About The Product Paradox
The Product Paradox is a space dedicated to the real work behind building products — the messy, human, often unpredictable side that rarely makes it into frameworks, glossy slides, or conference keynotes.
Products don’t live in theory
They live in factories or small workshops, warehouses, customer journeys, API calls, late-night decisions, and in the hands of people trying to make things work with the constraints they have. They are shaped by trade-offs, pressure, luck, timing, context and, most of all, by the people who carry them forward.
That’s the paradox:
We talk about products as if they follow a clean, linear logic, while in reality, they evolve in a world full of contradictions.
The Product Paradox exists to explore this exact space: the gap between how products are “supposed” to work and how they actually get built.
About the Curator
The Product Paradox is curated by Ciprian Dragomir, a product strategist who has spent his career navigating the intersection between digital journeys, physical operations, financial services and real-world constraints. Ciprian works across multiple countries and disciplines, where he sees firsthand how products succeed — and how they struggle — in environments that are anything but predictable.
He brings a mix of strategy, hands-on product work, curiosity and a grounded sense of reality. His interest lies not in the ideal version of product development, but in the lived one: where technology meets people, processes meet limitations, and decisions are rarely as straightforward as they look on a slide.
This project is his way of documenting those lessons — and of giving a voice to the builders, leaders, operators and thinkers who carry the weight of real products every day.
Here, you’ll find:
- Articles on decision-making, product strategy, constraints, uncertainty and scaling across environments.
- Interviews with people who actually build and run products every day, from engineers and operators to founders and leaders.
- Conversations about what really happens behind the scenes when something works… or doesn’t.
- Short insights that capture the small paradoxes that shape the big outcomes.
This isn’t a place for buzzwords or idealised stories.
It’s a place for honesty, curiosity and practical wisdom.
For learning from the field, not from the wishful version of how things “should” be.
If you build physical, industrial, electronic, service-based or digital products, or support the people who do, you’ll find yourself at home here.
The Product Paradox is for builders, thinkers, operators, and leaders. For anyone who wants to understand products as they truly are: complex, imperfect, human.
Welcome. Let’s explore the real world of product work together.