Engagement numbers climb month over month. Retention curves hold steady. Dashboard metrics glow green across every category. Yet something is fundamentally broken with the product, and by the time the team realizes it, they’ve burned through months of runway building features nobody wanted.
Product executive Marcello Genovese has watched this scenario play out repeatedly. The problem isn’t bad execution or insufficient 
resources. It’s that teams optimize for metrics that mask underlying product-market fit issues, mistaking healthy-looking numbers for validation that their product actually solves problems users care about.
„If you build a product that solves a real problem for the user, then you’re solving something important,“ Genovese says. „Build for the user, not for the technology or fancy interactions or excessive functions. That makes the difference.“
The distinction between products that scale sustainably and those that burn out after early traction comes down to whether the core value proposition genuinely resonates. Growth hacks, viral loops, and retention tactics can temporarily mask weak fundamentals. Eventually, the gap between what the product promises and what it delivers catches up.
When Good Metrics Hide Bad Products
Genovese points to a pattern that even experienced teams can fall into. A product shows early traction. Users sign up. Engagement looks reasonable. Investors get excited. The team doubles down on growth, adding features and expanding the roadmap. Six months later, churn accelerates, word of mouth stalls, and nobody can articulate why users actually need what they’ve built.
The root cause is measuring outputs rather than outcomes. A product can successfully drive behavior without successfully solving problems. Users might engage with the product because it’s addictive, not because it’s useful. They might stick around because switching costs are high, not because they’re satisfied.
This is where intuition becomes actively dangerous. Founders look at positive metrics and trust their gut that they’re on the right track. The data seems to confirm their vision. Internal conviction strengthens. Meanwhile, actual users experience friction, confusion, or indifference that doesn’t show up in aggregate statistics.
„People misunderstand that nothing is as easy as it looks,“ Genovese observes. „You still need to think through your product, and a good product strategy is always about the end user and how they’re going to use it.“
The correction requires systematic user contact that goes beyond surveys or focus groups. It means watching people actually use the product, asking what problems they’re trying to solve, and discovering whether your solution addresses those problems or just creates busywork they tolerate.
Why Startups Break at Series A and B
Genovese reserves particular criticism for how companies lose their way during growth-stage funding rounds. The pattern is predictable enough to be almost formulaic. A startup finds early traction with a focused value proposition. They raise a Series A or B. Within six months, the product has morphed into something bloated and confused.
„You see products that start strong and get traction, then they try to fulfill investor needs or CEO wishes,“ Genovese notes. „You should keep your vision and what you stand for, not build a product that does everything.“
The breakdown happens because the stakeholder base expands dramatically during these rounds. New board members bring opinions about what the product should become. Investors want features that signal the company can reach the next valuation milestone. Executives hired from larger companies import playbooks that worked elsewhere. The founder’s original vision gets diluted in the pursuit of consensus.
Teams that rely primarily on intuition are particularly vulnerable to this drift. Without a rigorous process for evaluating which ideas actually serve users, every suggestion from a credible source feels equally valid. The roadmap becomes a collection of compromises rather than a coherent plan.
„Teams should keep their vision,“ Genovese argues. „Don’t just build for investors or others in the company. Keep the vision and the idea for solving the problem for the user. Always focus on the first idea you had.“
The test Genovese applies cuts through the complexity:
„Are we focusing on solving a problem for the consumer, or just fulfilling wishes from people who don’t actually use the product?“
Most teams that break during growth funding fail this test. They’re building for pitch meetings, for competitive positioning, for internal politics. The actual user becomes an abstraction rather than the north star guiding every decision.
The Validation Framework That Scales
Process, in Genovese’s framework, isn’t about bureaucracy or approval chains. It’s about systematic reality-checking that persists even as the organization grows and pressure to ship increases.
„If you think through a product and you have an idea about how the user wants to use it, you need a process before building,“ he explains. „You can start building without one, but then you risk failure or building something the user won’t like.“
The specific mechanism matters less than the commitment to validation before resource allocation. For Genovese, that means rapid prototyping with minimal investment to test whether anyone actually wants what you’re planning to build.
„I test products with simple prototypes that may look ugly, but they have the functionality, and that helps,“ he says. These stripped-down versions expose flawed assumptions before significant engineering resources get committed.
The approach inverts how many teams operate, particularly at the growth stage. Instead of detailed specifications, elaborate development, and polished launches, Genovese advocates putting rough prototypes in front of users immediately. Polish comes later, once you’ve validated that the core concept resonates.
This requires overcoming the instinct most teams have to perfect things before showing them to the outside world. At Series A and B, when the company has real revenue and institutional investors, shipping ugly prototypes feels unprofessional. The pressure is to look credible, act like a mature company, and maintain brand standards.
Genovese argues those instincts lead directly to expensive failures. If a rough prototype can’t demonstrate value, a polished version won’t either. You’ve just spent more time and money reaching the same conclusion.
„Even if you can’t find the right user for your product to test it, sometimes the least likely person helps make your product stronger and gives you a different viewpoint,“
he notes.
