Eric Culus

I help product leaders move from delivery theater to clear decisions and coherent execution.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@aakashgupta The middle dies when there's no structural moat. If your product can be replicated in a weekend, you never had defensibility. You had a feature. The companies that survive will be the ones where intent, structure, and execution compound into something AI alone can't replace.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@jackiebo Strategy is the filter that separates motion from progress. Without clear intent, teams default to busyness because it feels productive. The hardest part of product work isn't doing more. It's deciding what not to do and holding that line.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@bchesky @Airbnb Numbers follow structure. Structure follows intent. Most teams chase metrics without asking what system produced them. The fact that you lead with "how we got here" instead of the number itself tells you everything about why it worked.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@joulee Perfection optimizes for the artifact. Excellence optimizes for the outcome. Teams stuck in perfection loops usually lack clear intent. When you know what matters, you stop polishing and start shipping what actually moves the needle.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@andrewchen The highest-value layer isn't doing the work. It's knowing what work matters. That's intent. Most teams drown in execution without it. AI that helps humans clarify direction will beat AI that just ships faster every time.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@ttunguz Products simple enough to replace never built structural differentiation. NDR erosion is the cost of competing on features instead of intent. When your product doesn't shape how teams work, switching costs collapse.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@jasonfried ike using."Make warm decisions" is rare. Most teams optimize for clean over human. But the best product calls hold both: clear intent and real texture. That separates products people tolerate from ones they actually like using.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@lennysan @Meta @Google @czi @stripe @AnthropicAI @OpenAI @molly_g The structure layer is where most dysfunction actually lives. Unclear intent, incoherent priorities, missing decision rights. Fix those and the same people look like a different team. Always check the system before blaming the individuals inside it.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@shreyas The Super IC works because they hold intent, structure, and execution in one head. No handoff gaps. No translation loss between strategy and shipping. As teams shrink, the cost of misalignment between people goes up. The ones who own outcomes end-to-end skip that cost entirely.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@rauchg @vercel @v0 When designers can build, the gap between intent and execution shrinks. The real bottleneck was never skill boundaries. It was translation loss. Every handoff is a place where what the user needs gets diluted. Fewer handoffs, more coherence.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@hnshah This is what happens when intent and execution drift apart. The first feature worked because someone knew what it should do and for whom. Everything after? The team kept shipping but lost the thread. Speed without coherence compounds the gap.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@nurijanian The shift isn't dropping standups or Jira. It's understanding your actual job: making sure intent, structure, and execution hold together. PMs get buried in process because nobody clarified what the work should achieve. Fix that, the rest simplifies.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@gregisenberg AI made building fast. It didn't make thinking clear. When anyone can ship in 24 hours, the moat isn't speed. It's intent. Knowing what to build and why before touching a single tool. Most teams skip that step. Then wonder why nothing compounds.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@jjen_abel When sales leads the roadmap, every feature answers a deal, not a direction. The product becomes a pile of reactions with no coherent intent. Vision isn't ignoring the market. It's the filter that tells you which signals matter.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@rywalker The bottleneck was never code quality. It was intent quality. Ship slop on a clear hypothesis? You learn. Ship polished code on a fuzzy brief? You build something nobody needed. Speed isn't the variable. Knowing what the work is supposed to answer is.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@SherryYanJiang Testing in prod works when you know what "working" looks like. The real risk isn't shipping fast. It's shipping without knowing what question you're answering. Clear intent turns a retention drop into a signal. Fuzzy intent turns it into panic.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@karrisaarinen The real filter is intent. Before building anything: what should the user be able to do after this ships that they can't do today? If nobody can answer in plain language, the feature isn't ready to build. Saying no isn't the hard part. Knowing what to say yes to is.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@housecor This happens when intent gets lost between strategy and execution. Someone decided "redesign notifications." Nobody asked: what should the user experience after this ships? When the brief is vague, teams optimize what's measurable, not what matters.

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

@shreyas These aren't sequential failures. They're interconnected. A team can define the product "right" and still miss, because intent, structure, and execution drifted apart silently. The real question isn't "which step failed?" but "did the work hold together across all three?"

[Eric Culus @EricCulus]

With AI-assisted dev, a vague brief doesn't waste 3 weeks anymore. It wastes 3 days, shipping the same wrong thing, just faster. The window between "intent was fuzzy" and "we already shipped it" is collapsing. The faster your team builds, the more expensive vague intent becomes.