Card

No product impact

No product impact means that the product or feature created does not result in any measurable change or improvement to the customer experience or improved business outcomes.

This is a big problem because 1. You need your product to be delivering increasing value in order to grow and 2. Your product team is costing you money to operate.  To avoid the negative spiral of no impact and increasing costs, address this challenge quickly!

What challenges are linked with No product impact?

I'd put No product impact on your radar and read on, if you're facing these challenges:

  •

    A feature factory describes a product development approach focused solely on delivering a high volume of features, often at the expense of user needs and overall product quality. Learn more

  • High Technical Debt is a state of your technical systems where accumulated shortcuts, outdated code, and quick fixes significantly slow down development and increase maintenance costs. Learn more

  • Your teams have no decisions about what they’re building or even how they’re building. They seek approval for most things. Learn more

  • Low innovation means that a company fails to deliver new features or improvements that meet customer needs, leading to decreased satisfaction and loyalty. Learn more

  • High customer churn is when many customers stop using a product or service over a short period, indicating issues with satisfaction or value. Learn more

  • Low transparency means people don’t know what product teams are working on, and whether they’re generating impact or not. Learn more

When is lack of Product Impact likely to occur?

Product Impact is defined as business metrics that are moved as a result of the product team's (engineers, designer, and product manager) work. Ultimately, these roles exist to impact the customers and the business positively. The average cost of a product team of ~5 engineers, a product manager, and a designer is ~$1m per year; if you get no impact, then it's a very poor use of funds.

In the startup phase of a company, where there is a need to find a product-market fit fast before the cash runs out, the founder will likely monitor the lack of impact. At this stage, there can be a problem of lack of impact, and the founder acting as Product Manager is best placed to identify and solve it. The work at this stage is a high risk, high reward, and high pace.

Any product launch that fails to deliver product impact at the startup phase will likely be spotted quickly, lessons learned from it and the next product release will follow rapidly as the company's survival is at stake. For these reasons, it's less common to feel the pain of an ongoing lack of product impact at this company stage.

Lack of product impact is more common at the scaling-up phase. Typically, one or more product teams and the founder operate independently at this stage. The teams choose what to work on and how to measure it. At this stage, the goal is to build on the already established product market fit, and the work can become more incremental, often lower risk, and release cycle times tend to lengthen. As you transition to scaling up, keep a close eye out for the lack of product impact.

How to spot lack of Product Impact

There are two main signs of a lack of product impact:

Firstly, metrics. Your business-critical measures, such as conversion rate, product adoption, usage, and retention, will highlight whether there has been an impact. Based on the circumstances, there is subjectivity around how long the impact should manifest.

Secondly, Context and instinct. If you are a leader, your instinct is formed from the context acquired by talking to the product team, reading their regular updates, and comparing them to other work. You will know how long the work has taken versus the plan and what should have resulted by this point regarding the features delivered and the metrics moved.

By tracking the actual metrics for measuring the product and combining them with your contextually informed instinct, you will recognize when there is a (valid) lack of product impact.

What steps to take

If you feel there is a lack of impact, you must first diagnose what led you to that conclusion before taking action to resolve it. There are many different solutions depending on the cause. Ask these questions to find out whether your concerns are valid:

  • Is the product work being delivered as per the plan? This is to understand whether there is an impact problem or a delivery problem. Delivery issues and impact issues can be related or separate. Step one is to pinpoint where to focus attention. If the plan is delivered as agreed, we can rule out many causes.
  • How much impact was expected by now, and how far from that are we? Understand the relative gap between expectations and reality. Predicting the future with accuracy is virtually impossible; if the realized impact is close to the desired impact (although still below), then there should be less cause for concern than if there is no positive movement in the impact metric and sufficient time has been spent. No impact is a cause for concern; less than desired impact requires either no or fewer interventions.
  • Does the team have a plan to address the lack of impact, and do you believe in that plan? If so, allow them more time to address the problem. If not, then read on!

Causes of Lack of Product Impact

There are many causes for the lack of Product Impact; having gone through the previous steps, you'll be closer to diagnosing which one/s applies to you.

  1. Poor problem definition and prioritization - Lack of understanding of the problem space and failure to properly plan the product work is a common cause. Without the sufficient context of the user problems, prioritizing solutions is difficult.

    Look out for the following causes:

    • Teams often rush to build solutions without deeply understanding the customer's problem - Albert Einstein once said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." Make sure there is enough time spent on the problem definition before a single line of code gets written
    • Lack of clear success metrics and expected outcomes - there could be a positive impact, but it could not be on the chosen metric. Or, that the selected metric is the wrong one to measure the solution. Often, this is because the selected metric has many other influences. An example of a poor metric is revenue, which is impacted by many factors.
    • Working on low-impact problems while ignoring more significant opportunities - the opportunity size could be so small that the impact is hard to spot. Pick a bigger opportunity if this is the case!

