Trends age fast. The right questions stay useful.
Editorial insight
Yes, you read that right. Untile is turning 17 today. No longer teenagers, almost young adults, looking back and asking what really stayed constant.
When you look at 17 years in product work, it is tempting to tell the story through big milestones. We have lived that story: new clients, new technologies, new markets.
In reality, most of our work has been less about big moments and more about conversations. With founders who are not sure what to build next. With corporate teams trying to move something forward inside a heavy context. With people who feel the gap between what they want their product to be and what it is right now.
Over time, the tools changed. The frameworks changed. The buzzwords definitely changed. Some of them did not survive even one year, let alone seventeen. But some questions kept coming back. We noticed that no matter how different a project looked on the surface, the same guiding questions kept helping teams get unstuck.
This edition is about those few. Not as a checklist to memorise, but as a set of lenses you can bring into your own product conversations, whether you are in a startup or a large organisation.
The tools will keep changing. The questions that survive are the ones that still help people make better decisions together.
Value piece
17 questions that still earn their place
Think of this section as the practical side of the story.
Instead of trying to squeeze all seventeen questions into this email, here are four we still reach for all the time:
1. What would have to be true for this to really matter a year from now?
Use this when everyone is excited about an idea, but the impact is fuzzy. It forces the team to connect the work to a concrete future state instead of a vague “nice to have”.
2. If this product disappeared tomorrow, who would feel it first, and how?
This one is for products that are trying to be everything to everyone. It brings the focus back to the people who would actually notice if it was gone.
3. If we could only do one thing for this audience in the next 3 months, what would it be?
Useful when your roadmap looks like a shopping list. You may still do more than one thing, but this question reveals what the team believes is the real lever.
4. What evidence do we have for this, and what is still mostly a story in our heads?
We use this when confidence is high but most of it lives in slides instead of in real contact with users or data. It separates what you know from what you are assuming.
If you want the full set of seventeen questions we still rely on after 17 years in product, we put them together in a Notion template you can plug into your own rituals, from strategy discussions to weekly check-ins.
Untile Picks & Trends Radar
You thought we would bring 17 picks, right? We will not do that to your inbox, but our team thinks these are worth a look:
If this edition made you want to sharpen your own questions, this article on the art of asking the right questions is a great follow up.
For anyone leading through ambiguity, this piece on sensemaking shows how teams turn scattered signals into shared direction.
To balance the AI hype, this article is a clear take on where tools help and where human judgment still does the heavy lifting.
Since we are celebrating 17 years today, the meme above is here as a tiny ‘aging like fine wine’ break between meetings.
Seventeen years in, trying to age like Portuguese wine.
📝 Hey, we need you
We are looking for meme specialists. Our marketing team is running out of good product memes.
→ If you spot one that is worth sharing, just reply to this email with the link. Our team will appreciate it (and probably laugh a lot too).
Use Cases & Case Studies
INSEAD NCMC: using the right questions to design for high-stakes tournaments
INSEAD NCMC needed a tournament system that could handle global negotiations without becoming the weak link.
The INSEAD Negotiation and Conflict Management Collaborative (NCMC) ran its first negotiation tournament, bringing together students and alumni across different time zones. Before building anything, we worked through a few hard questions: what had to be true for this system to hold under live pressure, and who would feel it first if something failed?
Our team treated the tournament system as critical infrastructure, mapping who would be most affected by failure and designing flows that protect organisers and participants during live matches.
Used questions about “what would break first” to prioritise a resilient rule engine, time zone coordination, and secure access over secondary features.
Focused on automating the most complex logistics so the NCMC team could concentrate on running the tournament, not the tools.
INSEAD NCMC can now run high-stakes tournaments with less manual risk, more control in the moment, and confidence that the system will hold under real pressure.
See how a few hard questions helped INSEAD NCMC run a negotiation tournament.
Inside Untile
Seven years back then. Seventeen now.
The year has just begun, and we already have so much to share about what’s going on within our team. Here are a few highlights that we think are worth your time:
Anniversary special insights. We were only 7 years old at the time. Crazy, no? Check how our team was back then here.
Seventeen years in feels like a good moment to pause and reflect. That’s why our CEO, Miguel Oliveira, wrote a new blog article about what has actually stayed constant in how we build products over time.
We are also hiring a Product Manager. If you are curious about what it is like to be a PM at Untile, check it out here.
From the team
“If I had to summarize 17 years of Untile in one word, it would be consistency. Without it, companies don’t survive, culture doesn’t last, and trust can’t be built.”
Till next month!
Seventeen years in, we have seen the same pattern in startups and large organisations. Tools and trends come and go, but the way teams ask and answer questions together is what really moves products forward.
If you are leading a product, initiative, or innovation stream and one of these questions hits close to home, you can always hit reply and tell us which one. Sometimes a short exchange is enough to unlock the next step.
And if you want to bring these questions into a concrete conversation with our team, we can help.
And happy birthday to us. Here’s to the next 17 years 🎉