In my fifteen years of consultancy work, I have seen many product teams doing well within their core skills—engineering, sales, and design (rarely found someone good in content strategy though).
What surprises me every time is that organizations do not talk about ‘the product’ much. They talk about their work, their teams talk about ‘their’ work. Sales doing the presentations, product marketers doing Hubspot, Designers in Figma, Backend in Postman, and they call it a product. They just take their skills for granted to bring them the desired results.
For example when I asked a senior front-end engineer if they had any suggestions to redo the B2B dashboard in sports betting—they would focus on the styling or a more clear interaction. They had nothing to comment or contribute on making the dashboard useful to the users. This is a huge red flag for me, and not for this engineer but when anyone in the organization works with this sentiment.
I have seen a team of twenty engineers working with five designers and none of them ever saw their product landing pages, the pricing pages, or the sales pitch. How can engineers design the code or how can designers plan interactions if they are not curious to know what sells the product. Their engineering heads or project managers or the CTOs ‘translate’ the gaps and the requirements to the engineers and designers. This is such a 2005-ish way to work.
In another team, the engineering head mentioned to me in a call that they have never seen the pitch deck that the founders used to raise Series A last year. The products die the moment their leaders raise a new ticket in a Trello board or in Linear as if they are assigning a task. This is not merely an issue or a ticket—this is the product opportunity.
Nobody is curious to build the product literacy in their teams—the product sense and the product judgment. How can a chef think of making ricotta cheese with their signature dish lasagna if they had not seen the seating arrangements in the restaurant?
So much of our work in content strategy, content design, design, and engineering lives in our conversations—in sharing an idea, framing the bets, raising a usability concern, solidifying an opinion, or fencing a possible argument. Leaders do not build this culture probably because their understanding of building products is so flawed.
No amount of no-code or quick AI-prototyping tools can help such organizations because the problem there is not technology or budgets or market. I wrote on product quality and why products fail in another post recently—that was about building our capacity, learning models, and developing our product judgment. To support this goal, the leaders need to build the product conversations culture.
Products die because of lack of conversations. I have been saying it for a long time now (my LinkedIn post), and I do not see it changing.
