How To Create A Losing Product
I find elation in the sport of running. It allows me to clear my mind and reset for the day. But, of course, some runs are better than others, which has nothing to do with pace or distance.
My worst runs occur when my mind is lost in the distractions of the day; thinking about what needs to get done or something that happened yesterday that
is weighing on me. Those days I end up down a dead-end road, not knowing how I got there.
The best runs come when I focus on the run itself and the path in front of me. I cross the finish line stronger mentally and more prepared for the day.
When we take the focus off of what is important, we lose.
The same is true when it comes to building your product. When you take your focus off what is essential, you find yourself going down the wrong path. You begin creating the wrong solution that your customers won't use.
It is easy to get wrapped up in feature ideation and lose sight of the goal. The 80/20 principle applies to product creation as well. 80% of your product usage
will come from 20% of your product features.
The most important thing to think about when creating your product is how can you help your customers achieve more results. Ask yourself what changes you should make to meet your customers' needs?
Create with a customer-first mindset and focus on creating wins for your customers.
I have watched this play out dozens of times with teams I have worked with. Someone gets excited about a competitor's feature, a board member's suggestion, or a shiny piece of tech. Suddenly the roadmap shifts. Three months later the team has built something technically impressive that nobody asked for. Meanwhile the actual pain point that customers emailed about every week is still sitting in the backlog untouched. That is what a losing product looks like. It is not bad engineering. It is misallocated attention.
The fix is not more customer interviews or better prioritization frameworks, though those help. The fix is discipline. Every feature request, every internal idea, every competitive reaction needs to pass through one filter: does this directly help our customer achieve the outcome they are paying us for? If the answer is not an obvious yes, it goes in a parking lot. Not deleted, not debated for two hours in a planning meeting. Just parked. Most of those ideas never come back, and that is exactly the point. The best product teams I have led are the ones that say no to ninety percent of what comes across their desk.
There is a simple exercise I run with every product team at the start of a quarter. Write down every feature you shipped last quarter. Next to each one, write down how many customers use it daily. If more than half your list has a number close to zero, you have been building a losing product. It is not personal. It is a signal that the team is optimizing for output instead of outcomes. The goal is not to ship more. The goal is to ship what matters and then make it so good that your customers cannot imagine going back to the way things were before.
Related: Lessons Learned from Building Stuff That Nobody Wants and Product Habits.
2026 Update: AI Added a New Way to Lose
Every anti-pattern in this post still applies. But 2026 added a new one: building with AI as a substitute for understanding. Teams that let AI generate features without understanding why those features exist are creating losing products faster than ever. The code is clean. The architecture is reasonable. The tests pass. And nobody uses it because nobody stopped to ask if anyone should. AI is a force multiplier. It multiplies good judgment and bad judgment equally. The product fails not because the technology was wrong but because the thinking was.
