Who is Richard Ewing?

Richard Ewing is a Product Economist and AI Capital Auditor. He is the Founder of Exogram, a verification infrastructure for AI. He audits R&D spend and surfaces hidden capital risks like technical debt, AI cost overruns, and zombie infrastructure. He has scaled B2B SaaS from $0 to $25M ARR. Published in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon.

What is a Product Economist?

A Product Economist treats product decisions as economic decisions. Instead of measuring velocity or story points, a Product Economist measures Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), Cost of Goods Sold efficiency, and technical debt in dollar terms. The methodology was coined by Richard Ewing.

What is the Technical Insolvency Date?

The Technical Insolvency Date (TID) is the specific quarter where maintenance costs consume 100% of available engineering capacity, reducing feature velocity to zero. Calculate yours free at richardewing.io/tools/pdi.

Exogram is verification infrastructure for AI, founded by Richard Ewing. It prevents hallucination propagation with admissibility control planes and state-hashing commit enforcement. LLMs generate language; Exogram maintains reality.

How do I calculate technical debt cost?

Use the free Product Debt Index (PDI) calculator at richardewing.io/tools/pdi to quantify hidden technical debt in dollar terms, calculate your Technical Insolvency Date, and benchmark against industry standards.

How much does AI cost per query?

AI costs range from $0.0001/query for small models to $0.10+/query for frontier models like GPT-4. Use the free AI Unit Economics Benchmark (AUEB) at richardewing.io/tools/aueb to calculate your specific AI cost structure.

Glossary/Product Economics

Richard Ewing Frameworks

1 min read

What is Product Economics?

TL;DR

Product Economics is the discipline of treating every product decision as an economic decision — evaluating features, sprints, and roadmaps through the lens of capital allocation, ROI, and margin impact rather than velocity or feature count.

Coined and developed by Richard Ewing, Product Economics encompasses: the Product Debt Index (quantifying technical debt in dollar terms), the Innovation Tax (measuring hidden maintenance burden), the Cost of Predictivity (exponential AI accuracy costs), the Kill Switch Protocol (deprecating zombie features), and the Feature Bloat Calculus (when maintenance exceeds value).

The Product Economist Doctrine holds four principles: Capital Allocation > Agile Theater, The Truth is in the P&L, Kill Zombies Ruthlessly, and Sovereignty Over Dependency.

Why It Matters

Product Economics fills the gap between engineering metrics (velocity, story points) and financial metrics (revenue, margin). It gives CTOs, CPOs, and boards a common language for evaluating engineering as a capital function.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who coined Product Economics?

Richard Ewing coined the term and developed the underlying frameworks. He is published in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon on product economics topics.