Why technically excellent products still struggle in the market
- Gorka Santamaria
- Jun 22
- 3 min read
There is a sentence I hear surprisingly often.
"Our product is better than the competition."
Sometimes it's true. It rarely changes the outcome.
For years I worked with companies developing genuinely impressive products.
Engineers solving difficult technical problems.
Teams investing years into innovation.
Products that deserved attention.
Some became market leaders.
Others remained remarkably difficult to sell.
The interesting part was that the difference was rarely technical.
It was almost always somewhere else.
One of the biggest misconceptions in industrial companies is that product quality and product success naturally move together.
They don't.
A product can become technically stronger every year while gradually becoming less relevant to the market.
That sounds counterintuitive. Yet it happens constantly.
Not because the engineers stop doing a good job.
Because markets keep moving while products often continue evolving in the same direction they always have.
Customers change.
Competitors redefine expectations.
New purchasing criteria quietly emerge.
What used to be a differentiator slowly becomes the minimum requirement.
Meanwhile, the product receives another feature...
I have seen organisations spend months debating whether to add functionality that almost nobody had asked for.
At the same time, nobody questioned whether the product was still solving the right problem in the right way.
Those are very different conversations.
The first improves a product. The second questions its future.
Unfortunately, the second conversation is much rarer.
This is not a criticism of engineering. Quite the opposite: most engineering teams are remarkably good at solving problems.
The challenge is that they naturally focus on the problems they can see.
Product strategy is different.
Its job is to notice the problems nobody is discussing yet. Those are usually the ones that matter most.
There is another pattern I've noticed over the years: the more successful a product becomes, the harder it is to question it.
Success creates confidence.
Confidence creates habits.
Habits quietly become assumptions.
Eventually, people stop asking why certain decisions were made because that's how we've always positioned it.
The product has not become worse.
It has simply become familiar.
Familiarity is an underrated strategic risk.
One of my favourite questions in product discussions is also one of the simplest.
"If we launched this product for the first time today, would we build exactly the same thing?"
The room usually becomes very quiet.
Not because people don't know the answer.
Because they realise they haven't asked themselves the question in years.
This is where an external perspective becomes valuable.
Not because it knows more: most of the time it doesn't.
The engineers know the product better.
The sales team knows the customers better.
Leadership knows the business better.
An external perspective contributes something different.
It has the freedom to ask questions that nobody inside the organisation has any particular incentive to ask.
Sometimes those questions change nothing.
Sometimes they change everything.
The difficult part is knowing the difference.
People often assume product strategy is about creating roadmaps.
But roadmaps are decisions that have already been made.
The interesting work happens before the roadmap exists.
When assumptions are still uncertain.
When several futures remain possible.
When one good question is worth more than ten confident answers.
That is probably why I enjoy product conversations so much.
Not because I particularly like products.
Because I like the decisions behind them.
Products carry the history of hundreds of decisions made over many years.
Some deliberate.
Some accidental.
Some brilliant.
Some simply inherited.
Understanding a product often means understanding those decisions first.
Only then does the product itself begin to make sense.
Perhaps that is why technically excellent products still struggle.
Not because they lack engineering.
Not because they lack innovation.
But because, every now and then, every successful product deserves someone to ask a question that has quietly disappeared from the room.
Sometimes that question changes everything.
Continue exploring...