I've worked on digital products for 10 years, and I've seen a lot of things go wrong. Here's my top 5 of things that ruin product companies.

Lack of focus

There's so much to do when you build a product: Add features, scale to more users, integrate with partners, the list goes on. The temptation for product leadership is to do a bit of everything:

• Let's put Team A on Feature X, because an important enterprise customer asked for it.
• We really need something fancy to show to investors, so let's also put Team B on Feature Y.
• Oh, and our devs have been complaining about technical debt, so let's also make this a quarter of refactoring.

In the end, nothing works. The feature for the enterprise client isn't ready on time, feature Y for end users is half-baked, and the refactoring... didn't happen.

When you talk to company leadership about the lack of focus, some will point to the pressure from outside: The corporation that recently acquired us, the fast competitor, or new regulations and upcoming audits (especially in Health and Finance). We have to do it all, otherwise we're screwed! Well, are we? Sure, we have to conform to regulations. But in order to achieve this, Feature Y just might have to wait. What good is it when it's half-baked?

Making tough calls on where to invest is the job of the leadership. If they can't decide, they failed.

Product teams learn this very quickly. Show them an unrealistic roadmap for a few times, and they will demand more focus. Keep doing it, and they will stop caring. They've learned: What leadership wants is not realistic anyway. There's no faster way to wear down the product teams' ambition.

-> Radical focus

-> Shape Up

How to notice this when you're joining a new team:

Strategy is poorly communicated

Strategy is a plan for how to be successful. It's a bet on how the world is changing, and how the product should evolve in reaction to it. Most businesses have a strategy. What I noticed is that some are extremely bad at clearly talking to their teams about it.

One company I worked for had strategy related questions at nearly every all-hands meeting. Every week, people asked why certain priorities had changed, projects had been cancelled, or teams were growing. The problem was not that people were asking questions – that's a good thing –, but that the questions were repeating.

Had the company leadership been more clear on the strategic goals of the company, and how teams were contributing, then many decisions would have been self explanatory. Instead, leaders got impatient, and sometimes dismissive of the questions. The mood of the all-hands meetings got tense. The questions kept coming, only anonymously.

-> Inspired

How to notice this when you're joining a new team:

Dishonesty is rewarded

There's a few things that we should never do to each other: Lie, be hurtful, manipulate, backstab. These are asshole moves. It has nothing to do with tech products, but with being human. It's true even when the company is under pressure. Even when competitors do it.

Times of growth are risky in that regard: When teams grow, there's a need for people who give guidance to others, organise the work and support individual growth. New roles emerge. This is a crucial task for leadership: Who they put into these new leadership positions, and how, has an impact on team culture. They must choose people with integrity, and coach them to be good leaders. When leaders tolerate indecent behaviour, or even reward it with promotions, the culture erodes.

Company leadership has to be explicit about moral standards. They have to speak up when people cross the line. And most importantly, leaders have to live it. Some examples where this went wrong:

• A leader talks badly to his team of middle managers about a partnering team, but doesn't have to the guts to criticise them openly. He teaches his team that bitching is ok.
• A person is applying for a leadership position and discredits his competitor by talking badly about her. He also tries to intimidate her by saying other people talk badly about her. He's creating a culture of backstabbing and fear.
• A leader is aware of the backstabbing of the team member, but promotes him nonetheless. He teaches the company that it is ok to talk behind other peoples' backs. In fact, he shows that indecent behaviour is a road to success.

-> Radical candor, directness

How to notice this when you're joining a new team:

• There are more discussions about people and roles than about the product.

Teams get lost

We've known for a while that tech products are best built by empowered teams, rather than managed top-down. Teams can best navigate the uncertainties of complex technology and markets when they are tasked to achieve outcomes, but have freedom in finding the solution.

It can be tricky to finde the right degree of freedom. In fact, I saw that many product teams get lost in the freedom they have. They shipper along for months without delivering or even validating a product. It happens usually with the best of intentions, e.g. understand the customer better, or get the technical foundation right. Along the way, they lose sight of delivering timely.

Why? It usually boils down to one of two problems:

1. Unclear outcome and timeline. Teams have to know what kind of change their product should cause in user behaviour or attitude (and how to measure it, see below). They should also have a rough plan on when to have a validated concept and deliver a working product.
2. Lack of expertise in the team. Building product comes down to making good decisions: Technical, design-wise, business-wise. You can do a lot with trial and error, but with complex products, expertise goes a long way in keeping the team focused. In complex products, can be very helpful to have an experienced tech lead as well as design lead on board.

Both are leadership mistakes. Product leaders have to give product teams the right guidance, and they also have to assemble the right team for the task.

-> Empoweredd

No way to measure / org changes without checking

-> Lean Startup, measure metric