(2025-03-13) Gilad Why Is Product So Hard Itamar

Itamar GIlad: Why Is Product So Hard? Building great products — ones that deliver high value to the customers and to the company — is extremely hard. This is evident from discussions I hold with product people, who regularly report not being able to create impact.

even 50% success rate is very high.

But why is product success so hard?

The answer is that product development faces three big core challenges that are extremely hard to deal with. We rarely talk about them openly

Challenge 1: Uncertainty, Complexity, and Constant Change

many assumptions, dependencies, friction points, and potential snafus

Solutions

Dealing with uncertainty is the area where we’ve made the most progress in recent years. Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Product Discovery

To embrace uncertainty we should let go of our production-oriented system of plan-and-execute in favor of a model that combines building with learning

We have to tackle uncertainty at every level: strategy, goals, roadmapping, and prioritization. We need to make research and discovery equal-rights citizens. (Quadruple-Loop Product Management)

Challenge 2: Divergent Needs and Misalignment

Think of your product as a spacecraft coasting across the universe. Like all space vessels, it has thrusters pointing in every direction to help propel and steer it,

If all goes well the the thrusters fire in sync and you sail smoothly. However, more often than not the computers are not in agreement on the destination

different needs and interest groups inside and outside the company. There are always these three “strong forces” acting on the product:

• The Market — Customers, users, and partners
• The Business — To prosper your company wants a product that will help it close deals, capture market share

but you often also have also these forces pulling and pushing on the product:

• The System — the software you’re building (the spacecraft in the analogy) has to be maintained, upgraded, and fitted with new technology
• The Company — your company needs to reduce costs, comply with laws and regulations
• Shareholders — investors and shareholders may want to steer the product in the direction that raises the short-term value

Employees and Managers

We intuitively think that finding a middle ground between all the worldviews creates the best solution. However compromise (which takes a lot of time and energy to achieve) rarely delivers the best decisions. Decision-by-committee can also amplify the problems of friction, politics, infighting, and constant escalations

Solutions

A good start is to put in place strategic context to align and focus the company: vision, mission, a strategy, and a small set of top metrics. (Strategic Context)

This entails being concrete, and saying No to a lot of things, which many leadership teams find very difficult.

To succeed we must strive to break the walls between the silos, reduce or eliminate departmental goals, and make the work truly multi-disciplinary. Common approaches include delegating most product decisions to product triads at different levels, partnering effectively with stakeholders, and transparently using evidence to back prioritization decisions.

Challenge 3: Org Culture

Culture includes the structure and processes of the company, as well as its guiding principles, philosophy and core beliefs

New approaches to product development are either rejected or are subverted to conform to the culture.

Solutions

Culture change is very hard.

Simply adopting new processes without updating the underlying belief system does not work (see OKRs in most companies).

The most successful tech companies care deeply about their culture and take an active approach to shaping it.

That’s not to say that bigtech culture is necessarily the best or should be copied. The thing to note is that these companies are willing to devote effort and resources to develop and maintain a culture that truly fits them and their needs. I feel more companies should do that

HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah argues that you should think of your culture as you would of a product:
Culture is a product and your people are its customers.

Shah, an engineer by training, takes a very product-like approach to culture development: it has to be built based on employee feedback, it has to have clear use cases and metrics, culture “features” have to be prioritized and pruned, “culture debt” has to be limited, culture is never “done”. Hubspot has an explicit culture code (which you can see here) which it regularly reviews with employees

However there’s a chicken-and-egg problem in applying this thinking to your own org — it won’t really work if the culture isn’t ready for it.