Why your team keeps shipping products nobody buys

For almost a decade, I ran product teams with one strong belief: discovery comes before building. Always.

I used an extended double diamond model. Build foundation. Set priorities. Discover. Define and validate. Build and release. Measure. It was thorough. Sometimes slow. But it worked. And inside that process, something was happening that I never explicitly named or gave credit to.

We were creating alignment on go-to-market before anyone wrote a single line of code.

When we researched, we were also asking: who is this for and why would they care? When we involved Product Marketing from discovery onwards, we were pressure-testing positioning before we had a product to position. When leadership set priorities together, they were making explicit bets about what the market wanted and what the business could win.

This is the cross-functional RACI I used for years:

I thought I was being disciplined about discovery. Looking back, I was accidentally creating GTM alignment. The process was doing the leadership work for me.

Then AI arrived. And everything I believed got tested.

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What I keep seeing now

I work with product leaders at scale-ups. And social media screams the same story loud and on repeat. In the past months, I have watched the same thing happen again and again.

A team moves fast. They use AI to prototype in days what used to take months. They skip discovery because building feels faster than researching. They ship. And then the product sits there. Nobody buys it. Nobody shares it. Nobody can quite explain what it is or who it is for.

I keep seeing posts that say “I’ve built a product.” And I always think: so what? That’s where the hard part starts.

The products that fail are not necessarily badly built. They are often well-crafted. Sometimes even beautiful. But nobody ever seriously asked who would buy them, why they would switch from what they already use, or how to reach them. Those questions used to live inside discovery. When teams remove discovery, they remove the questions with it. And they don’t notice until it’s too late.

This is the GTM gap. And underneath it is almost always the same leadership problem: nobody explicitly aligned on who owns the market question. Everyone assumed someone else had it. Nobody did.

That assumption is part of the Alignment Tax.

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What the left side of the diamond was actually doing

Look at my now seven-year-old double diamond model, which I proudly introduced in every new company I joined as a leader. The left side, which covers foundation, priorities and discovery, is where most of the people are involved before the product takes shape. Leadership sets direction. Product managers and designers lead the research. Data analysts inform the decisions. And Product Marketing is involved but not yet leading.

That left side was slow. I know because I ran it. You could spend weeks in discovery. Stakeholders would get impatient. Engineers eventually wondered why they weren’t building yet.

But that slowdown had a function nobody talks about. It created the conditions for a conversation that is very easy to skip. Who is the actual buyer here? Is this a real problem or a problem we invented? What would make someone pay for this? How are we different from what already exists? Would our sales team be able to explain this to a customer?

These are not discovery questions. They are alignment questions. They just happened to be forced by the discovery process.

When teams collapse the entire left side of the diamond into one fast loop, those conversations disappear. Not intentionally. Just quietly. Nobody notices until the product is live and nothing is moving. And by then the Alignment Tax has already been paid, in failed launches, confused sales teams, and a product org that cannot explain what they built or why anyone should care.

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The Lovable exception

I want to be fair here. There is one world where collapsing the left side seems to work.

Elena Verna helped build Lovable’s growth engine from zero to $400M in ARR. In a recent podcast she talked about the principles behind it. Relentless shipping. Trust as the moat, not functionality. The product itself as the primary growth channel.

It is a compelling model. And it is real.

But Lovable is not most companies. Lovable already knew who trusted them and why. They had alignment on the market question baked into the founding of the company. The constant shipping was feeding a well-crafted growth engine, not searching for one in the dark.

Most teams skipping discovery right now are not Lovable. They are shipping faster into a void. They copy the output of that model without having the foundation underneath it. And the result is not growth. It is product slop that never finds a market and never makes money.

Speed is not the strategy. Knowing who you are building for is the strategy. Speed only helps when you already have that alignment. And alignment on the market question does not happen by accident. Someone has to create it.

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Where the Alignment Tax actually lives

Here is what troubles me most about the current situation. It is not that teams are moving too fast. It is that product leaders are not creating the alignment that used to happen inside the process.

In the old model, the collaboration map was clear. Leadership was heavily involved on the left side and stepped back as the product took shape. Product Marketing entered at discovery, involved but not yet leading. Engineers arrived late. Everyone had an entry point. The process enforced the alignment.

When the left side collapses, those entry points disappear. And what you get is one of three versions of the same Alignment Tax, depending on how your company is structured.

