Why technically excellent products still struggle in the market
Updated: Jul 27
There is a particular situation that I have witnessed many times over the years, in companies of very different sizes and operating in industries that, on the surface, had almost nothing in common. A product review is taking place. The atmosphere is constructive, the discussion technically sophisticated, people around the table genuinely care about what they are building and, after an hour or two, somebody eventually says something along the lines of "This product is already stronger than any competitor."
Very often, they are right. And that is the most uncomfortable part.
Because I have also seen many technically outstanding products spend years struggling to find the commercial traction everyone around that table expected them to achieve. Not failing, exactly. Simply never becoming what they seemed destined to become.
It would be tempting to conclude that the market had failed to recognise their quality, or that competitors were simply better at marketing. Occasionally that may even be true, but most of the times, the explanation lies somewhere far less dramatic.
Technical excellence and market traction are related, but they are not the same journey.
Engineering, almost by definition, moves towards better solutions. Products become more capable, more reliable, more accurate, more integrated and generally better with every generation. Markets, on the other hand, have the inconvenient habit of moving sideways. Customers gradually redefine what they care about. Competitors change the rules without asking permission. New purchasing criteria appear so discreetly that, by the time everybody notices them, they have already become expectations rather than differentiators.
The consequence is very subtle and it often escapes even very experienced organisations. The product keeps evolving. The market does too. They simply stop evolving in the same direction.
I have sometimes left product discussions with the curious feeling that everyone had been talking about the future of the product while almost nobody had been talking about the future of the problem it was supposed to solve. Hours would be spent discussing another feature, another refinement or another technical improvement, each perfectly reasonable on its own, yet the more uncomfortable questions somehow remained outside the room. Is this still the problem customers are trying to solve? Is this still the way they expect it to be solved? If we were entering this market today, would we even decide to build the same product in the first place?
Those are difficult questions.
Not because they are technically demanding, but because they require an organisation to question some of its own successes.
Success has an interesting effect on products. It creates confidence, which is indispensable, but confidence also creates habits, and habits eventually become assumptions that nobody remembers making. Decisions gradually lose their history. Features become permanent because they have always been there. Positioning becomes fixed because it once worked very well.
Little by little, the product stops being a response to today's market and becomes a rather sophisticated response to yesterday's.
None of this should be understood as a criticism of engineering teams. Quite the opposite. Throughout my career I have consistently found them to be among the most intellectually honest people in any organisation. They solve the problems placed in front of them with extraordinary discipline and creativity.
The more interesting question is who remains responsible for noticing the problems that have not yet reached the table.
That, to me, has always been the real territory of product strategy.
Not roadmaps.
Not feature prioritisation.
Those come later.
The more valuable work often happens long before anybody starts discussing implementation, while assumptions can still be challenged without threatening months of work, and while several possible futures still exist instead of only one carefully optimised continuation of the present.
Perhaps this is also where an external perspective becomes unexpectedly useful. Not because it understands the technology better than the engineers, nor because it knows the customers better than the sales organisation. Usually it does neither.
Its only privilege is distance.
Distance from the decisions that have gradually become invisible, from the assumptions that have quietly turned into facts, and from the understandable attachment that every organisation develops towards products it has spent years improving.
Sometimes that distance changes nothing.
Sometimes it brings back a question that had disappeared from the conversation so long ago that nobody had noticed its absence.
And every now and then, that question turns out to be much more valuable than another technically excellent answer.
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