It’s the perpetual question.

In Vibe Driven Development, Robin Rendle suggests the following:

Building a great product is a matter of two questions: How should we measure progress? And what should we build next?

The way progress is measured is, in my opinion, often not done for the benefit of the product, but for the benefit of the people who build the product. At that point, it is about profit. I wrote about this in Week­notes 2024 W01: Product tiers too:

Then there is the third and bottom tier, which contains the products that exist purely for making a profit. For these products, the focus is not on the product itself, but on sales.

Robin agrees:

[…] you can make billions of dollars building something for customers and go live on a beach in the south of France. But you’ll have built junk in the process […]

And the most important bit, which I fully agree with;

It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.

That is what I have been doing with Nanoc. There is nobody to tell me what direction to take it in. Nanoc is still built for myself as the primary customer.