Yin-Yang of product care
Inside doubts keep it alive. Outside belief makes it matter
I’ve seen many teams proudly declare they “care for the product.” Usually, it means one of two things:
- Endless maintenance work inside the product to clean it or
- They're sprinting out feature after feature, experimenting to find something that works.
Both sound noble, but both have loopholes. Real care is yin and yang: pulling doubts in and pushing belief out.
Yin: the inside care
Inside care is invisible to the user and that’s the point. It’s the testing, the error monitoring, the “wait, what if this breaks?” conversations.
Inside care is definitely boring:
- slow downs validation
- holding the quality of line when teams are forced to "just ship it" (I hold more when I hear this from my team, jk :P)
Testing the ugly edges. Killing bugs before users meet them. Watching error logs is like it’s a crime scene. Slowing down even when the roadmap screams “move.” Do it right, and nobody thanks you. Do it wrong, and now everyone remembers you.
Oops, you should have done that boring testing (later regrets).
Yang: the outside care
This is really loud. The promotion, newsletter, storytelling that makes your user want to use it. It's about standing behind the work done and saying "it matters".
This looks bold:
- shipping at pace,
- owning the product narrative,
- putting features in real hands before they are in backlog
Done right, the product feels alive. Done wrong, it feels like noise. Just a shiny shell with no depth.
Here's the problem
Most teams pick one:
- All yin? You’re babysitting a product that’s safe, neat, and invisible.
- All yang? You’re gambling with user trust, sprinting on a foundation that’s already cracking.
Real care isn’t choosing between them. It’s about the rhythm. Testing and storytelling. Monitoring and launching. Doubt sharp enough to find cracks (which means you need good systems or good people). Belief is strong enough to ship anyway.
Why It Matters
Users don’t care about your excuses, roadmaps, or velocity charts. They care about whether the product works and whether they can trust it.
If your product feels fragile, you cared too much about it outside. If it feels invisible, you cared too much inside. Either way, the imbalance shows.
The yin-yang of care is what keeps a product alive. Break the balance, and you don’t have to care - stop calling it progress. The goal only drifts further when the balance is lost.
