That might seem obvious. But it's definitely not easy.
Signal acquired
SourceMike Costanzo
Strength15+ yrs
InsightThe opportunity sits in plain sight, consistently ignored, because the cost structure made it uninvestable.The race is won before the product ships.Defensibility isn't built. It accumulates.In a non-consumption market, customers don't try you and leave. They never arrive.Positioning isn't a marketing function. It's the mechanism by which latent demand becomes active demand.The channel and the message are one motion.


I started in bands. Making posters, hustling for shows, selling tickets, building hype. Songs, and later albums, were the first products I ever shipped. It's where I learned to build, collaborate and sell… I never knew it would be useful in business.
Then Rangle.io, a JavaScript consultancy scaling fast. I was a designer who could code before that was a thing, and I got obsessed with the craft. The rules hadn't been written yet, so we wrote them on client work, one shipped product at a time.


Twice I've inherited a product built without talking to the people it was for. The fix was often research and repositioning more than it was redesign. Some succeeded and others failed, and the pattern was simple: lose contact with your customer and you lose your way.
Since 2023 the work has been AI. An experimental shopping experience for Nike, then a dozen GenAI products for Fortune 500 companies in banking, insurance and accounting. It felt like the early mobile days at Rangle again: the rules hadn't been written, the tools changed monthly, and the only way to learn was to experiment and play.
I've never stopped doing the work. When GenAI hit it felt like the iPhone moment all over again. I knew I had to go back to the keyboard and truly understand how it worked. I still run discovery, prototype in Claude Code and Cursor, and built this site. The signal gets weak with distance.
I'm always searching for the signal in the noise

essay · ↗
Recent advances in generative and agentic AI make one specific thing possible that wasn't before: effectively serving customers whose demand was always real but whose economics never worked at venture scale.

video · ↗
A conference workshop and webinar, presented with @arsenysmoogly, on lessons learned from years of building and maintaining design systems.

article · ↗
Learning, experimenting, and iterating solutions based on understanding and mapping customer pain, not shipping outputs for their own sake.

article · ↗
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them" is an often-quoted piece of Steve Jobs wisdom that has given license to some bad thinking. What it actually meant.
Highlights
Smaller projects, experiments, and details from over the years. Select an image or video to explore the project.
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