People keep asking me what a “Product Economist” is.
That’s fair. It’s not a job title you’ll find on LinkedIn.
And it’s definitely not something you grow into by shipping a lot of features.
So let me say it plainly.
A Product Economist is the person who shows up after the excitement fades and before the damage becomes undeniable.
The problem no one wants to name
Most product organizations don’t fail loudly.
They fail politely.
They keep shipping.
They keep hiring.
They keep celebrating momentum.
And slowly, almost invisibly, the math stops working.
Costs creep up.
Returns flatten out.
Decisions get harder to defend, so people stop defending them.
No one is lying.
No one is incompetent.
But reality is being smoothed.
What we trained leaders to optimize for
For the last decade, we trained product leaders to be great at motion.
Shipping.
Alignment.
Narratives.
Roadmaps that feel reassuring.
What we didn’t train them to do is sit in a room and answer questions like:
What is this actually costing us over time?
Which decisions are reversible and which quietly aren’t?
What are we pretending not to know because the answer is uncomfortable?
So organizations do the rational thing.
They optimize what’s rewarded.
Velocity replaces solvency.
Output replaces accountability.
Confidence replaces verification.
Nothing explodes.
It just quietly stops adding up.
What a Product Economist actually looks for
I’m not interested in whether something works.
I’m interested in whether it holds.
Can the decision survive scale?
Can it survive scrutiny?
Can it survive being wrong for six months without compounding into a mess no one wants to own?
A Product Economist exists to answer one question most teams avoid:
“If we keep doing this, what breaks first?”
Not in theory.
In dollars, people, and time.
Why the instruments exist
I didn’t start by trying to sell advice.
I kept running into the same failure pattern:
there was no shared way to surface truth without turning it into a political fight.
So I started building instruments instead of opinions.
Ways to make hidden product debt visible.
Ways to test whether someone can defend a decision under constraint.
Ways to see whether an AI feature is leverage or a slow financial leak.
That’s where the Product Debt Index, the AI Unit Economics Benchmark, and the Audit Interview came from.
They’re not content.
They’re not demos.
They’re diagnostic instruments built to force clarity when conversation alone keeps failing.
Why Exogram had to exist
Eventually, the same problem showed up again at a different layer.
Modern software systems, especially AI-driven ones, are very good at suggesting things.
They are very bad at knowing what’s allowed to become true.
They remember guesses as confidently as facts.
They overwrite context without accountability.
They move forward before anyone asks, “Wait, is that actually correct?”
That’s not a creativity problem.
It’s a responsibility problem.
Exogram exists to draw a hard line.
Thinking is allowed.
Proposing is allowed.
But knowing requires commitment, record, and traceability.
Exogram turns memory into a ledger instead of a blur.
It preserves what was believed, when, and why.
It lets systems say “unknown” instead of guessing.
That distinction matters once decisions stick around.
Why advisory still matters
Tools surface risk.
Infrastructure enforces rules.
But judgment still belongs to humans.
At some point, someone has to sit with the outputs and answer the uncomfortable questions:
What do we stop doing?
What do we unwind?
What do we not ship, even though it’s popular?
That’s where my advisory work lives.
Not as staff augmentation.
Not as “fractional leadership.”
As independent oversight.
I run audits.
I pressure-test decisions.
I help leadership teams see what the math is already saying before it shows up in the financials.
That work exists because clarity without accountability doesn’t change outcomes.
This isn’t a blog.
It’s not thought leadership.
And it’s not motivation.
This is a public audit trail.
A place where I write down what breaks when product decisions compound.
Where tools surface risk, systems enforce truth, and humans are still accountable for judgment.
If something shows up here, it’s because it showed up in real reviews first.
Who this is for
If your job is to ship faster, this won’t help you.
If your job is to explain outcomes, defend tradeoffs, or decide what shouldn’t be built, you’re in the right place.
That’s what a Product Economist does.
More soon.
Richard Ewing
Product Economist
Explore the system: https://richardewing.io
See the instruments: https://richardewing.io/tools
Run the Audit Interview: https://richardewing.io/tools/audit-interview
Learn about Exogram: https://exogram.ai
Request advisory oversight: https://richardewing.io/advisory