The Failure Was Not the Product. It Was the Thinking.

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There was a period early in my career when I worked on a product that never quite became anything, though at the time it looked as if it might. Work was constant. Conversations were frequent. Features were always in motion. If you walked into the room on any given day, you would have seen a team that appeared busy, engaged, and committed to building something of value.

The founder, however, had a habit that shaped everything else. He would arrive with new ideas, often compelling in isolation, sometimes urgent in tone, and almost always positioned as necessary adjustments. Direction shifted frequently. What had been agreed upon at the start of the week could lose relevance before the week ended. Entire segments of work were abandoned midway, not because they had been completed, but because something else had taken priority.

At first, I responded the way most product managers are trained to respond. I tried to impose structure. I refined the roadmap. I organized priorities more carefully. I asked questions in an attempt to anchor decisions. When that did not work, I pushed harder. When that also failed, frustration began to set in.

What unsettled me most was not the inconsistency itself, but the reaction of the engineers. They were composed in a way that felt out of place given the circumstances. When I outlined plans for the week, the response was often a simple question. Is that what the founder wants? It sounded routine, almost procedural, but there was something underneath it that I did not understand at the time.

The project continued like this for months. Work accumulated without ever forming a stable direction. Engineers came and went. When they left, they often recommended replacements, as if the system had normalized its own instability. Compensation was inconsistent, and the role itself was treated as something secondary. For many of them, it was simply an additional stream of income that did not require full commitment.

For a long time, I carried a quiet sense of responsibility for how that project unfolded. When products fail, the instinct in many organizations is to look first at product management or marketing. It is assumed that something was missed, something was poorly executed, or something was misunderstood. I believed, at least partially, that I had not done enough to prevent what happened.

It was only much later, after spending time in founder environments and structured accelerator programs, that I began to understand what I had been part of.

The issue was not a lack of effort. It was not even a lack of talent. The problem was that there was no stable source of direction.

A product is not simply built through execution. It is shaped by a sequence of decisions. When the person responsible for those decisions operates without consistency or without a grounded understanding of the problem, every part of the organization absorbs that instability. Processes can be introduced. Frameworks can be applied. None of these will compensate for a system where the core direction changes faster than the work can settle.

What I had interpreted as disengagement from the engineering team was, in fact, an adjustment. They had learned not to invest too deeply in any given direction because experience had shown them that direction would likely change. They continued to deliver, but without attaching themselves to the outcome in any meaningful way.

This pattern is not uncommon, particularly in environments where compensation is uncertain and long term incentives are weak. In such settings, individuals adapt quickly to the conditions around them. Commitment becomes conditional. Effort becomes measured.

The deeper issue, however, is not about individual behavior. It is about how decisions are made.

Many early stage teams operate without a clear understanding of how they arrive at what they choose to build. Features are introduced based on opinion rather than evidence. Roadmaps are filled with activity, but there is little connection between that activity and any form of validated learning. When asked why something is being built, the answers often rely on reasoning that sounds persuasive but does not hold up under examination.

There are, in practice, only a few reliable ways to justify building anything. One is through direct insight derived from observing users, studying behavior, and identifying consistent patterns. Another is through clearly defined assumptions that are being tested in a structured way. A third is through existing demand that has already been demonstrated in some form. Outside of these, most decisions fall into speculation.

Speculation is not inherently wrong. It is often necessary in the early stages. The problem arises when speculation is treated as certainty, and when there is no mechanism to test whether it is correct.

In one instance not too long ago, I worked with a product team that had spent months building features without any form of validation. They were effectively recreating an existing product, but with additional layers that had not been tested or even properly defined. When I asked why certain features were being developed, the responses were framed as justifications rather than explanations. The team was trying to convince me that the features made sense, rather than demonstrating how they had arrived at those decisions.

This distinction matters. A product team should not need to persuade anyone that what they are building is reasonable. The reasoning should be evident in the data, the research, or the hypotheses being tested.

When none of these are present, what remains is a form of decision making driven by intuition, imagination, and, in some cases, optimism. These are not sufficient foundations for building something that is expected to last.

There is another layer to this problem that is often overlooked, particularly by founders.

Every meaningful problem exists within an environment. It is shaped by context, by behavior, by constraints that are not always visible from a distance. To understand a problem is not simply to describe it. It is to engage with the conditions in which it exists.

Founders who are not connected to this environment tend to operate from abstraction. They interpret the problem rather than experiencing it. As a result, the solutions they propose may appear coherent internally, but they do not align with how the problem is actually lived by the people affected by it.

This is especially relevant in African markets, where assumptions borrowed from other contexts often fail. Infrastructure is different. Trust operates differently. Payment systems behave differently. Informal networks play a significant role in how people solve problems. A product that ignores these factors may function technically, but it will struggle to find relevance.

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Understanding this requires more than desk research. It requires direct engagement. It requires speaking to people, observing behavior, and, in some cases, participating in the environment where the problem exists. Without this, teams are left to build based on second hand interpretations, which rarely capture the full picture.

The accessibility of modern tools has made this issue more pronounced. It is now possible to build a functional product in a matter of hours. Interfaces can be generated quickly. Systems can be assembled with minimal effort. The barrier to creating something has been significantly reduced.

What has not changed is the difficulty of creating something that people actually need.

The speed at which a product can be built does not reduce the complexity of understanding whether it should be built in the first place. In many cases, it increases the risk of building the wrong thing faster.

This creates a situation where founders and teams mistake the ability to build for evidence that they are on the right path. They move quickly, but without a clear connection to the problem they intend to solve.

There is also a tendency to focus heavily on external forms of investment. Funding, talent, tools, and infrastructure are all important, but they are not sufficient. What is often missing is a different kind of investment, one that is less visible but more critical.

It is the investment in thinking.

This includes the effort required to define problems accurately, to question assumptions, to test ideas in a structured way, and to engage with reality even when it contradicts initial expectations. It requires patience, discipline, and a willingness to accept that early ideas are often incomplete or incorrect.

In the absence of this, teams may continue to build, but the work does not accumulate in a meaningful way. Each iteration replaces the last without building upon it.

Within such systems, the individuals who make the greatest difference are not necessarily those who execute tasks most efficiently, but those who understand the problem deeply and can translate that understanding into decisions. These individuals are both willing to do the work and capable of doing it effectively.

This combination is not as common as it might seem. Many people are willing but lack the necessary skill. Others are capable but not fully engaged. When both are present in the same individual, they provide a form of stability that the system might otherwise lack.

In many cases, however, these individuals are undervalued or overlooked. When they leave, the organization often loses not just a contributor, but a source of continuity in how the problem is understood.

Looking back at that early experience, it becomes clear that what failed was not simply a product. It was a way of working that never established a reliable connection to reality.

Startups rarely fail because they lack activity. They fail because the activity is not guided by learning. They fail because decisions are made without a clear understanding of why they are being made. They fail because the responsibility for defining direction is not exercised with the level of rigor that the work demands.

When this happens, it is tempting to assign blame to the most visible functions, product, marketing, engineering. But the origin of the problem often sits elsewhere.

The role of a founder extends beyond generating ideas. It includes shaping how decisions are made, how knowledge is validated, and how the organization engages with the problem it seeks to solve. When this role is not carried out with discipline, the effects are felt across every part of the company.

Building something that lasts requires more than the ability to create. It requires a sustained effort to understand, to test, and to align with the realities of the environment in which the product will exist.

Without that, the work may continue, but it will not move forward in any meaningful sense.

PS: Visit Product Slice HQ for more resources and Product Nerve AI for startup idea validation and tools.

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