Culture, media and product thinking

What product thinking actually means

Product thinking is not a set of templates. It is not a sprint board, a user story format, or a design sprint. It is a discipline of asking, consistently and with rigour, who this is for, what problem it solves, how it will reach the people who need it, and how you will know if it is working.

When that discipline is applied well inside a technology company, it tends to produce software that people actually use. The question we started sitting with in 2016 was simpler and stranger than it might appear: what happens when you apply the same discipline to culture?

A record label is a product organisation. It identifies an audience, commissions creative work, packages it for distribution, and monitors whether it connects. A media company does the same thing with stories and formats. A film production company does it with narrative. The language of product, properly understood, is not alien to any of these. What has historically been alien is the rigour, the feedback loops, and the willingness to treat distribution as a first-class creative decision rather than an afterthought.

Product thinking, in the context of culture and media, means bringing those elements into the centre of creative strategy without letting them crush the thing that makes creative work worth doing in the first place. That tension is the subject of this piece.

How distribution rewrote creative strategy

In 2016, the shift was already several years old, but its implications were still settling. Digital distribution had removed the gatekeeping function that physical distribution once provided. A record did not need a pressing plant or a lorry to reach an audience. A film did not need a cinema chain. A publication did not need a printer or a newsstand.

This sounds straightforwardly liberating, and in some ways it is. But the removal of those physical constraints did not remove the need for distribution strategy. It complicated it. Instead of a small number of powerful gatekeepers, there were now thousands of platforms, each with their own algorithms, audiences, and content dynamics. Getting something made is easier than it has ever been. Getting it seen is arguably harder, because the competition for attention is global and the mechanisms for surfacing work are opaque and constantly shifting.

The creative teams that adapted well to this environment did something specific: they stopped treating distribution as something that happened after the creative work was finished, and started treating it as a constraint that shaped creative decisions from the beginning. Format, length, pacing, title, thumbnail, release cadence, platform selection: these became creative inputs, not marketing afterthoughts.

This is product thinking. It is not a betrayal of creativity. It is an acknowledgement that a piece of creative work that no one encounters has failed at one of its most basic functions.

All Purpose: culture as a platform

The framing that emerged for us around All Purpose is that culture is a platform in the same way that an operating system is a platform. It sets conditions. It shapes what is possible. It creates affordances for certain kinds of behaviour and makes other kinds of behaviour harder.

A music platform is not just a catalogue of songs. It is an environment that shapes how people relate to music: what they discover, how they listen, what they share, what identity they construct around their taste. A creative community is not just a group of people who make things. It is a set of norms, incentives, and shared references that shapes what gets made and how it circulates.

All Purpose Music, Relay, Horizon, and Made It Out each address a different node in this platform. Music, communication, perspective, and the documentation of creative lives: these are not four unrelated products. They are four surfaces of a single cultural environment, built around the idea that people who are trying to create, connect, and become more capable deserve tools and media that take them seriously.

The platform framing matters because it changes how you think about success. A single piece of content that performs well is a data point. A platform that consistently helps people discover what they need, build what they want to build, and connect with people who share their orientation: that is a durable thing. Product thinking helps you build toward the second kind of success rather than optimising for the first.

What changes when a creative team starts thinking like a product team

The most immediate change is uncomfortable: you start asking questions that feel, at first, like they undermine the creative act. Who is this for? How will they find it? What do we expect them to do with it? Why would someone share it? What would make them come back?

These questions can feel reductive, as if you are trying to engineer an emotional response rather than express something genuine. But that discomfort tends to ease once teams distinguish between questions that sharpen the work and questions that flatten it.

Asking "who is this for?" does not mean designing by committee. It means having a clear mental model of the person whose life this work is intended to enter. A musician who can picture a specific listener, in a specific moment, in a specific emotional state, makes different decisions than a musician who is making music in the abstract. Those decisions are often better, more considered, more purposeful.

Asking "how will they find it?" does not mean optimising for an algorithm at the expense of integrity. It means being honest about the conditions of distribution and designing the work with those conditions in mind. A short film that is structurally built for a three-hour theatrical viewing experience will fail on every platform that is not a cinema. That is not a creative failing. It is an absence of product thinking.

What also changes, more gradually, is the relationship to feedback. Product teams build systems for understanding what is working and why. Creative teams have traditionally relied on critical reception, word of mouth, and commercial performance measured in aggregate after the fact. The middle ground, the ability to gather specific, meaningful signal from audiences while work is in progress, is an area where product discipline genuinely improves creative outcomes. Not because the audience should dictate the work, but because real signal is almost always more interesting and more useful than assumption.

Where product thinking helps and where it harms

This distinction matters enough to name directly, because the risks of getting it wrong are real.

Product thinking helps when it sharpens intent. When it forces a creative team to articulate who they are serving and why, when it builds feedback mechanisms that surface genuine signal rather than noise, and when it treats distribution as a creative input, it makes creative work more purposeful and more likely to reach the people it is for.

Product thinking harms when it becomes the primary evaluative framework. When creative decisions are made principally on the basis of what will perform well by measurable metrics, the work tends to converge on what already works. It optimises for the known at the expense of the new. The most important creative breakthroughs, almost by definition, cannot be predicted by past performance data, because they create categories that do not yet exist.

There is also a subtler risk. Product thinking, applied without care, tends to instrumentalise the human experience that creative work is trying to address. A piece of music or a story or a film is not a product in the same way that a project management tool is a product. It has a different relationship to truth, to vulnerability, to failure. When product metrics become the language through which a creative organisation evaluates its own work, something important gets lost, even if the numbers are going up.

The working principle we arrived at is this: use product thinking to get the work to the people it is for. Use creative judgement to decide what the work should be. The two disciplines are not in competition. They operate at different levels of the same endeavour. Confusing them in either direction, treating creative decisions as product decisions or product decisions as creative ones, tends to produce work that is both less interesting and less effective.

The longer view

In September 2016, the question of how creative organisations should think about product and distribution was live and contested. It still is. The platforms have changed, the tools have multiplied, and the pace of change has accelerated, but the underlying tension has not resolved.

What we believe, and what All Purpose is built around, is that the answer is not to choose one discipline over the other. It is to build organisations that hold both with competence and honesty: that know when they are making a creative decision and when they are making a product decision, and that apply the appropriate rigour to each.

Culture is not a side project. It shapes how people see themselves, what they aspire to, and what they believe is possible. That is exactly the kind of problem worth bringing serious product thinking to. And it is exactly the kind of problem that serious product thinking, used alone, will fail to solve.

The creative question remains what it has always been: does this help someone become more capable, more honest, or more alive? Product thinking is in service of that question. It is not a replacement for it.