You cannot afford to ignore early warning signs

You cannot afford to ignore early warning signs of organization and system failure - The costs are far too high.

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve shared patterns that predict expensive product mistakes:

• Strategy driven by demo dates instead of customer problems
• Building on weak foundations because they look good
• Excluding the people with the most context from decisions
• Performance processes without clear expectations
• Shipping features before validating they solve real problems

None of these patterns are unusual.

What separates healthy organizations from struggling ones is how they respond when they spot these signs.

Real costs I’ve documented:

• One company spent $180K rebuilding a pricing system no customer asked for - just to have something to announce at a conference.
• Another burned 6 months trying to merge incompatible systems because “best of both worlds” sounded good in the board deck.

The real damage wasn’t the money or time. It was what these episodes revealed about how decisions were made, how expertise was valued, and how strategy was formed.

If any of this feels familiar: Treat it as data, not drama.

The earlier you spot these patterns, the less expensive the course correction.
The later you notice, the more you’ll spend unwinding decisions that should never have been made.

I’ve written a full breakdown of these patterns (and what healthy organizations do differently), and I’ve also built a diagnostic that helps you identify these patterns in your own organization before they become expensive. Check the link.

Product Organization Health Diagnostic