Product leaders are expected to turn data, feedback and business goals into priorities, roadmaps and decisions. Yet one of the richest sources of product information is often already there: the work being done by the team.
Code, design files, content, tickets, bugs and technical decisions are usually treated as execution artefacts. But they also contain evidence about the product itself.
Product Leaders should be able to read that evidence.
Reading the product through its work
A technically literate product leader can learn a great deal from a codebase without being the person writing the code.
Frequent changes in a particular area may reveal an important product capability — or an unstable one. Repeated workarounds may point to a weakness in the underlying product model. A feature that is disproportionately expensive to change may reveal an architectural constraint that should influence the roadmap.
The same applies to design.
Repeated iterations around the same flow can indicate unresolved product complexity. A growing number of exceptions in the interface may reveal that the original model no longer fits the user's needs.
Content can provide similar signals. Recurring questions, increasingly complex explanations or content that repeatedly compensates for confusing product behaviour can reveal gaps in the experience. The topics users repeatedly search for, ask about or engage with can also point to unmet needs — and sometimes to opportunities for entirely new features.
Recurring bugs, support requests and technical fixes expose other patterns that are difficult to see when each issue is considered individually.
None of these observations necessarily arrives labelled as a product insight.
They have to be extracted from the work.
Product leaders as readers
This requires a certain degree of technical and cross-disciplinary literacy.
Product leaders do not need to become developers, designers or content specialists. But being able to navigate a codebase, understand design decisions, recognise patterns in content and interpret operational data creates a more direct relationship with the reality of the product.
Modern tools, including AI, can make this exploration easier. They can help investigate a codebase, compare artefacts or surface patterns without requiring every piece of information to be pre-processed and presented by someone else.
The important thing is not the tool itself.
It is the ability to go looking for evidence.
From team work to product decisions
This changes how we can think about metrics and roadmaps.
Instead of starting with:
What should we measure?
we can start with:
What information is already contained in the work?
The frequency of a particular class of bugs can become a metric. The time spent repeatedly modifying the same component can become a signal. The number of iterations required to solve a design problem can reveal product uncertainty. Patterns in the codebase can expose areas where future change will be expensive.
And the way users, designers, developers and content creators work around existing limitations can reveal opportunities for entirely new features.
These may not be traditional product metrics. But they can tell us something about product health, user experience, the team's ability to evolve the product — and where new opportunities might lie.
Taken together, these signals become multimodal product insights.
Code, design, content and operational data each reveal different aspects of the product. Reading them together allows Product Leaders to identify patterns and opportunities that would remain invisible when each source is considered in isolation.
Once these multimodal product insights are connected, they can influence priorities, generate new product ideas and enrich the roadmap with opportunities emerging directly from the team's work.
The roadmap becomes more than a list of requested features. It becomes a response to what the product is actually telling us.
Product leadership is not simply about telling the team what to build.
It is also about reading what the team is already building.