Stop Building Features No One Wants: The Value of Product Discovery

Stop Building Features No One Wants: The Value of Product Discovery

I'm tired of watching companies waste millions of dollars building software products that nobody uses. I've seen this pattern play out dozens of times across enterprise software companies, and it follows a predictable trajectory: someone important has an idea, the team builds it, they launch it with fanfare, and then... crickets. The feature sits unused, the investment evaporates, and everyone moves on to the next idea without stopping to ask what went wrong.

Hope is not a strategy.

Here's the uncomfortable reality that many product leaders don't want to acknowledge: decades of data show that roughly 70-90% of features built in traditional models fail to deliver meaningful business results*. Let that sink in for a moment. Approximately 7 to 9 out of every 10 things your teams build will not move the needle for your customers or your business. This statistic isn't an exaggeration or a worst-case scenario. It is the industry standard.

And it's not because people aren't trying hard enough. It's not because your engineers aren't talented or your product managers aren't competent. The problem is far more fundamental: companies are building first and learning second. They're investing months of expensive development time into untested assumptions, hoping that their initial idea was correct. Hope is not a strategy.

The True Cost of Building Blind

Every failed feature carries two distinct costs that compound the damage to your organization. The first is the direct cost: expensive engineering time that could have been spent on something valuable. When you calculate the fully loaded cost of your product team (engineers, designers, product managers, QA, DevOps support), a single feature can easily cost $50,000 to $500,000 or more, depending on complexity. When that feature fails, that money disappears. But the direct cost is actually the smaller problem. 

The second cost is far more damaging: the opportunity cost of what you could have built instead. While your team spent three months building a feature that nobody uses, what customer problem did they leave unsolved? What competitive threat went unaddressed? What market opportunity slipped away? Opportunity cost is invisible on your P&L, but it's often 3-5x larger than the direct cost.

Innovative companies have figured out how to escape this cycle. They get evidence before building. They don't treat every idea as equally worthy of investment. Instead, they assess four critical risks before a single line of production code gets written.

The Four Risks That Predict Success or Failure

Value Risk: Will customers actually buy this? Will they use it regularly enough to justify the investment? Value is the risk that most companies ignore entirely until after launch, when they're surprised to discover that customers don't care about their brilliant idea.

Usability Risk: Can users actually figure out how to use this thing? I've watched countless features fail not because they didn't solve a real problem, but because the interface was so confusing that customers gave up before they could experience any value. If users can't figure it out in the first 30 seconds, you've already lost.

Viability Risk: Can we sustain this financially and operationally? Does this align with our business model? Will it create support burdens we can't handle? Many features technically work, but create downstream costs that make them unsustainable.

Feasibility Risk: Do we actually have the technical capability to build this reliably? Can we do it with our current architecture and team skills? Can we maintain it long-term without creating technical debt that will haunt us for years?

These four risks aren't theoretical frameworks from business school textbooks. They're practical filters that separate ideas worth pursuing from ideas that will waste your team's time and your company's money. The companies that consistently win reduce these risks through disciplined product discovery and experimentation.

The Discovery Alternative: Testing Before Building

Here's the shift that changes everything: before spending months building something, spend days testing the idea. The process is straightforward but requires genuine discipline to execute consistently.

First, create a prototype. Not a fully functional feature, but something that looks and feels real enough to get honest feedback. A prototype might be a clickable wireframe, a landing page, a wizard-of-oz demo, or even a well-crafted description paired with mockups. The fidelity should match what you need to learn, nothing more.

Second, test the four risk areas with actual users and customers. Not your colleagues. Not your executives. Not people who are paid to be nice to you. Real users who have the problem you're trying to solve and who will tell you the truth about whether your solution actually works for them.

Third, measure the results objectively. How many people took the desired action? How long did it take them? Where did they get confused? What feedback did they provide? What behaviors did you observe that contradicted what they said? Qualitative insights tell you why something happened. Quantitative data tells you how often and at what scale.

Fourth, be transparent about what you learned and how you'll move forward. Share the evidence with stakeholders. Admit when an idea didn't work. Celebrate when you invalidate a bad idea before wasting months building it. This transparency builds trust and makes it easier to kill bad ideas in the future.

The result? You learn what works in weeks instead of quarters. You get honest market feedback while your idea is still cheap to change. You avoid the soul-crushing experience of launching something you spent months building only to watch it fail.

Same Capacity, Dramatically Different Outcomes

Product discovery fundamentally changes the math of product development. In the traditional model, you build 10 features and watch 7-9 of them fail to deliver results. Your team worked incredibly hard, shipped everything on time, and achieved almost nothing meaningful for the business or customers.

In the discovery model, you rapidly test 10 ideas, eliminate the 7-9 that won't work, and build only the 1-3 that show genuine promise based on real evidence. Same engineering capacity. Same talent. Same time period. Dramatically different outcomes.

Discovery isn't necessarily about working harder. It's about working smarter. It's about respecting the enormous cost of building the wrong thing and having the discipline to validate ideas before committing resources. It's about understanding that speed means nothing if you're running in the wrong direction.

The companies that master product discovery don't just avoid waste. They build genuine competitive advantages. They learn faster than their competitors. They solve customer problems that others miss because they're too busy building features nobody asked for. They create products that customers love because they've validated major assumptions before building.

Your job isn't to build features quickly. Your job is to solve customer problems while minimizing waste. Product discovery is how you do that. Everything else is just expensive theater.

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I write about product transformations and building real product capability every week. If you're navigating the shift from projects to products, follow along for frameworks and strategies that actually work.

*https://hbr.org/2013/11/a-new-model-for-innovation-in-big-companies