Writing this somewhere over the North Pole, on a long haul from Seattle to India by way of Dubai. Too hot to sleep. Plenty of time to think about where technology is going and what it means for our industry.

Most product leaders live in the tyranny of the roadmap. They assume the future is just the present with more features.

The best product thinkers I've worked with don't think in lists. They don't think in buttons. They think in tech trees.

In Civilization, you don't research Physics to understand the universe. You research it to unlock Space Flight. You don't research Nuclear Fission to split atoms. You research it because it unlocks both Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons. One capability, two completely different branches of the future.

When you build a feature, you solve a user problem. That's good work! But when you build a capability, you unlock a new branch of the tech tree. That's a different game entirely!

F5 turns 30 this year. When we built BIG-IP, we didn't build a load balancer. We built TMM, a traffic management engine that could process and make decisions on network traffic at incredible speed. That wasn't the product. That was the foundation. From that single capability we unlocked load balancing, SSL offloading, application security, and more. One engine, multiple branches of the tree.

Amazon did the same thing at a much different scale. They didn't build a bookstore. They built a logistics engine. That engine wasn't the product. It was the foundation that made the "Everything Store" possible. Then they looked at their server infrastructure and realized they were sitting on another foundation. AWS didn't come from a roadmap. It came from recognizing that a capability they'd already built could open a branch nobody had mapped yet.

Stop building features. Start researching Physics.

Still a long way to go on this flight. Back to not sleeping!