Half-Baked Product

I really enjoyed this fable of the product that’s built too quickly. I’m sure it’s extremely familiar to many of you. It’s the story of a startup that aims to build a next-generation oven. They get funding on the back of a pitch deck, then build the prototype. It’s a long way short of perfect, but is good enough to demonstrate. And then comes the uncomfortable discovery: if the oven only does two of the three things (bread, cakes, or pizza), the algorithm fails just 5% of the time. The engineer brings the proposal to the founder: let’s sacrifice one market and have a product that works. The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.” Next up is the hunt for sales. They quickly realising that the money comes from the enterprise market. And enterprise sales are based on promises, not on what the product actually does. So the feature requests stack up, every one of them urgent, in order to bring in the next…