Product strategy is now the bottleneck: building software is easier

There’s a new discussion on product strategy making a pretty straightforward case: software teams can now build and ship a lot faster with code generation, rapid prototyping, and automated testing, but deciding what actually deserves to be built is turning into the bigger bottleneck for product teams.

The argument is that as building gets cheaper, product judgment gets harder to find. The numbers behind that are ugly: 42% of startups still fail because they misread demand, 70% to 80% of new consumer packaged goods fail, 95% of new products fall short of expectations, and about 80% of software features are rarely used or never used at all.

The discussion also points to MIT-cited research showing a surge in new mobile apps as automated coding spreads. User attention, though, isn’t expanding at the same pace, so teams are competing less on shipping speed and more on relevance, habit, and whether people keep coming back.

If you work in product, this is worth reading because behavior data is starting to carry more weight. Product teams can see what users return to, where they get stuck, and where they abandon tasks, and repeat use says more than surveys or launch-day curiosity.

You can read the full discussion online.