Kodawari in strategy and sharp signals

How emotional logic sharpens AI strategy

Improving my craft as a product marketer is about precision and evolving my outputs. The tension and friction from rewriting a reframe so it sounds better and lands stronger with emotional lift and logic.

I talked about this to a friend on Friday and she offered up a new word for conciseness: ‘kodawari’. In Japanese, ‘kodawari’ reframes perfectionism into its positive counterpart: caring deeply. It means noticing the details no one else may, and honoring them anyway. It’s what makes a message unforgettable. What makes the copy feel crafted, and the experience thoughtfully produced. Kodawari is all about the work and how you approach it.

In the current flood of AI-enabled consulting frameworks, everyone’s got a co-pilot and a deck. And I’m left wanting more on how people find clarity and agency inside them. I made this table of how big consulting and tech frame their AI playbooks:

These playbooks are much needed to solve for ambiguity and decision paralysis, and offer great structure—I have a lot to learn. But first I want to get to the human recalibration underneath this technical transformation, and most stop short. What about the emotional and psychological lift AI demands for us to adopt it well?

Craft today is technical and emotional. Signal comes from specificity and meaning. Precision becomes compassion and where product-market fit sits.

The word personalization gets thrown around a lot as AI-powered expectation and intent. When I thought of ‘kodawari’ in the context of personalization, Issey Miyake came to mind. Personalization for him doesn’t mean tailoring something to you. It means designing something that’s already ready for you to inhabit.

His iconic pleated garments ‘PLEATS PLEASE’ or the A-POC (A Piece Of Cloth) system—engineered so that the same piece of fabric can be worn by both an XS and an XL body, without needing alteration. The shape doesn’t force the person to conform. The garment invites movement, play, and individuality through beautiful meticulously designed pleats and structure. Wearing some of his shirts, I feel like I live inside my clothes, proudly and sustainably.

That’s ‘kodawari’—a level of intentional craft that removes the need for constant tweaking. The personalization is embedded in the flexibility of the system itself, not layered on after the fact. It’s a perfect metaphor for behavior-AI fit. When we talk about personalization in product strategy, especially in health or AI systems, we often confuse reactive nudging with true attunement. But personalization isn’t about customizing every edge for each user. It’s about designing the infrastructure so that different humans—quirks, constraints, and all—can step into it and feel like it already knows them.

In other words, real personalization doesn’t chase the user. It sits, flexible and stable, for the user to arrive.

Which finally brings me to Labubu. A sharp-toothed creature created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, now appearing on the official Instagram page of TSA and in investor decks. A figure once tucked away in toy collector feeds, now fully mainstream. Popmart’s stock surged over 600% at one point, due in large part to Labubu’s breakout popularity. Did CEO Wang Ning tap into a generation’s inner child? Possibly. I’m in.

Here’s one of mine, in a pile of Issey Miyaki flexible weekend fits, wearing a custom hoodie with ‘omda’ — Egyptian Arabic word for “village chief.” It’s a reminder: the most resonant signals aren’t always obvious at first. They’re precise, specific, and strange enough to be remembered. That’s branding that gives ‘kodawari’ vibes and translates across culture and language.

If you’re working in AI, product, product marketing, or behavior change — this is my prompt: outline flexible frameworks for what AI can do, then show people where they’re uplifted. Find the blank spaces to cover with depth and at scale— modeling what its like to find identity and pace inside faster systems. The output starts to cut through content noise with signal for belief and adoption.

I added ‘kodawari’ to the list I use to never forget what matters.

Author’s note: “Omda” is used here in its original Egyptian Arabic meaning — a nod to cultural identity, not a reference to any financial advice.