The story goes like this:
- A team of smart people lock themselves in a room.
- They grind for months, sometimes years.
- They launch a product.
- And nothing happens.
No customers. No revenue. No traction.
Everyone in tech has seen it. Some have lived it. The pain cuts deep because the team worked hard. But they worked in isolation.
The hidden graveyard
CB Insights analyzed hundreds of startup post-mortems. The top cause of death was simple, “No market need”. 42% of failures blamed this reason.
That’s not just a startup problem. McKinsey looked at new product launches across industries. More than 40% failed to hit even basic goals.
These aren’t bad ideas. They’re isolated builds.
Nobody asked the difficult questions early:
- Who will pay for this?
- Why now?
- How do we reach them?
Without answers, the product graveyard fills up.
What isolation costs
The cost isn’t just money. It’s wasted quarters, damaged morale, and broken trust.
One engineering director told me about a two-year build that died within weeks.
“People cried,” he said. “We’d poured ourselves into it. Leadership just said shut it down.”
The bill was $15 million. The bigger loss was time. Competitors shipped something smaller and uglier, but customers bought it. Morale never fully recovered.
Why teams still build blind
So why does this keep happening?
Isolation feels efficient. Fewer, meetings, stakeholders stay out of the way, engineers get “focus time.”
It’s also ego. Teams convince themselves they know the customer better than the customer knows themselves. Demos go well, so they assume that means demand.
It doesn’t. Admiration is not adoption.
And inside many organizations, incentives push the wrong way. Roadmaps reward output. Promotions reward delivery.
Nobody asks if what shipped actually sold.
The false comfort of the “big reveal”
There’s a cultural myth that surprise launches impress the market. The reality is surprises usually flop. Products don’t go viral by accident. Distribution beats features almost every time.
Take Juicero, the $700 Wi-Fi juicer.
- It raised $120 million.
- The launch was slick.
- The market reaction was brutal.
- Nobody needed a $700 device to squeeze a juice bag by hand.
The company died within months.
The antidote: go-to-market discipline
A go-to-market strategy is not bureaucracy, it’s a safety net. It forces the questions teams avoid.
- Who exactly is the buyer?
- What problem hurts enough for them to pay?
- How do we reach them repeatedly at scale?
- What does success look like in numbers?
Without this work, you’re gambling. With it, you’re running controlled experiments.
Gartner calls GTM a plan for how a company reaches customers and achieves advantage.
In practice, it means sales, product, and marketing are in the same room from day one.
What it looks like in the field
One SaaS company I worked with had been shipping features for a year with flat adoption. Sales hated the roadmap, marketing didn’t know what to say.
They stopped, ran 50 paid interviews, and discovered the product solved a niche problem for mid-market finance teams.
- They cut half the backlog, rewrote the positioning, and launched a pilot priced at $5,000 per seat.
- The first three customers closed within six weeks.
- Not because the product changed, but because the story and buyer focus did.
That’s what GTM discipline does, it aligns the build with the buy.
How leaders can break isolation
- Demand proof of demand.
Pre-orders, pilots, or paid trials. Admiration doesn’t count. - Shift incentives.
Reward adoption and revenue, not features rolled out. - Expose teams to customers.
Engineers and designers should hear real complaints. - Cut big bets into small bets.
Launch smaller, learn faster, scale only when signals are strong. - Keep GTM at the table.
Sales and marketing should not be downstream. They’re partners in discovery.
The bottom line
When teams build in isolation, they confuse effort with value. They burn capital and morale on products nobody buys.
The fix is not more features, it’s early, disciplined, go-to-market work.
Because a product isn’t real until someone pays for it.
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Sources and further reading:
CB Insights, “The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail.” CB Insights
Harvard Business Review, “Why Most Product Launches Fail.” Harvard Business Review
McKinsey, “How to make sure your next product or service launch drives growth.” McKinsey & Company
Gartner, “Go-to-Market Strategy Framework.” Gartner
Clayton Christensen summaries on product failure rates.