  2. Misaligned incentives - The culture in many companies rewards shipping/delivering features at pace. This type of culture is often called a . The outcome is usually lots of features and not much impact. Ensure you reward the right behaviors, in this case, outcomes over output.

    Look for the following cause:

    • Teams optimizing for and being rewarded for, delivering features rather than delivering customer/business outcomes

  3. Insufficient customer understanding - if the product team thinks of customers as mere numbers in a spreadsheet, then qualitative context on the problem and the solution will be missing, leading to a lack of impact.

    Look for the following:

    • Limited direct customer interaction and feedback means before creating the solution and testing the proposed solutions (as a ) on real customers before launch. You may be surprised by the insights you uncover about WHY real customers do or don't do something, leading to the impact. You cannot find out the reasons WHY from a spreadsheet.
    • Relying too heavily on internal opinions/assumptions - your colleagues are not real customers; they are biased by the context they have access to, which real customers do not. Therefore, their opinions may not be similar to those of actual customers. Be wary of taking too many signals from colleagues as it can lead to incorrect assumptions about what to do, which in turn causes a lack of product impact.

  4. Execution challenges - There is NO impact without delivery. Therefore, it could be the case that the cause of the lack of Product impact is the lack of delivery.

    Look for the following:

    • Long feedback loops between building and learning - how quickly are the team able to iterate based on their findings—the longer the cycle time, the less chance of realizing any impact
    • Poor (especially between product, design, and engineering) - delivering technical products requires multiple functional interactions, and these interactions are based on relationships. Time invested to make these relationships harmonious is a key factor in delivering impact.
    • slowing down iteration speed - the more complexity the engineers face in building the solution, the longer it will take, simple. Pay down your tech debt if you want to move faster!
    • Lack of experimentation mindset and infrastructure - validating new products and the magnitude of their impact through is a common tactic. However, if the testing tools are missing, the impact will also likely be missing.
  5. Strategic misalignment - The lack of impact could be a lack of understanding of where the company/team needs to go. The leader's job is to ensure context is shared widely and understood. Without context, you might find teams are working on the wrong things to achieve the right impact.

    Look for the following:

    • Unclear connection between and
    • Competing priorities across different teams/departments - for example, Team X might be focused on the volume of new users and Team Y's conversion rate. More new users typically lower the conversion rate as lower-quality users are acquired. The leader must watch out for this as it might not be picked up within the teams or functions themselves.
    • Frequent changes in direction without clear rationale. Changes require relearning the new context, costing valuable time. That time could have been spent iterating on solutions to create impact.
  6. Leadership and organizational issues - Having the right skills onboard, the right number of people to deliver in the expected time, and a culture of operating for maximum impact are all important factors to consider.

    Look for the following:

    • Insufficient resources or support - does the team have enough people with the right skills to deliver? Lack of delivery equals lack of impact.
    • Micromanagement and - there's a fine line for leaders to walk between providing enough guidance in the form of strategy and too much operational involvement which can hamper the team's creativity, decision-making, speed of execution, and impact creation.
    • Risk-averse culture discourages bold bets - the bigger the bet, the bigger the reward. It's the leader's responsibility to set the culture for their team, and a healthy amount of risk tolerance is essential to create a positive impact.

Linked cards

All of these challenges are solvable. It's about finding the specific one/s that are impacting your delivery and addressing them. Use the cards suggested below to explore the right solutions for you.

  •

    Product strategy provides the logical sequence of big bets (projects, value streams) that will take you to Product Vision. Learn more

  • Strategic Pyramid documents your entire strategy (Mission → Vision → North Star → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap). Learn more

  • ICE prioritization is a framework for ranking ideas based on their Impact, Confidence, and Ease of implementation. Learn more

  • Customer Interviews is a research practice where product teams conduct structured conversations with users to understand their needs, pain points, and behaviors. Learn more

  • A/B tests involve comparing two versions of a product to determine which one performs better based on specific metrics. Learn more

  • Product goals provide targets on the list of metrics product team is asked to achieve. Learn more

  • The North Star metric is a single KPI that directly reflects the core value a product delivers to its customers. Learn more

  • OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, is a goal-setting framework that helps teams define clear objectives and track measurable outcomes to ensure alignment and progress. Learn more

  • Jobs to be Done is a framework that helps teams understand what tasks (jobs) customers want to accomplish, focusing on their goals and needs to create better products and services. Learn more

  • Pirate metrics (AARRR) is a framework for tracking user Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue in product. Learn more

  • An Opportunity Solution Tree is a visual tool that helps teams explore all potential solutions to a customer problem and choose the most effective one. Learn more

  • Product vision tells a story about how would you like your product to look like in 3-5 years. Learn more

  • The HEART framework is a user-centered approach to measure the quality of user experience across five key metrics: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Learn more

  • Your customers are your business therefore, obsessing over them must be at the core of your culture in order to succeed. Learn more

Hope that's useful!

Nick Kenn