At tech conferences you usually hear ready-made recipes. Charts go up, strategies work, everything goes according to plan. But if you’re building a product yourself, you know that behind every button sits someone’s decision – sometimes made under pressure or without the full picture.
That’s exactly why I was at Behind the Product #2 in Łódź.
A problem everyone knows but few have solved well
I told the story of KanapkaMan, which starts with something simple. In Poland many catering companies deliver lunches and breakfasts to office buildings. The sandwich guy shows up at an unknown time with an unknown menu. Nobody knows when he’ll arrive – or whether he’ll come at all. Employees wait, some leave, some miss him entirely.
The problem was obvious. The solution also seemed obvious: an app with a menu, orders and a notification when the delivery driver arrives. From a code perspective it’s straightforward. I’ve written harder systems.
But the code turned out to be the easier part of this project.
What programming courses don’t teach you
As developers we entered this project thinking that understanding the problem was half the battle. It turned out we had only just begun to grasp how much we didn’t know.
We had to learn to look at the same product through the eyes of three different groups. And that didn’t just mean having conversations.
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With catering companies we ran several meetings walking through their processes step by step: how they plan routes, how they manage orders, where they lose time and money. We documented every meeting and looked for recurring patterns.
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With the delivery driver we spent an entire day in the field. From loading the van in the morning, through every stop at office buildings, to settling up in the evening. We saw where he lost time and how he actually worked. None of that could be read from any brief.
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For office workers we set up a survey system. The results diverged from what people said out loud: asked directly, they pointed to concrete problems.
Today KanapkaMan has over 250,000 users and 3.5 million processed orders. If I had to identify the one moment that made the difference, it wouldn’t be any feature. It would be leaving the office and spending a whole day riding along with the sandwich guy.
How the presentation came together
The first version of the slides was correct, chronological, complete – and utterly bland. The second was better, but something still wasn’t right.
A meeting with Tomasz Szer at Robimy Startupy helped. Tomek asked one question: what do you actually want people to take away from this talk? Not what story I’d tell, but what should stick in their heads after they leave the room. That reframed the entire structure.
Intentional action – what we’re really doing and why
The core of my presentation was one thing: intentional action.
When I look back at decisions that turned out to be wrong, most of them happened because we were doing something because we could, because we were pumped with energy, because a new technology seemed exciting. Not because we had a clear reason. The decisions that turned out to be right came from a specific problem we could see, or from conversations with users. They had intent.
It’s much easier to act fast than to act with purpose. But only the latter compounds over time.
Where would I start today?
If I were starting from scratch today, I’d go earlier to environments where you can test ideas against reality. Events like Robimy Startupy aren’t networking for its own sake. They’re places where someone tells you directly what doesn’t hold together in your idea.
I’d also take my surroundings more seriously. Mastermind groups let you see your own projects from the outside, regularly. Thanks to the Ponadprzeciętni community for creating that kind of environment in Łódź.
What the other speakers talked about
I don’t want this post to be only about me.
Maciej Krasowski shared his journey in fintech – concrete and unvarnished. Olka Fiszbak-Biernat talked about product distribution and where AI actually helps versus where it’s just noise. Both talks were good for exactly the same reason: they didn’t try to prove how great we are, they showed what it actually looks like.
In the product world that’s precisely what’s missing: not more case studies written for conference programmes, but honesty about what those decisions looked like before we knew the outcome.
Thank-yous
Thanks to the organisers – Paweł Lewiński, Michał Moroz and Karolina Boguszewska – for the invitation. You created an event worth attending, and I hope there will be more.
Thanks to Klaudia Pietrzak for the excellent photo coverage, and to Paweł Konieczko for analysing my talk through the eyes of a public speaking coach.
Event partners: Uniwersytet Medyczny w Łodzi, Makimo, PonadPrzeciętni, Zwinna Łódź, ProductMeetups.com, Agile Polska and Da Grasso.
If you’re building a product and want to talk about making decisions with intention, reach out.
