Ship it half-baked: Teresa Huang's case against the perfect product

Ask most product leaders what holds their teams back and you will hear a familiar list: too little data, too little headcount, too little time. Teresa Huang's answer is more uncomfortable, because it points inward. The thing that slows teams down, she has argued, is the urge to get it right before anyone sees it, and the cure is to give that urge up. Her advice to her younger self, she told Mind the Product, is to "always push it into the customer's hands, no matter how rough it is." The reason is not impatience. It is a theory of what customers actually want.

"Customers don't care. They want to experience half-baked things; they want to co-create."

It is a deliberately provocative line, and Huang knows it. She is candid that perfectionism is usually imposter syndrome wearing a respectable coat, the fear of being judged, dressed up as a commitment to quality. The way through, she says, is to treat building as something done with customers rather than for them: to put a half-formed idea in front of real people early, ask for feedback throughout the process rather than at the end, and resist taking the criticism personally. People find value in the act of creation, not only in the polished artefact that eventually emerges. The rough cut is not an embarrassment to be hidden until it is ready; it is the invitation.

The long climb to Head of Product

Huang did not arrive at that view quickly. She studied a double degree in information technology and business at the University of Technology, Sydney in the mid-2000s, then moved to Melbourne and worked her way up the product ladder one rung at a time, from associate product manager through senior and director-level roles, the unglamorous progression she now coaches others through. Her path ran through corporate Australia and the startup world alike: a stint in a major Australian bank's innovation lab, a stretch at the mobile-first marketplace Redbubble where she worked on the consumer product experience, and a spell connected to the Melbourne Accelerator Program, the University of Melbourne's startup engine. She has also held product roles associated with the accounting-software company Xero. The throughline is breadth: marketplaces, fintech, startups and now health insurance, each a different shape of the same craft.

Today she is Head of Product for the enablement and platform domain at Bupa, the global health and care company, based in Melbourne. By her own account the remit is substantial, more than a hundred people across platform and quality teams, and it is the kind of work that rarely makes a keynote: the internal tooling, services and foundations that the customer-facing teams build on top of. That is precisely the problem Huang has made her subject.

The two-step problem

Platform product management has an image problem, and Huang names it plainly. Internal platforms are harder to justify than customer-facing products because the people who pay for them rarely see the customer at the other end. The platform team's immediate "customer" is a developer or another internal team; the actual customer, the patient, the member, the person buying cover, is two steps removed. Speaking on Mind the Product's The Product Experience podcast, she framed the discipline's central challenge as exactly this gap: a platform PM has to understand the immediate user and the end-customer impact, and hold both in view at once.

Her prescription is to hop two steps, to refuse the comfortable framing of platforms as efficiency machines measured by "features deployed," and instead trace a line from the platform all the way through to "value unlocked" for the business and the customer. That means borrowing the experience teams' outcomes as your own: not just adoption and reliability and error reduction, but retention, acquisition, the customer's actual experience. The platforms that survive scrutiny, she argues, are the ones whose leaders can tie their performance to shared goals with the customer-facing teams, rather than reporting technical productivity gains into a void.

The stakes in that reframing are bigger than measurement. A platform seen only through the lens of cost is a line item to be trimmed in a hard quarter. A platform understood as a value enabler, the thing that lets every downstream team move faster and serve customers better, is an investment to be protected. Huang's argument is that platform leaders earn that second reading or they don't, and that the burden of proof sits with them. It is not the business's job to imagine the customer at the end of the chain; it is the platform PM's job to show them.

Teaching the ladder she climbed

What sets Huang slightly apart from her peers is how openly she works in public. She runs a YouTube channel on product leadership and career progression, turning the lessons of her own climb, how to grow from associate to senior to executive, how to handle feedback, how to think about platform impact, into something other product people can use. The same instinct that drives her shipping philosophy seems to drive the teaching: put the thinking out there before it is perfectly polished, and let the audience co-create the rest.

In 2026 she carries the argument to the conference stage as a speaker at The Outlook's Product Leadership 2026, the kind of forum where senior product people gather to compare notes on exactly the problems she has spent a career inside. The two ideas she brings, ship it rough, and hop two steps, sound at first like opposites, one about velocity and one about value. They are really the same idea seen from two ends. Both are arguments against the seductive, paralysing pursuit of the finished thing: against waiting for the perfect product, and against the perfect, self-contained justification a platform team would love to have before it commits. In Huang's telling, leadership is mostly the willingness to act before you are sure, and to let the customer, wherever they sit in the chain, tell you whether you were right.