04/12/2025
Anthony Garetto
Andreas Schweiger
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.
While there are a number of factors influencing these high failure rates, the first and most foundational hurdle that must be overcome, is to make sure you have a product customers are willing to pay for. That means avoiding the 'I Love My Product Trap''.
The 'I Love My Product Trap'
One of the core reasons for these failures is often attributed to companies not engaging sufficiently with their target consumers during the ideation and development process. Even when this engagement does take place, companies often miss the mark or filter the input through the lens of confirmation bias - taking away the key points that confirm their hypothesis instead of objectively extracting the underlying need.
We call this phenomena the "I Love My Product" trap, and it is one of the easiest and slipperiest slopes to sabotaging the success of your product and business. It occurs when organizations, often unknowingly, prioritize their own vision or beliefs over the actual needs and preferences of their customers. It is incredibly common, difficult to avoid and plagues even the most seasoned product managers and customer centric companies.
Remember the Amazon Fire Phone? If you said no, you are not alone. Launched in 2014 it boasted innovative new features (like dynamic perspective display) but was criticized for its high price and lack of essential apps which lead to it's discontinuation within a year. Even Amazon, a company whose success is attributed to customer centricity, sometimes fails to accurately gauge consumer expectations (5).
Let's discuss some of the root causes.
Root Causes
We've already established that failing to deliver a product that serves the need of the customer can come from neglecting thorough market research altogether, ignoring learnings or filtering feedback in a subjective way to support our hypothesis or pre-conceived notions. Among the common root causes are:
1) Resource Constraints
Some businesses perceive customer research as too time-consuming and costly, leading them to bypass this crucial step and develop their products and roadmap based on the strongest product or engineering team members opinions. It is often seen as more efficient and less costly to establish a well-informed roadmap and just start 'doing' based on their input. In the long run this can be a critical failure resulting in a product flop.
2) Overconfidence in Internal Vision
We all tend to become enamored with our own ideas, assuming we inherently understand the market and that our great product idea doesn't need external validation. While deep domain expertise helps get the direction right, the success of the product often comes down to finer points around the workflow, trends and true priorities that need to be validated. Maybe this is a problem with your customers, but maybe they have higher priorities they need to allocate funds to.
3) Fear of Negative Feedback
Engaging with customers and testing your idea can sometimes yield unfavorable insights requiring a dramatic change to the concept or the need to scrap it altogether. No one wants to hear this, particularly if you want to introduce something revolutionary or if you have already promoted the concept internally. Some organizations and egos prefer to avoid feedback altogether.
4) Industry Constraints
The amount of customer feedback required and available can depend on the industry. A semiconductor capital equipment company that serves 10-20 customers in a B2B setting is much different than a sneaker company that serves tens or hundreds of thousands of customers. There are vastly different customer pool sizes as well as willingness to provide feedback and share information. This can steer some companies to the false belief that customer input is neither possible nor needed.
5) Confirmation Bias
The most challenging situation to deal with, and core of the 'I Love My Product' trap is when you actually have performed customer research, but not in an objective, unbiased manner. Even the best of us fall prey to this. It is human nature to place more weight on comments that support our own viewpoints and less weight on those that contradict them.
Best Practices
Ensuring a product's success requires meticulous attention to gathering customer requirements and fostering customer centricity. Here are some expert tips that can help you avoid ending up in the forgotten product abyss:
1) Check your ego
Before implementing any best practices, the belief that you inherently know what your customers need must be thrown out the window. I don't care if you are a seasoned product executive with decades in the same industry, your great idea is not a great fit for everyone. Every customer is in a unique business and operational situation and new technologies, processes and best practices are constantly being developed. Be humble in what you know and hungry in your quest for what you don't.
2) Know your product ABC's
As a product person you should 'Always Be Collecting' requirements and data points form your customers. (stolen from the iconic phrase"Always Be Closing"(Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992) which has become a widely used mantra in sales). Every, and I mean EVERY, interaction with a customer, partner or end user should be an opportunity to add a data point or new insight. Train yourself to think this way.
3) Try to disprove your hypothesis
In statistics, we try todisproveour hypothesis based on the concept offalsifiability (introduced by philosopher Karl Popper) which helps prevent biases in interpreting data. If we try toproveour hypothesis, we may selectively look for evidence that supports our claim while ignoring contradictory data (confirmation bias). By attempting to disprove our own idea, we ensure a more objective and rigorous approach to hypothesis testing and mitigate confirmation bias. Force yourself to look for evidence DISPROVING your hypothesis.
4) Implement Continuous Feedback Loops
Regularly collected customer feedback is useless if you don't make continuously analyzing and distilling the information a part of the product lifecycle. This often leads to small adaptations that have a big impact over time. These mechanisms can be incorporated directly in your roadmapping process or set as a dedicated meeting structure. Bake continuous improvement into your governance.
Conclusion
One of the most frequent causes of product failure is not having enough objective focus on customer insights. Whether organizations feel the effort is too much and time is too short, that they know best or if confirmation bias blinds them to the real needs, the outcome is the same. A combination of accepting you don't know everything and training yourself to always collect evidence is a crucial first step. Trying to actively disprove your hypothesis as well as baking feedback loops into your process are additional steps that can help concretize the path to a customer centric organization.
3 https://explodingtopics.com/blog/startup-failure-stats/
4 https://www.embroker.com/blog/startup-statistics/
5 https://www.formpl.us/blog/history-of-12-survey-market-research-disasters/