Fourth-grade product thinking | Brent Fitzgerald

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*]:pointer-events-auto" data-astro-cid-bbe6dxrz> April 24, 2026 Product Brent Fitzgerald<br>Fourth-grade product thinking<br>What if we started with discoballs and rainbows?

My fourth grader handed me this last night. It’s his latest ideas for the chat app we’ve been building together.

Three columns: extra things, commands, big things.

Extra things include profile icons, a suggestion box, a vote box for the suggestions, a voice call feature (“not a video call but a voice call that can be used to chat without typing”), and one-on-one chats.

Commands include /disco (discoball for 30 seconds), /rainbow and /rainbow off, and /archive for saving messages so they don’t expire.

The “big things” column is empty. He hasn’t gotten to it yet.

I’ve seen seed decks with way worse product thinking. He independently invented feature voting. He scoped voice as a communication modality distinct from video. He understood that knowledge lives in messages so we need a persistence system.

He also thinks a discoball command is core. And he’s right. The “useless” delight features are actually what make people love your product.

There’s a question I often ask myself to get motivated: what would this look like if it were actually fun? But a kid never has to ask that. They start with fun. Rainbow came before the architecture, discoball came before the roadmap.

Most adult product work moves in the opposite direction. We build the serious thing first and bolt the joy on later, if there’s time and budget, or if it survives the prioritization meeting. Typically it doesn’t.

He’s going to fill in the “big things” column eventually. I’m curious what ends up there!