When there is no dedicated PMM, the “who buys this and why” question has no owner. Product managers absorb it by default, but most PMs were not trained for it and don’t have the skills. Marketing gets handed a product they did not shape and cannot explain. The product dies quietly while everyone assumes someone else was handling it. The leadership failure here is not the missing PMM role. It is that nobody ever made the ownership explicit.

When PMM sits inside Marketing, they tend to get pulled in post-build. They receive a finished product and are asked to write the messaging, plan the launch, create the campaign. They do the best they can with what they have. But they were not in the room when the product decisions were made. The bridge between product reality and market message breaks before it is even built. This is fake alignment. Product and Marketing both believe GTM is covered. It is not.

When PMM sits inside Product, the timing is better. They are closer to the decisions and can push back on positioning before the product is built rather than after. But the risk here is different. PMM in a product organization can become too feature-focused and lose the buyer lens entirely. They start thinking like a PM and stop thinking like someone who needs to sell the thing to a skeptical market. The org looks aligned. But the market question is still not being answered.

Here is what I have come to believe: the reporting line matters less than the explicit conversation about who owns what. Whatever structure you choose, the CPO needs to name clearly who owns the question of who buys this and why, and that person needs to own it before the first line of code is written. Not at launch. Not at discovery. At the moment the idea exists.

That conversation is the new left side of the diamond. It is not a process. It is a leadership responsibility.

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What product leaders can actually do

The answer is not to slow your teams down. If your teams can build fast, that is a real advantage. The goal is not to put the old diamond back.

The goal is to have the alignment conversation before the build starts, so speed works in your favor instead of against you. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Make the market hypothesis part of the idea pitch. Before any team starts building, they answer three questions. Who is the specific buyer? Why would they switch from what they use today? How will we reach them? If a team cannot answer these before they start, they are not ready to start. This is not a gate. It is an alignment checkpoint. It takes an hour and changes everything about what gets built.

Name a GTM owner explicitly. This is the conversation most product leaders avoid. They assume PMM has it, or that marketing will figure it out, or that the PM will pick it up along the way. The Alignment Tax starts the moment you leave that question unanswered. Name the owner. Give them a seat in the room from day one. Make it non-negotiable.

Pull your GTM owner into ideation, not discovery. The old model had PMM entering at discovery. In a fast-moving team, discovery and build can happen in the same sprint. Your GTM owner needs to be in the room when someone says “I have an idea,” not three weeks later when the prototype exists. This is a calendar and culture change. It costs nothing except the decision to do it.

Separate GTM readiness from launch readiness. Most teams treat these as the same thing. They are not. Launch readiness means the product works. GTM readiness means someone will buy it and you know how to reach them. A team can be launch-ready and GTM-unready at the same time. The CPO’s job is to make that distinction visible before it becomes a failure.

None of this slows you down. It shifts where the alignment happens. From after the build to before it.

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What I am questioning now

I am not ready to say the double diamond is dead. For many teams and many contexts, a rigorous discovery process is still the right way to work.

But I am ready to say this: the double diamond was never designed for a world where building is cheap. It was designed for a world where building was expensive, so you had to be sure before you committed. That world is changing fast.

What I did not understand until recently is that the process was also doing alignment work I never gave it credit for. When we remove the process, we need to be deliberate about doing that alignment work ourselves. It does not happen automatically. And when it doesn’t happen, the team pays the price in failed launches, confused messaging, and products that never find a market.

The Alignment Tax is silent. You don’t feel it when you skip the conversation. You feel it six months later when nothing is moving and you’re not entirely sure why.

Anyone can build now. The new moat is knowing who you are building for, what problem you solve for them, and whether it will make money for the business. That is not a discovery question. It is an alignment question. And it is yours to answer as a leader.

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This is the work I do with CPOs and VPs of Product.

If your 1:1s have started to feel more like therapy than leadership, that is usually a signal that one of the four taxes is running quietly in the background. The assessment takes five minutes and tells you which one.

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If you want to work through a specific situation with someone who tells you the truth, a Power Hour is the right next step. (Paid offering)

This article is an addition to my six-part series on the Leadership Taxes that drain product leaders silently over time.

If you missed the earlier articles you can find them here:

• Part One: My Product Operating Model

• Part Two: The Therapy Tax

• Part Three: The Trust Tax

• Part Four: The Alignment Tax

• Part Five: The Confidence Tax

• Part Six: How the Taxes show up in your Roadmap