Genius can be hard
to navigate.

Product Therapy Studio helps top talent find their way through tough intangibles.

💬 The CTO

“The users don’t use the app but the software makes perfect sense. I’m not sure what is the difficulty.”

💬 The Founder

“How do I direct this *** design studio to get what I want? They are not hearing me and I need them to get the vision.”

💬 The CD

“What they’re asking for makes no sense. I can’t get into flow, it’s impossible. HR said I could talk to you.”

💬 The CEO

“Pivoting is a great option but if I mention it the team will freak. I need help thinking through our positioning asap.”

What is Product Therapy?

Insight on demand for founders, talent and teams who need help with their product.

Product Therapy gives talent somewhere to talk and get fresh perspective. Product Therapy means coming to new points of view through tools such as

→ Audit that checks your vision against execution

→ Neutral feedback that understands the market

→ Novel systems and analogies to map the terrain

→ Socratic dialog that cuts to 1st principles

→ Useful sketches of insights and alternatives

By who?

Product Therapy Studios is led by designer and founder Ben Pieratt ⇱ ⇱:

“Juggling the variables needed to put a dent in the universe is a rare and lonely position – it’s hard enough to keep all the parts moving let alone get anyone to understand what you’re trying to do.

Becoming a successful designer within the manic dream world of venture-funded tech has meant developing my own approach to understanding genius at the edge of comprehensibility.

Talent finds value in offloading their thoughts and hearing them reflected back because this allows them to step back from holding it together and see the whole picture for themselves. Even in absence of domain expertise, situations will open themselves to new understanding within a few moments of deep empathy and inquiry.

I’m very excited to now offer these singular moments of abstract utility as a primary deliverable. If you are building something great and feel stuck, I would love to help.

— BP”

Steps:

First call is free of course ↓

🗓️ — Find a time on Calendly

💬 — or txt me at +1 (978) 491-7637

✉️ — or reach out via Email

Money:

✨ Talk

In-depth talk with notes.

$500
Subscription discount available
Includes:
✨ 90 min call
📝 Follow-up notes
⏳ Delivery: 2 days

🔬 Audit

Two talks with deck.

$5,000

Subscription discount available

Includes:
✨ Talk x 2
📘 360º Deck with sketches
⏳ Delivery: 2 weeks

🏛️ Team

Talks and deck for the team.

$10,000
+ $500 per team member

Subscription discount available

Includes:
✨ Talk with each team member
📘 360º Deck with sketches summarizing team’s relationship with self and vision
⏳ Delivery: 1 month

Recent Clients:

💬 Ben Z.
Founder, Consultant

“I have worked with Pieratt on naming, branding, and product design over four companies, from seed stage to acquisition. Again and again, he's consistently been five years ahead and one light year out on vision, technology, and culture.”

💬 Phil M.

Founder, CTO

“Ben brings a certain magic to any project. He's a profound product thinker and designer who does not flinch from telling you exactly what you need to hear, which is admirable and vitally needed.”

💬 Mark K.

Founder, CTO

“Have you ever read an author and felt pried open after they articulated your own experience and vision more completely and vividly than you ever could? Ben’s like that, but on demand.”

Notes — Assorted quotes on world builders:

Lewis Hyde

A disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. Where we reckon our substance by our acquisitions, the gifts of the gifted man are powerless to make him substantial.

Gospel of Thomas

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Janais Nin

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Pearl S. Buck

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Carl Jung

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

John Muir

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Henry James

Deep experience is never peaceful.

@nosilverv

In ~ all areas I've looked at like 90% of the work is not the actual work but undoing confusions and mistakes and lies and status games and language games so that you can actually interact with the material. WHY is it like this

James ?

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.

Algernon Blackwood

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

Terence McKenna

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

Alan Watts

Like it or not, change is coming. And the greater the resistance, the greater the pain.

I Ching

Adapting itself to obstacles and bending around them, wood in the earth grows upward without haste and without rest. Thus too the superior man is devoted in character and never pauses in his progress.

Tao Te Ching

Only when we are sick of our sickness
Shall we cease to be sick.
The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness;
This is the secret of health.

James P Carse

Only that which can change can continue.

Marshall McLuhan

The present is always invisible because it’s environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Carlos Castaneda

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

Buckminster Fuller

Don’t oppose forces, use them.

Hofstadter’s Law

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Herman Hesse

Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men and women treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Sam Harris

You can’t take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can’t really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don’t make a lot of sense in the final analysis. But they weren’t much fun anyway; these are isolating emotions.

Sam Harris

The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Aldous Huxley

I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

Charles Eames

Eventually, everything connects.

With thanks for most of these quotes to my favorite designer and personal hero, and founder of cargo.site on which this site is built — Folkert Gorter

Genius can be hard to navigate.