The Product Failed Due to the Decision Nobody Remembers Making

Most product failures have an official explanation.

The market wasn’t ready. The pricing was off. Sales didn’t execute. Engineering took too long. The competitive landscape shifted.

These explanations aren’t wrong per se. They’re just not complete. Because underneath most of them, if you trace the initiative back far enough, there’s a decision, or a set of decisions, or a lack of decisions, that shaped everything that followed. A decision made casually, in a planning meeting, through accumulated small additions, through the path of least resistance.

Who, exactly, are we studying? Or as I like to informally ask, “Whose life are we trying to make better as a result of this project?”

That question has a name. The Market Lens is the explicit definition of five things: the company conducting the study, the product category in scope, the specific person performing the job, the conditions under which they perform it, and the fundamental goal they are trying to accomplish. Together those five elements create a complete picture of the customer situation the initiative is actually built to serve.

It sounds like a research parameter. It is actually a strategic one.

And all too often, it gets answered the way a lot of consequential things get answered: without anyone recognizing it as consequential.

Why This Decision Gets Dismissed (Or Missed)

There’s a reasonable explanation for why leaders don’t treat market scoping as a strategic decision.

It produces no immediate deliverable. It doesn’t feel like progress. The consequences of getting it wrong are distant and indirect. And there’s always pressure to move. (“Let’s just start talking to customers” sounds practical. Which more often implies, “What are you guys waiting on?”) It feels like momentum to begin the interviewing part. Compared to that, spending another week defining who those customers should be feels like planning overhead. An apparent waste of time.

So the scope gets set a bit quickly, without deep thought. A geography gets included because someone in the room has relationships there. A stakeholder type gets added because a VP wants coverage. And another. And another. A second customer segment joins because excluding it feels risky. Each addition sounds minor. Each one is presented as a small expansion.

And so, the fun and chaos begins.

What a Bad Market Lens Actually Does

Here’s what most teams don’t see until it’s too late.

The Market Lens doesn’t just shape the research. It shapes everything the research touches. And the research touches everything.

Who you define as the market determines who gets recruited. Recruitment determines what you hear. What you hear determines which needs get prioritized. Prioritized needs shape the concept. The concept drives specifications. Specifications become the product. The product enters a market.

That’s not a research process. That’s a business decision chain. And if the first link is wrong, every subsequent link pulls in the wrong direction. Competently, diligently, expensively, in the wrong direction.

The specific danger is this: when a lens tries to cover too many customer types, contexts, or jobs simultaneously, the findings don’t describe multiple customers clearly. They describe an averaged customer who does not actually exist. Important differences disappear inside aggregate scores and combined need lists. The result looks precise. It represents no one.

The cost of breadth is depth. And depth is exactly what sound product decisions require.

The cruelest part is that a bad Market Lens doesn’t announce itself. A bad feature is visible. A missed deadline is visible. A bad market definition hides inside every decision that follows it. Each subsequent decision appears locally reasonable. Each one references the work that came before rather than the flawed foundation beneath it.

By the time the product is in market and the results are disappointing, the original decision is 18 months old. Ancient history. Buried. Nobody connects it to what went wrong because nobody remembers it as a decision.

So the post-mortem looks at execution. At pricing. At the sales team. At timing. The organization assigns blame, makes adjustments, and moves on. Without ever learning the thing that would actually change the outcome next time.

How the Market Lens Goes Wrong

It rarely happens through negligence. It happens through a set of completely understandable failures that compound quietly.

In my experience, the most common is scope creep through addition. Leaders hear “market scoping” and think research administration. And there’s a discomfort with leaving someone out. So when a leader suggests including another geography, another customer type, another stakeholder, it sounds like inclusion rather than multiplication. This is a massive error. Each addition may require separate recruiting, separate analysis, separate survey representation. Scope doesn’t grow incrementally. It grows multiplicatively, exponentially. The result is thin understanding across many populations instead of deep understanding of any one.

A second failure is false alignment. Every person in the room says “the market” (or “the customer”) and believes they’re in agreement. Sales pictures large accounts. Marketing pictures a segment. Engineering pictures an application. Leadership pictures a growth platform. The alignment is an illusion. The truth will surface as conflict later, in the findings, in prioritization, in positioning decisions, when it’s far more expensive to resolve. Or when someone says, “We can’t do anything with this.”

A third is relevance mistaken for coherence. A buying committee may include users, economic buyers, operators, and approvers. They’re all relevant. But they may be performing entirely different jobs, in entirely different contexts, defining success in entirely different ways. Combining their evidence doesn’t produce a richer picture. It produces the averaged customer again. A composite built from blended assumptions that the product will then be designed to serve.

And underneath all of it, often, chaos is quietly shaping the answer instead of targeted strategic ambition.

The Questions Worth Asking Before the First Interview

The fix is not a more elaborate process. It’s treating the market definition as the set of strategic decisions that it actually is, and asking the hard questions before any recruiting begins.

Can your team answer these five questions clearly and consistently?

Who is the company conducting this study, and what capabilities and constraints does that create? What is the product category, defined the way customers naturally think about it? Who specifically is the job executor, and are the people we’re including actually performing the same job? What are the conditions under which that job occurs, and do those conditions create meaningfully different needs? And what is the fundamental, solution-agnostic goal the customer is trying to accomplish?

If different people in the room give different answers, the lens isn’t set. And if the lens isn’t set, everything that follows is building on uncertain ground.

DISCOVER, the first book in the Prismatic Product System, treats the Market Lens as the foundation of the entire discovery process, for exactly this reason. Every job map, every interview, every success criterion, and every strategic insight generated downstream is only as reliable as the lens that defined the scope.

The Real Risk

Companies rarely decide to build the wrong product.

They get there sort of accidentally. They broaden the opportunity. They combine groups that should stay separate. They smooth over disagreements because momentum feels like progress. And they end up guessing, despite the research. Or they execute well against a target they defined poorly.

The Market Lens is not a research planning exercise. Well, actually it is. But it’s more than that. It is also where strategy meets action. And like most foundational decisions, the cost of getting it wrong doesn’t show up where the decision was made.

It shows up later, in a post-mortem, with the wrong explanation.

What It Actually Requires

The Market Lens doesn’t require a new methodology. It requires the same rigor leaders already apply to decisions they take seriously.

When a company evaluates an acquisition, it models the consequences. When it sets pricing, it pressure tests the assumptions. When it makes a significant hire, it slows down and asks hard questions, because the cost of getting it wrong is visible and attributable.

The Market Lens deserves exactly that quality of attention. Not because it’s complicated, but because the consequences of getting it wrong are severe, delayed, and almost never traced back to the original decision.

That means sitting in the room long enough to surface the disagreements that are already there. It means listening carefully when someone questions the scope, because that question is usually right. It means following each addition to its logical conclusion: if we include this group, what does that require, what does it cost, and what does it dilute? It means asking not just who we want to study, but whether studying them together will produce findings we can actually act on.

Treat this as the strategic decision it is. The organizations that build the right products aren’t the ones with the best research methods. They’re the ones that decided, clearly and deliberately, who they were building for before they built anything at all.

If you want a practical framework for building a Market Lens the right way, that work is the starting point of DISCOVER, the first book in the Prismatic Product System.