are mostly constraint management — not feature prioritization.
The job is to decide which constraints are non-negotiable (policy, approvals, reversibility, incident posture), then design the product to be operable inside them.
Principles I use to make trade-offs explicit in money-moving systems.
What you build first matters more than what you build. In asset systems, wrong sequencing creates expensive operational debt.
Partnerships create leverage early. Unmanaged dependencies become risk once critical flows scale.
Regulatory pressure is a design input across approvals, control boundaries, and launch sequencing.
When money moves, MVP still requires clear controls, reversibility logic, and incident readiness.
Partnering is leverage early — until the dependency becomes a risk surface in critical flows.
Partner when
Speed and uncertainty dominate, and integration boundaries are well-defined.
Debt starts when
External control limits critical operational decisions in core money-moving paths.
Treat operations, monitoring, and recovery as first-class product surfaces.
Product doesn’t end at launch.
Operating the system is part of the product.
Ownership does not stop at requirements.
Operator’s rule
If you can’t describe the rollback / containment plan, it’s not “done” — it’s just “shipped”.