As part of the continued series on startup anti-patterns, we examine the productivity-killing practice of collective decision-making: “Design by Committee.”

First, a Story

In 2014-2015, my team at Life360 struck a strategic partnership with ADT, the #1 home security company.

They invested $50m in our company, we agreed to strategically launch a co-branded version of the Life360 application under the ADT umbrella, jointly going to market to reach millions of ADT subscribers. We were ecstatic, and so was ADT.

The beginning was fine. The deal was championed by ADT’s Chief Innovation Officer at the time. The innovation team had clear requirements and understood enough about mobile applications to chart what clear success looks like. Our champion had a strong voice within the org and convinced the CEO that the project should be fast-tracked, operating more like a “startup”.

From there it all went downhill. The Chief Innovation Officer got replaced. Later the CEO was gone as well.

The project got sidelined, but more importantly, with a new and relatively weak champion the entire process got convoluted. Marketing jumped in claiming that anything customers see and hear need to be brand appropriate and follow their guardrails – they insisted on reviewing and editing every single app screen. Sales chimed in, concerned that the product could cannibalize their activities and complicate rep compensation. Product demanded deep integrations into ADT core to justify the investment. The list went on and on and it was pretty unclear who calls the shots. Every major decision required multiple C-level owners, but worse, even minor and myopic issues went through pretty much the same decision by committee process with dozens of people involved. The new champion insisted on getting a buy-in from everybody.

Three years later with tens of thousands of hours spent across R&D, Marketing, Business, etc. the entire project got shut down.

This is not just a story of corporate slowness and incompetence. This is a story about making decisions by committee – getting buy-ins to perfection – killing the product and business.

What It Is

“Design by Committee” is the anti-pattern where companies attempt to make product and strategic decisions through group consensus, resulting in diluted solutions that satisfy no one and solve no specific problems effectively.

This anti-pattern emerges when companies prioritize inclusive decision-making over effective decision-making. While gathering input from various stakeholders can be valuable, design by committee occurs when that input process becomes the decision-making process itself.

Common manifestations include:

Meeting Overload – Product decisions require endless meetings with multiple stakeholders, each contributing conflicting opinions and requirements.

Feature Frankenstein – Products become bloated with features that attempt to satisfy every internal constituency rather than solving specific user problems.

Analysis Paralysis – Simple decisions become complex because too many voices create too many options and considerations.

Compromise Solutions – Every feature becomes a watered-down compromise that removes any potentially differentiating elements to avoid disagreement.

Responsibility Diffusion – When everyone has input, no one takes ownership of outcomes, leading to poor accountability and execution.

The irony of design by committee is that it often stems from good intentions—wanting to be inclusive, democratic, and collaborative. However, in practice, it frequently produces the opposite of what teams are trying to achieve: slower progress, frustrated employees, and inferior products.

Why It Matters

Design by committee can systematically undermine a startup’s competitive advantages:

Slow Time-to-Market – While committees debate, competitors ship. In fast-moving markets, speed often matters more than perfection. Extended decision cycles can mean missing critical market windows.

Loss of Product Vision – Products developed by committee tend to lose coherent vision and become collections of features rather than solutions to specific problems. This makes it harder to build brand loyalty and differentiate from competitors.

User Confusion – When products try to serve everyone, they often serve no one well. Users become confused about what the product actually does and who it’s for.

Team Frustration – High-performing employees become demoralized when they spend more time in meetings discussing work than actually doing work. This can lead to talent attrition.

Increased Development Costs – Constantly changing requirements and competing priorities lead to technical debt, rework, and inefficient resource allocation.

Weak Market Positioning – Companies that can’t make clear product decisions struggle to articulate their value proposition to customers and investors.

Diagnosis

How do you know if your startup is suffering from design by committee? Look for these warning signs:

Meeting-to-Work Ratio – Are your team members spending more time discussing what to build than actually building it? If engineers spend more hours in product meetings than coding, you likely have a committee problem.

