The main reason product strategy fails
-
Moe Hachem
- July 5, 2025
The main reason product strategy fails?
We keep asking what can we build instead of why should we build it at all.
This week, I worked through a case study on global vaccine production.
On the surface, it was about manufacturing speed, capital investment, and technical capability.
And it’s tempting to stop there, but that’s only one side of the coin.
The other side? That’s where you ask:
- Who wants to scale? Not “just who can?”
- Who benefits?
- Who doesn’t?
That simple shift reframed the entire problem.
Back to product
Too often, whether we’re launching an MVP, building a feature, or scaling a platform, we jump straight into:
- “What can we build?"
- "What do we have the capability for?"
- "Who’s the biggest competitor?”
All valid questions.
But the ones we forget to ask are the ones that actually shape outcomes:
- “Who has the incentive to act?"
- "What’s the structural advantage here?"
- "What happens after we launch?”
The lesson
In the case, one lesson was clear:
It doesn’t matter how deep your pockets are if you have no incentive to put skin in the game.
Thinking like a strategist means looking beyond capabilities and into the invisible forces that shape systems: incentives, positioning, asymmetries.
That’s what turns a product decision into a business one.
And that’s the difference between building features, and building leverage.
