I Can't Stop Taking Things Apart

Some people collect stamps. Others restore old cars. I sign up for products and tear them apart.

Not out of malice, but out of genuine curiosity. Every product is a puzzle. Someone made a thousand decisions to get it to where it is, and I find it endlessly interesting to reverse-engineer those decisions and ask: what would I do differently?

It started young

I've been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I'd take apart electronics just to see how they worked. That impulse never went away. It just shifted from hardware to software. Now when I use an app, I can't help but notice the friction in the onboarding, the drop-off point in the funnel, the pricing page that's leaving money on the table.

It's not something I can turn off. My wife can confirm: I've ruined more than a few dinner conversations by pulling out my phone to show her a checkout flow that's "so close to great but look at this one thing."

From instinct to process

At some point I realized this wasn't just a quirk. It was a skill I'd been developing for 20 years as a product leader. So I started being more deliberate about it. When a product catches my eye, I go deep:

• Sign up as a real user. Not a quick glance at the marketing site. I go through the full flow, enter my credit card, use it for real.
• Map the funnel. Where does it feel smooth? Where does it feel like work? Where did I almost leave?
• Look at the business model. Is the pricing aligned with the value? Are there obvious experiments they could run?
• Check the growth loops. What's bringing people in? What's keeping them? What's driving them away?
• Audit the details. Broken links, confusing copy, bugs in the payment flow. The small things that quietly bleed revenue.

Then I write it all up. Not a surface-level review, but a full roadmap of what I'd do if I were running product there.

The Extern teardown

The most recent one I did was for Extern, an externship platform that's transitioning from B2B to B2C. I went through their entire product, analyzed their funnel, audited their ads, tested their payment flow (and found a bug that resets your payment info mid-checkout), and put together a 180-day product and growth roadmap.

It covers everything from their legitimacy gap (the first thing new users wonder is "is this a scam?") to their churn pattern ("mission accomplished" drop-off after users land their first externship) to eight specific pricing experiments they could run.

You can read the full case study here →

Why I do this

Partly because I can't help it. But mostly because I believe the best product thinking comes from genuine empathy with the user experience. You can't fix what you haven't felt. And the more products I tear apart, the sharper my instincts get for the patterns that matter.

Every product has a version of itself that's 20% better hiding in plain sight. Finding it is the fun part.