Feature Justification Difficulty – Can team members clearly explain why specific features exist and what user problems they solve? If features exist primarily because “someone thought it would be good to have,” that’s a red flag.

Decision Ownership Confusion – When asking who made a particular product decision, do you get answers like “we all decided” or “it came out of the product meeting”? Lack of clear decision ownership indicates committee decision-making.

Release Cycle Lengthening – Are your development cycles getting longer despite having more resources? This often indicates that increased coordination overhead is overwhelming productivity gains.

User Feedback Confusion – Do users express confusion about what your product does or who it’s for? This suggests your product may be trying to serve too many masters.

Competitor Velocity – Are competitors consistently beating you to market with similar features? This might indicate your decision-making process is too slow.

Misdiagnosis

Not all collaborative decision-making is problematic. The key is distinguishing between healthy collaboration and counterproductive committee dynamics:

Good Collaboration – Gathering input from various stakeholders to inform decisions, with clear decision-makers who synthesize feedback and make final choices.

Bad Committee Dynamics – Requiring consensus from multiple stakeholders before any decision can be made, with no clear final decision authority.

Healthy Debate – Encouraging different perspectives and constructive disagreement to stress-test ideas before implementation.

Unhealthy Compromise – Watering down every decision to avoid conflict, resulting in solutions that satisfy no one.

Some decisions genuinely benefit from broad input—major strategic pivots, significant architectural choices, or decisions with legal implications. The problem arises when this collaborative approach is applied to every product decision, regardless of importance or complexity.

Refactored Solutions

If your startup is stuck in design-by-committee mode, here’s how to refactor your decision-making:

Establish Clear Decision Rights – Define who has authority to make different types of decisions. Product features, user experience, technical architecture, and business strategy may have different decision-makers, but each domain should have clear ownership.

Implement Consultation vs. Consensus – Encourage decision-makers to consult with relevant stakeholders, but don’t require unanimous agreement. The goal is informed decisions, not popular ones.

Time-Box Input Gathering – Set specific deadlines for providing input on decisions. After the deadline, the decision-maker moves forward with available information.

Create Decision Documentation – Require decision-makers to document their reasoning and the input they considered. This creates accountability while respecting the consultation process.

Use the “Disagree and Commit” Principle – Once a decision is made, everyone commits to supporting it regardless of their initial opinion. This prevents endless relitigating of settled matters.

Implement Feature Ownership – Assign specific individuals as “feature owners” who are accountable for success metrics and user outcomes. This creates clear responsibility for results.

Regular Decision Retrospectives – Periodically review decision-making processes to identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency without losing valuable input.

Customer-Driven Prioritization – When internal stakeholders disagree, default to what serves customers best rather than what satisfies internal politics.

When It Could Help

Are there situations where design by committee might be beneficial? Very rarely, and usually only in specific circumstances:

High-Stakes, Irreversible Decisions – Major strategic decisions like pivots, acquisitions, or market entry might benefit from broader input given their potential impact.

Cross-Functional Dependencies – When features require significant coordination across multiple teams, broader input can help identify potential issues early.

Regulatory or Compliance Requirements – In highly regulated industries, legal and compliance teams may need substantial input on product features.

Crisis Situations – During existential threats to the company, broader perspective gathering might help identify solutions that individual decision-makers might miss.

However, even in these cases, the process should have clear timelines, defined roles, and ultimate decision authority rather than indefinite committee deliberation.

Final Thoughts

The fastest way to kill innovation is to put it through a committee. While collaboration and input-gathering are valuable, effective startups distinguish between consultation and decision-making.

Great products have strong points of view about what users need and how to solve their problems. These points of view come from individuals or small teams with clear vision and decision authority, not from committees trying to please everyone.

If your startup feels like it’s moving slowly despite having more resources and smart people, look carefully at your decision-making processes. You might discover that your well-intentioned inclusivity is actually preventing you from building anything users truly love.

Remember: it’s better to build something specific people love than something generic everyone tolerates. Committees are great at building the latter and terrible at creating the former.

