A growth person's notes on why good products die

13 May 2026

Across all of my career in product growth, and all the teams, companies, and projects I worked with, we shipped enough things that died, and a few that didn’t.

For a long time I had a reason for each one. Too early. Too crowded. Sales didn’t get it. Bad quarter. Every excuse was true enough to let me sleep and useless enough to make me do it again. Then the pattern got too loud to ignore. The products that died weren’t worse than the ones that lived. Some were better. They didn’t lose to a better product. They lost to a better sentence.

Most good products die in the gap between what you built and what someone was already trying to buy.

You made a great answer to a question nobody was asking in those words. The thing works fine. It just never touches a want anyone already had. And you can’t feel that gap from the inside, because the day you build something you fall in love with what it is instead of what it does for someone else. So you go hunting for a product problem.

It isn’t a product problem. It’s a recognition problem. And recognition is made of words.

Everything below is what that cost me to learn:

A product is two things glued together: the thing you built, and the positioning you use to hand it to someone.

For years I obsessed over the first half and treated the second as an afterthought, the press release you write at the end, the landing page someone else can handle, the pitch deck that BD had vs. the marketing we were doing elsewhere.

That was backwards. The sentence was doing more work than the entire feature set:

it decided who showed up to even try the thing
it set what they compared us to the second they do
it picked who felt threatened enough to fight us
and who’s allowed to say yes without calling a meeting

So you can ship a perfect product into the wrong positioning and watch it suffocate. I have. That’s why now, when something good isn’t catching, I don’t start with the roadmap. I start with the words.

Here’s how the words usually do the killing.

Four ways I watched good things die

1. Death by grandiosity

This was the founder, sometimes it was me, who insisted on calling it the future of [category]. The revolution. The thing that changes everything.

It feels brave. It’s actually a trap, because the size of your claim is the size of the measuring stick you hand the world.

Your pitch sets the bar you’ll be graded against.

Promise the future and you’ll be judged against the future, a standard nothing on day one can clear. Promise “a slightly less annoying Tuesday” and you might actually beat it. The grand version doesn’t just risk disappointing people; it guarantees it, because you’ve defined success as a finished revolution while shipping a v1.

What I now flinch at:

“The next [iconic thing]” → you just volunteered to be compared to the one product you can’t beat yet.
“A new paradigm” → nobody buys a paradigm. They buy a small, specific relief.
Ambition belongs in the product, not the pitch. Big dreams, modest promises.

2. Death by jargon

This was the team that named the category after what we built instead of what the customer wanted. We led with the architecture, the mechanism, the clever bit, the noun we were proud of.

The problem turned out to be brutally simple:

Nobody has ever woken up wanting your system.
Nobody wants your virtual machine, your incentive model, or your beautiful new framework.
They want the outcome. Faster. Cheaper. One less thing to worry about.

When you sell the mechanism, you make the customer do the translation work, “okay, but what does this do for me?” and most of them won’t bother. They just leave. Every word of jargon is one more thing they have to decode before they can care.

3. Death by the education tax

Related, and sneakier. If your pitch requires you to first teach a new concept before the value lands, you’ve signed up to pay a tax on every single deal, forever.

Every sale now starts with a lecture.
Every customer needs to believe the category is real before they’ll consider you.
Your cycle balloons; your funnel leaks at a stage that shouldn’t even exist.

The best positioning I’ve ever shipped slotted straight into a folder the customer already had open in their head. The worst made them create a new folder first. Creating folders is expensive. You usually can’t afford it.

4. Death by talking to the wrong “yes”

The last one is about who you point the sentence at.

I’ve watched good products die because they were aimed at the most defended buyer in the building (the executive, the committee, the procurement gauntlet) that can say no a hundred different ways and yes only one. We’d spend a year courting the title with the most power to reject us.

Meanwhile the person who could’ve adopted us in an afternoon alone, no permission, no meeting, never heard a pitch built for them.

The biggest title is the hardest yes. The smallest user is the easiest one.

What I learned actually works

Flip every death and you get the playbook. None of it is about building more. All of it is about choosing better words and pointing them at the right person.

1. Name it after the want, not the build

Describe the outcome the customer already craves, in language they already use. The category name should land before you finish the sentence.

If they have to ask “wait, what is that?” you’ve already lost a beat you won’t get back.

2. Make boring a superpower

Counterintuitive, and it took me too long to believe it: the humble pitch usually wins. “Sound smaller than you secretly are” does two things at once. It lowers the bar you’ll be judged against, and it removes the threat that makes powerful incumbents want to crush you. Boring doesn’t get studied, doubted, or fought. Boring just gets adopted.

Be a revolution on the inside; sound like a utility on the outside.

3. Pick a villain they already hate (my all time fav)

Great positioning isn’t invention. It’s recognition.

You’re not teaching anyone a new desire. You’re naming one they already have and aiming it at an enemy they already resent, the slow process, the dumb fee, the tool everyone complains about. Do it right and demand isn’t created, it’s released. It was always there, trapped behind the wrong words.

4. Borrow trust instead of building it

For anyone risk-averse, trust is the actual product and everything else is implementation detail. You don’t earn it by being clever; you earn it by standing next to something they already trust, so saying yes to you feels like saying yes to something safe.

Borrowed credibility is THE distribution strategy.

5. Win the smallest yes

Build for the one person who can adopt you without asking anyone. Make the docs the storefront; let them reach value before a sales team is involved; then let that quiet usage grow into the big deal. You stop asking permission and start earning pull and pull, unlike permission, compounds.

Stuff I wish I’d known earlier

A few moves that aren’t the obvious flips but are what actually moved the needle once I stopped hiding:

Price is your loudest sentence.

A number tells people what shelf you’re on faster than any tagline. Cheap says “tool, don’t overthink it.” Expensive says “strategic, loop in your boss.” We usually mis-position products purely by mis-pricing them, charging tool money for a platform, or platform money for a thing people wanted to swipe a card for and forget. If the price and the pitch disagree, the price wins the argument. Every time.

Lead with the objection.

The thing you’re tempted to hide “it’s small”, “it only does one thing”, “it’s narrow” is usually the exact thing to say first. “It only does X” is a positioning gift: it tells the right person they’re safe and tells the wrong person to leave, which is the whole job. Hiding the limitation just means the customer discovers it later, at the worst possible moment, and feels lied to.

Sell the clock, not the adjective.

“You’ll feel it in five minutes” beats any superlative you can write. Time-to-first-value is the realest pitch you have, and it’s a check your onboarding has to be able to cash. If the value only shows up next quarter, no sentence will save you, go shorten the distance to the first “oh, nice.”

A few tools for the toolkit

Voice-of-customer mining. Read 20 sales calls, reviews, or support tickets and copy the exact phrases people use for their problem. Paste them into your headline verbatim. Your best copywriter is your customer; your job is transcription, not invention.
The swap test. Put a competitor’s logo on your homepage. If the page still reads true, your positioning says nothing, it’s generic. Rewrite until the page would be a lie in anyone else’s mouth.
The “so what?” ladder. Take any feature and ask “so what?” until you hit something a human actually feels, then write the headline from the bottom rung. (”Real-time sync” → so what → “you never lose work” → so what → “stop redoing the thing you already did.”)
The re-transmission test. (The one I’d keep if I could keep only one.) Positioning isn’t what you say, it’s what survives being repeated by someone who doesn’t care about you. Write the one sentence a user would Slack a coworker to explain you. If that sentence needs you in the room to make sense, it doesn’t scale. You haven’t shipped positioning until a stranger can re-pitch you correctly without you.

Fin.