The I Love My Product Trap: Are you building for yourself or your customer?

04/12/2025

Product teams love conceptualizing and launching great products. Engineering teams love solving problems and building great products. Businesses love the foundation for growth and revenue that great products provide.

So why have manufacturing and technology sectors come to accept a 50-80% failure rate for new product ideas (1)? Looking at the Consumer Packaged Goods industry, a Nielsen report claims up to 85% of products will cease to exist in 2 years (2). And those statistics don't even consider the fact that around 90% of startups fail (3,4). This provides a startling reminder that your great idea may not be as great as you think.

Why Europe Is Struggling with High-Tech Startups

23.03.2025

Recently, I listened to a thought-provoking podcast discussing a sobering trend: the decline of high-tech startup activity in Europe. The conversation shed light on a topic that doesn’t get enough attention—why high-potential, innovative ideas in fields like deep tech, AI, biotech, or advanced manufacturing are increasingly struggling to get off the ground on European soil.

How to Build a Product Development Process that Scales for SMBs

03/12/2025

As SMBs grow, their product development processes often fail to scale. This is especially challenging in phases of fast growth, such as a scale-up or small business who may have been more successful than anticipated over time and never had their processes streamlined. A World Economic Forum report indicates that 67% of SMB executives worldwide cite expansion among their main challenges, specifically highlighting issues such as scaling operations (1).

Efficiency Over Overwork: Why Reducing Waste is Key to Productivity

03/10/2025

In today’s business world, the quest for higher productivity too often ends up in a debate about longer working days, home versus remote work and how to motivate employees to put in more time - just for this project (yeah, right). There's a pervasive notion that we must work longer and harder to be successful, however, this mindset overlooks a more crucial factor: working efficiently is far more important than simply putting in more hours.

Building a Product Roadmap: 5 Factors SMBs Need to Consider

03/03/2025

There are a few like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs who, instead of seeking out what the market wanted, successfully innovated and changed our lives (Ford's famous statement 'If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses' is a testament to this). For most of us, however, not aligning our products and strategy to what the market is telling us would be a recipe for disaster.