As the saying goes, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” Don’t let your product become a camel.

As part of the continued series on startup anti-patterns, we examine the dangerous territory of bridge rounds that lead nowhere: “Bridge to Nowhere.”

First, a Story

In 2018, I came across a promising fintech startup that had raised a solid Series A but was burning through cash faster than expected while pursuing an ambitious expansion strategy. The founders approached their existing investors for a $8M bridge round, arguing they were “just six months away” from hitting the metrics needed for a strong Series B.

The bridge round closed. Existing investors wanted to protect their investment, and the startup’s story was compelling. Revenue was growing, albeit slower than projected, and the team was confident they could fix their unit economics with a few product tweaks.

The company was running hot. The founders decided to keep going at it aggressively, ramping up customer acquisition spend and keep the entire staff.

Six months later, the company was on life support, tethering on verge of bankruptcy. They hadn’t achieved the growth trajectory needed for institutional Series B investors. The product improvements had minimal impact on retention, customer acquisition costs remained stubbornly high.

When the bridge money ran out, there was no Series B waiting—just a difficult conversation about whether to pursue an acqui-hire or shut down entirely.

The bridge round hadn’t solved the fundamental issues; it had simply delayed the inevitable reckoning. Further, the bridge round was also done in onerous terms (as they very often come) with 2x preferred and serious down round protection, no to mention the addition to the preference stack.

The founders spent their final months desperately pitching to smaller funds and strategic investors, but without meaningful progress to show, they couldn’t secure additional capital.

When they turned (too late) to an acqui-hire the found it more difficult to strike a deal also because they took on more capital with hard to swallow preferred terms. That lat bridge became an albatross around their necks. The company eventually wound down, leaving founders, employees, and investors with nothing but expensive lessons learned.

What It Is

“Bridge to Nowhere” is the anti-pattern where startups raise interim funding—typically called bridge rounds—with the hope of reaching key milestones that will unlock their next major funding round, but fail to achieve meaningful progress during the bridge period.

Bridge rounds are intended to be exactly what their name suggests: a bridge between where you are and where you need to be. They’re supposed to provide enough runway to hit specific, measurable milestones that will materially improve your ability to raise a larger round at a higher valuation.

However, when startups fall into the “Bridge to Nowhere” trap, they use bridge funding as a band-aid rather than a strategic tool. Instead of addressing fundamental business issues, they buy time while hoping their problems will somehow resolve themselves.

Common scenarios that lead to bridges to nowhere include:

Founder Optimism Bias – Entrepreneurs consistently underestimate how long it will take to achieve meaningful progress, believing they just need “a little more time” to turn things around.

Investor Pressure – Existing investors, trying to protect their downside, agree to bridge rounds even when deep down they know the fundamental issues haven’t been addressed.

Market Timing Delusion – Teams convince themselves that market conditions will improve or that their delayed traction is simply a matter of timing rather than product-market fit.

Milestone Mirage – Startups focus on vanity metrics or artificial milestones that don’t actually indicate genuine business health or investor appeal.

Why It Matters

Bridge to nowhere scenarios are particularly damaging because they create false hope while burning through precious time and capital:

Delayed Decision-Making – Instead of making tough decisions about pivoting, cost-cutting, or strategic changes, teams continue operating under unsustainable assumptions. Time is the most valuable asset for any startup, and bridges to nowhere waste it. Scarcity wins the day and more capital can be an double-edged sword.

Investor Fatigue – When bridge rounds fail to deliver promised results, existing investors become skeptical of management’s ability to execute. This makes future fundraising even more difficult, as your most natural supporters lose confidence.

Team Demoralization – Employees can sense when a company is struggling to raise money. Extended bridge periods create uncertainty and anxiety, leading to talent attrition precisely when you need your best people most.

Reduced Strategic Options – The longer a startup operates with unclear prospects, the fewer options remain available. Potential acquirers become wary, and merger opportunities disappear as the company appears increasingly distressed.

