Why Your Product Team is Building the Wrong Things (And How to Fix It)

Why Your Product Team is Building the Wrong Things (And How to Fix It)

The Hidden Trap of Starting with Solutions

Your team just spent six months building a feature nobody uses. The requirements were clear. The stakeholders approved. The engineering team delivered exactly what was asked. Yet users ignore it completely. This scenario plays out in product teams everywhere because we make one critical mistake: we start with solutions instead of problems.

Requirements feel safe and concrete, but they often lead us down the wrong path. When we begin with "the product shall have four wheels," we might build a car when our user just wants to cut grass. The gap between what stakeholders request and what users actually need creates expensive failures that could be avoided with better product discovery practices.

Quote from Henry Ford

Why Traditional Requirements Miss the Mark

Traditional requirements gathering creates a false sense of security while hiding the real risks. When someone says "build me a mobile app with login functionality," they're already three steps ahead of where we should start. We haven't validated that users want a mobile app, or that login is their biggest pain point, or even that we understand what problem we're trying to solve. Requirements feel productive because they give us something concrete to build, but they skip the most important question:

Are we solving the right problem?

I've seen too many teams deliver perfect technical solutions that solve problems users don't actually have. The result is wasted time, frustrated stakeholders, and products that sit unused despite meeting every requirement.

The Double Diamond: A Better Way Forward

The Double Diamond approach to Design Thinking transforms how we approach product development by separating problem understanding from solution design. The first diamond focuses entirely on understanding the problem space through research, user interviews, and observation. We diverge to explore multiple problems, then converge on the most valuable one to solve. Only then do we move to the second diamond, where we diverge again to explore multiple solutions before converging on the best approach. This process prevents us from falling in love with our first idea and forces us to validate both the problem and solution. Teams using this approach spend less time building the wrong things and more time creating products users actually want.

The Double Diamond approach to Design Thinking

From Assumptions to Experiments

Every product decision starts with assumptions, but most teams treat assumptions like facts. We assume, for example, that users will switch their buying habits, prioritize flexibility over price, or will find our interface intuitive. These hidden assumptions carry invisible risks that can kill even the best-designed products. The key is making assumptions visible and then testing them quickly and cheaply. For example, suppose you have an assumption that "users care about flexibility". In that case, you can test this assumption by creating a hypothesis. An example hypothesis might be "If we offer flexible ticket options, then 60% of business travelers will choose them over cheaper alternatives, because they value flexibility more than cost." Then you can run a simple experiment to test and validate your assumptions.

Building a Culture of Discovery

Product discovery isn't a one-time activity but a continuous practice that can be embedded in your team's DNA. Start every project or product initiative by asking "what problem are we solving and how do we know it's worth solving?" Use techniques like user personas, journey mapping, and story mapping to gain a deep understanding of your users. Create prototypes to test ideas before committing to development. Most importantly, be willing to pivot, persevere, or kill ideas based on what you learn. The best product teams I've worked with make discovery as rigorous as their development practices.

Discovery work feels slower at first, but it actually accelerates delivery by ensuring you build the right things. When you validate problems and solutions upfront, you avoid the expensive cycle of building, launching, and then scrambling to fix what doesn't work. Your engineering team stays focused on valuable work instead of constantly changing direction. Users get products that actually solve their problems. And stakeholders see better business outcomes because resources go toward validated opportunities instead of gut feelings and assumptions.