Discovery
Testing whether an idea is worth building before investing too much in building it.
The Mindful Product Company
By Sam McAfee
How Your Methods Reveal What Your Company Actually Values
For anyone whose work touches a product company’s success: startup CEOs, senior leaders, investors, board members, engineers, product managers, designers, and sales and marketing people.
Publishing Tuesday, November 10, 2026.
The premise
Arguing over Scrum versus Kanban, whether SAFe is viable or the root of all evil, big-vision-first versus emergent product, can feel small. But those debates aren’t as unrelated to the larger picture as they seem. The methods a team chooses to build products together are downstream of its values and principles, and the methods amplify those values outward: to the rest of the team, to the organization, to everyone who touches what gets built.
The Mindful Product Company walks through seven dimensions of a healthy product company, in the order problems tend to surface, and shows what each one’s methods reveal about what a company values.
The seven dimensions
Delivery
How a team ships what it discovered.
Organization
The vision, strategy, and structure that either support a team or get in its way.
Management
The daily practice of leading the people doing the work.
Culture
The challenges that tend to surface once a company is humming along, though a smarter leader gets to them earlier.
Leadership
What it takes to lead well once culture is in play, not just manage.
Mindfulness
The thread underneath all six: awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, and the people around you, running under everything that came before.
62 free companion worksheets are already live, one page each, built from the material in this book. No book purchase required.
Browse the worksheetsAbout the author
Sam McAfee
Sam McAfee is the founder of Startup Patterns, where he works with product and engineering leaders to help their teams build better products. He started his technology career in 1999, has been a freelance engineer, run a software development agency, served as CTO or VP of Engineering for half a dozen startups, and advised or coached roughly a hundred more through accelerators, incubators, and innovation labs. The Mindful Product Company is his second book, following Startup Patterns.
Publishing November 10, 2026
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