The more capital invested, the harder it is to sell the company in an acqui-hire or run smaller acquisition. If the founders took the bridge capital, haven’t made progress, and are trying to sell they are in a worse position.

Opportunity Cost – Both founders and investors could be deploying their time and capital more effectively elsewhere instead of prolonging what may be a failing venture.

Diagnosis

How do you know if your bridge round might be heading toward nowhere? Ask yourself these critical questions:

Are the metrics that matter improving meaningfully? Look beyond vanity metrics. Is monthly recurring revenue growing? Are unit economics improving? Is customer retention strengthening? If core business health indicators aren’t moving in the right direction, more time won’t fix fundamental issues. Is there a clear plan for the above in place before taking on extra capital.

Do you have a clear, specific plan for achieving next funding round readiness? Vague hopes about “growing faster” don’t count. You should have concrete milestones with specific timelines and the resources to achieve them. You should validate those milestones with investors you target for the next round.

Are institutional investors expressing genuine interest? If you haven’t had substantive conversations with investors who are excited about your progress trajectory, you may be building a bridge to nowhere.

Is your bridge timeline realistic? Most bridge rounds provide 6-12 months of runway. If you believe you need “just six more months” but your historical execution suggests otherwise, you’re likely being overly optimistic. My rule of thumb, always assume everything you are trying to do will take twice the time and effort. Worse case you will be very positively surprised.

Are you addressing root causes or symptoms? Hiring more salespeople won’t fix a fundamentally flawed product. More marketing spend won’t overcome poor unit economics. Bridge funding should enable you to solve core business issues, not mask them.

Misdiagnosis

Not every bridge round is problematic. Bridge financing can be a valuable strategic tool when used correctly:

Strategic Bridge Rounds – Sometimes companies raise bridges to optimize timing for their next round, perhaps waiting for better market conditions or reaching a more compelling milestone that will improve valuation.

Market Dislocation – During economic downturns or industry-specific challenges, even healthy companies may need bridge financing to weather temporary storms while maintaining growth.

Acquisition Preparation – Bridge rounds can provide the runway needed to properly explore strategic alternatives or optimize for acquisition discussions.

The key difference is whether the bridge round addresses fundamental business issues or simply provides more time to hope for better outcomes.

Refactored Solutions

If you suspect your startup might be building a bridge to nowhere, consider these approaches:

Conduct “Brutal Honesty” Sessions – Have frank discussions with your board, advisors, and team about whether core business metrics are improving fast enough to justify continued investment. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is acknowledge when a business isn’t working and drive toward a reset.

Set Binary Milestones – Instead of hoping for gradual improvement, set clear pass/fail criteria for your bridge period. If you don’t hit these milestones, have a predetermined plan for what happens next (pivot, wind down, or seek strategic alternatives).

Consider Alternative Strategies – Rather than raising a bridge, explore other options: significant cost reduction to extend runway, revenue-based financing or venture debt, strategic partnerships, or even acquisition conversations.

Focus on Unit Economics – Use bridge funding specifically to fix fundamental business metrics and further address product market fit concerns. If your customer acquisition cost is too high or lifetime value too low, dedicate resources specifically to solving these issues rather than simply scaling a broken model.

Prepare Multiple Scenarios – Develop plans for different outcomes: successful Series B, smaller growth round, strategic sale, or orderly wind-down. Having clarity about alternatives reduces the psychological pressure to “make the bridge work at all costs.”

Time-Box Decision Making – Give yourself a specific deadline (perhaps halfway through your bridge runway) to evaluate progress objectively. If you’re not on track to meet your Series B goals, pivot to Plan B while you still have options.

When It Could Help

Are there situations where what looks like a “bridge to nowhere” might actually be the right strategy? Occasionally:

Market Recovery Waiting – During severe economic downturns, sometimes the best strategy is survival until conditions improve. However, this requires discipline to cut costs appropriately and realistic assessment of how long the downturn might last.

