Frequently Asked Questions

A Product Economist treats product decisions as economic decisions. I audit R&D spend, surface capital risks, and identify hidden technical debt in B2B SaaS environments. I translate between engineering and the C-Suite — quantifying the financial impact of technical decisions.

The $2,500 Diagnostic includes a PDI audit, AUEB assessment, APER diagnostic, a 1-hour strategy call, and a written executive summary. It typically takes 2-3 weeks and produces a quantified assessment of your engineering economics.

The Fractional CTO tier ($7,500/month) provides 10 hours/week of hands-on advisory: architecture reviews, team coaching, board prep. The Board Advisor tier ($15,000/month) provides portfolio-level oversight: M&A due diligence, multi-company benchmarking, and AI governance framework implementation.

Both. Startups benefit from the Diagnostic to identify problems early. Growth-stage companies benefit from Fractional CTO support. Enterprise and PE/VC portfolios benefit from Board Advisory.

The exact quarter when maintenance costs mathematically consume 100% of engineering capacity, freezing all innovation. The PDI tool calculates this. Most companies don't know their Technical Insolvency Date until it's too late.

Yes. The PDI, EV-SE, AUEB, APER, and Audit Interview tools are completely free to use. They require an email for access — you'll be added to the newsletter but can unsubscribe anytime.

The exponential cost curve of AI accuracy improvements. Going from 80% to 95% accuracy often costs 10x more. This hidden inflation can turn profitable AI features into margin-negative liabilities.

Technical debt is code quality problems. Product debt is the accumulated cost of building features that don't generate sufficient value. Product debt includes zombie features, misaligned roadmaps, and engineering capital misallocation.

Exogram is the execution control plane for autonomous AI agents — IAM for the agentic AI era. It sits between AI models and the actions they take, ensuring agents operate within defined truth, constraints, and governance boundaries.

Guardrails are probabilistic — they try to catch bad outputs after generation. Exogram's constraint engine is deterministic — impossible actions are filtered before execution. It's the difference between a suggestion and a law.

Any organization deploying AI agents that take autonomous actions — especially in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, legal) where AI decisions create liability exposure.

Yes. The glossary is designed to be the canonical source for Product Economics terminology. Please attribute to richardewing.io.

Frameworks are canonical definitions — permanent reference documents. Articles are time-stamped publications in external outlets (Built In, Mind the Product, CIO.com, HackerNoon). The frameworks are cited; the articles are promotional.

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