When to Throw Everything Away
The sunk cost fallacy traps growth-stage companies more severely than early-stage startups. When you’ve raised millions, hired dozens of people, and spent months building features, the psychological resistance to starting over becomes enormous.
Genovese’s most radical advice addresses this directly: sometimes the best path forward isn’t iteration. It’s a complete rebuild.
„Be bold enough to throw away what you’ve done and start from scratch,“ he says. „I’ve seen products improve their design and structure when they started from scratch and rethought from the beginning what problem they’re actually solving. The product became much better.“
This willingness to discard work reflects a specific understanding of how technical debt and conceptual debt compound. When a product is built on flawed assumptions about what users want, every feature adds weight to a shaky foundation. Incremental improvements optimize the wrong thing.
The difficulty is recognizing when you’re in that situation. Teams naturally resist the idea that months of work need to be discarded. Founders have emotional attachments to features they championed. Engineers take pride in the systems they’ve built. Investors want to see their capital produce outcomes, not restarts.
Genovese frames the decision around the original vision: „What was my initial idea for this product? Are we still solving that problem, or have we drifted into something else?“
If the answer reveals substantial drift, especially drift away from solving real user problems and toward satisfying internal or investor preferences, rebuild becomes preferable to continued iteration. You’re no longer optimizing for product-market fit. You’re just making a fundamentally misaligned product more elaborate.
For growth-stage companies, this advice is particularly painful but also particularly necessary. The scale of operations makes pivots expensive. But continuing down a wrong path at scale just amplifies the eventual failure.
The Modern Tooling Paradox
Genovese identifies a shift that has both accelerated innovation and introduced new failure modes. Tools for building digital products have improved dramatically, making execution faster and cheaper than ever.
„AI helps build digital products much faster now, but you still need to think through your product,“ he observes. „Good product strategy is always about the end user and how they’re going to use it.“
The paradox is that improved tooling removes natural constraints that once forced validation. When building something took months and required significant capital, teams had no choice but to think carefully before committing. Now you can build elaborate features in weeks, which means teams can travel much farther down the wrong path before recognizing the mistake.
This has particular implications for growth-stage companies with engineering teams large enough to ship quickly. The velocity feels like progress. Roadmaps fill with shipped features. Sprint retrospectives show consistent delivery. Yet the product doesn’t gain traction because all that execution is misdirected.
The corrective is to use speed for learning rather than for building. Modern tools should enable testing more hypotheses with rough prototypes, not shipping more features without validation. The advantage isn’t that you can go faster. It’s that you can fail cheaper and learn sooner.
„Talk to your users, do reviews, run user testing,“ Genovese says. „There are plenty of testing platforms out there.“
The practical implementation comes down to making user feedback constant rather than episodic. Not a quarterly research study. Not a pre-launch validation exercise. An ongoing dialogue in which insights inform decisions in near real time.
Process Without Bureaucracy
Teams often interpret „process“ as permission to create governance structures that slow everything down. Approval chains, documentation requirements, and stage gates that turn shipping into an ordeal.
Genovese’s version of process is simpler: before you build anything significant, show something rough to actual users and watch what happens.
This requires cultural shifts that many growth-stage companies resist. Startups succeed early by moving fast and trusting founder intuition. Scaling that approach means hiring people who share the vision and empowering them to make decisions. Adding validation gates feels like returning to corporate dysfunction that the founders escaped.
The distinction is whether the process serves learning or control. The bureaucratic process exists to maintain consistency and reduce risk through centralized decision-making. Learning process exists to maximize contact with reality before committing resources.
„If your product isn’t doing well, look into why,“ Genovese says. „What was the initial vision? What are you solving? Talk with your user, talk with your customer. Find out what they need, what they want, what they don’t like.“
Teams that internalize this develop better intuition over time, because their hunches get constantly calibrated against actual behavior. The goal isn’t eliminating gut instinct. It’s training that is based on reality rather than assumptions.
The User as North Star
Genovese identifies the core distinction between product teams that succeed through growth stages and those that flame out despite raising capital: clarity about who they’re actually building for.
„The user is what matters most,“ he says. „You should keep the company mission and build a product that solves a problem, but I would never change a product just because an investor wants something. If it’s stupid, I don’t care who’s making money.“
The statement cuts through the complexity that surrounds product strategy at the growth stage. Board members have opinions. Investors have expectations. Competitors launch features that seem threatening. Internal executives lobby for capabilities that would make their jobs easier. Every stakeholder has seemingly valid reasons why the roadmap should shift.
The corrective is returning repeatedly to whether changes serve the person actually using the product. Not whether they make good presentation material. Not whether they address competitive threats. Not whether they unlock new revenue models. Whether they solve real problems for real users.
Teams that lose this focus optimize for metrics that look good in board decks. They add features that sound impressive in pitch meetings. They prioritize things that make internal executives happy. Users experience this as products that feel simultaneously over-engineered and inadequate.
The gap between intuition and process, ultimately, is that process forces honest examination of who you’re really building for. Intuition allows comfortable self-deception. Process demands evidence. And evidence, when you’re willing to look at it, reveals whether you’re solving real problems or just building what you wish people wanted.
