A friend messaged me after reading my last post ( https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7477941614376599552/ ) on the founder who got sucked into the ‘feature trap’ (i.e the founder kept building more and more features in response to the product not finding traction).
The friend asked – “He was an inexperienced founder, right?” – No, not really.
In fact, the founder was one of the earliest employees of a startup that became a successful unicorn.
He had seen that startup struggle, grow and eventually succeed. He also grew into a CXO role in that unicorn.
This background actually makes his story more interesting.
How does someone with that much experience still end up building feature after feature while customers aren’t adopting the product?
My first reaction was a) Maybe he missed some important lessons in his previous company b) Maybe it was luck – the earlier startup succeeded despite making similar mistakes.
But after spending more time with him, this is what I learnt –
He knew the principles, yet he simply could not see them. Why? A couple of biases had crept in.
The first was vision induced confirmation bias.
He had a compelling picture of the future in his mind.
A world where every small business was digitally connected. Appointments, payments, inventory and accounting—all flowing through one system. It was an exciting vision.
The problem was that the excitement slowly stopped him from looking at reality of what his customers lived today. The severity of the bias increased when he had to sell this vision to investors, initial hires and even suppliers almost on a daily basis.
The second was the curse of knowledge.
Once you’ve experienced how elegant a connected system can be, it’s difficult to imagine why someone would still choose a note book and a pen or excel. His thoughts, conversations were all about workflows, architecture, automation, integrations and other technicalities.
He had become better at building a beautiful product than understanding the customer.
In summary, the real problem was not the feature trap like I concluded in the previous post. It was losing the ability to see reality without the filter & biases of own conviction.
That could also be why product building can be difficult.
The challenge therefore is not having ‘enough conviction’ on your idea but in knowing when that conviction is preventing you from seeing what customers and others around you are trying to tell you.
Have you ever caught yourself becoming more attached to your solution than to the problem you were trying to solve?