Strategic Patience – If you have genuine conviction that your market is about to inflect (perhaps due to regulatory changes or technology adoption), a bridge round might make sense. However, this should be based on external evidence, not internal hope.

Acquisition Optimization – Sometimes extending runway through a bridge provides leverage in acquisition negotiations or time to find the right strategic buyer.

Final Thoughts

Bridge rounds can be valuable tools for startups navigating challenging periods, but they’re only effective when used strategically to address real business issues. Too often, they become expensive delays that postpone difficult but necessary decisions.

Before raising a bridge round, ask yourself honestly: Are we building a bridge to somewhere specific, or are we just hoping the destination will appear? If you can’t articulate exactly where your bridge leads and how you’ll get there, you might be building a bridge to nowhere.

The best entrepreneurs recognize when it’s time to change direction, cut costs dramatically, or explore strategic alternatives. Sometimes the bravest thing a founder can do is acknowledge that more money won’t solve fundamental problems—and act accordingly.

Remember: time is your most valuable asset as a startup founder. Don’t waste it building bridges that lead nowhere.

This post is part of our ongoing series on startup anti-patterns. Previous posts have covered topics including Boiling the Ocean, Founder Arrogance, and Analysis Paralysis. Each anti-pattern represents common failure modes that can derail promising startups if not recognized and addressed early.

In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was famously arrogant.

He believed he knew what users wanted before they even realized it themselves. His confidence led to groundbreaking products like the Mac and the iPhone, but it also resulted in some significant missteps—like the overly expensive Lisa computer and the rigid, closed system of the early Macintosh that alienated developers.

Steve Jobs was an outlier. Most founders who carry the same level of arrogance find that it backfires – sometimes spectacularly.

Take Quibi, for example. Founded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman, Quibi was launched with nearly $2 billion in funding and the belief that short-form, mobile-first premium content would revolutionize entertainment. Katzenberg dismissed concerns from industry experts who doubted people would pay for Quibi when free platforms like TikTok and YouTube existed. He doubled down on a strategy that ignored user feedback, believing in his vision to the end. The result? A spectacular failure—Quibi shut down in just six months, proving that misplaced confidence can be deadly.

What It Is?

Arrogance in startups is an anti-pattern where founders and leaders believe they are always right, ignoring market signals, data, customer feedback, and team input. It manifests in several ways:

1. Overconfidence in decision-making – Founders assume they have all the answers without validating their assumptions.
2. Ignoring customer feedback – Dismissing user complaints or requests because they “don’t get the vision.” or because product or marketing failed to properly portray the solution to them.
3. Lack of adaptability – Insisting on a strategy or product feature despite overwhelming evidence that it’s not working.
4. Alienating team members – Dismissing dissenting opinions and creating a toxic work culture where only one voice matters.
5. Underestimating competition – Believing that competitors are irrelevant or inferior, leading to a failure to adjust to market realities.

While confidence is essential in building a startup, unchecked arrogance leads to blind spots that can cripple a company early on or later in the journey.

Why It Matters?

Arrogance doesn’t just make founders difficult to work with—it can cause real, measurable harm to a startup:

Slower Product Iteration – If a founder refuses to accept feedback, the company will waste valuable time and resources building the wrong product. A startup is a journey in the team’s head from where the product is today and where it needs to be to satisfy most customers requirements. The faster you get there, the better!

Poor Team Retention – Employees who feel their expertise is ignored will leave, taking valuable institutional knowledge with them. The stronger an employee is, the more likely they are to get frustrated by yet another founder decision that is based solely on the founders vision or intuition.

Investor Skepticism – Arrogant founders struggle to raise money once investors realize they are unwilling to listen or adapt. As a VC myself I can attest to this first hand. Investors don’t want to work with founders who don’t listen, learn, and adapt.

Reputation Damage – Customers and partners lose trust in a company that refuses to acknowledge its mistakes. Customers, like everybody else, want to be heard. A arrogant team can make it harders for customers to feel the work they are doing with the startup is cooperative.

Diagnosis

Arrogance is particularly dangerous because, in the short term, it can look like visionary leadership. Many successful founders, from Elon Musk to Travis Kalanick, have displayed strong opinions and confidence. However, the difference between arrogance and conviction is data-driven adaptability—great founders recognize when to adjust their approach.How can you tell if arrogance is creeping into your startup’s culture? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do we test assumptions with real users, or do we assume we already know what they want?
• Do we regularly review and act on customer feedback?
• Are we open to pivoting if the data suggests our strategy isn’t working?
• Do employees feel comfortable challenging leadership without fear of dismissal?
• Do we recognize and learn from our competitors rather than dismissing them?

If you’re answering “no” to most of these, arrogance may be a growing problem in your startup.

Misdiagnosis

Not all confidence is arrogance. In fact, some level of conviction is necessary for a founder to push through adversity. It’s important to differentiate between:

Visionary Leadership – Being confident in a bold vision but validating ideas with data and feedback.

Arrogance – Dismissing input from customers, employees, and the market because you “know better.”

Another common misdiagnosis is confused “Founder mode” (a specific kind of leadership in which a founder has a direct, hands-on approach to their company rather than breaking up and delegating responsibility through a top-down structure) with arrogance. There is a subtle line between “Founder Mode” and “Founder Blindness”. The best founders know when to step back, listen, and adapt—before their arrogance turns their biggest strength into their biggest liability.

A founder like Jeff Bezos, who famously insisted on long-term thinking at Amazon, was confident but data-driven. He made big bets but constantly adapted based on customer behavior. In contrast, founders like Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) or Adam Neumann (WeWork) disregarded all warning signs, leading to catastrophic failures.

Last, another misdiagnosis can happen when founders and leaders keep “blaming” the team for poor delivery, assuming that the end user didn’t “get it”. Ask yourself if your organization keeps thinking that users are “stupid” and just need to be taught better? Is the team continuously talking about the users not “Getting it” because Marketing or Product failed to communicate the merits of the product? You might be misdiagnosing the situation thinking that it’s an execution issue instead of arrogant leadership.

Refactored Solutions

How do you fix an arrogance problem in your company?

1. Prioritize User Research – Build systems for continuously collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Blend vision with data, research to make decisions (while reducing the risk of analysis paralysis and long decision cycles).
2. Encourage Internal Debate – Create a culture where employees feel safe questioning leadership decisions. Embrace ambiguity and contradiction without penalizing those in your team who participate. Seek intellectual honesty and data points to back theses.
3. Seek External Mentorship – Surround yourself with advisors and investors who challenge your assumptions. Ideally, those are folks you strongly respect who can challenge your thinking to avoid “unnecessary” arrogance
4. Test Before Scaling – Don’t assume something will work—run small experiments before committing major resources. Listen to the market be aware of industry trends and competition, and adjust accordingly.
5. Own Your Mistakes – Admit when you’re wrong, learn from it, and move forward. Your team will appreciate it.

A good exercise? Have every leadership team member make a list of the last five big decisions they made and the data that supported them. If there’s no real data behind those decisions, arrogance might be clouding judgment.

When it could help and final thoughts

Is there ever a time when arrogance is beneficial? Yes.

• Breaking new ground – Some innovations require ignoring conventional wisdom. If everyone already agrees with your idea, it might not be innovative enough.
• Fundraising & sales – Investors and customers need to believe in your vision. Confidence can be a powerful tool in selling your startup’s potential.
• Navigating uncertainty – Startups often operate in ambiguity, and hesitation can be deadly. Sometimes, a strong conviction is necessary to push through doubt.

But these benefits only apply when paired with adaptability. Founders who balance confidence with learning and iteration have a much higher chance of success than those who stubbornly refuse to adjust.

One of the most interesting debates about investing in early-stage startup teams centers on arrogance in founders. You might also hear it referred to as hubris or cockiness among tech entrepreneurs.

You need a certain level of arrogance to be a successful entrepreneur. After all, starting a company from scratch to transform an industry or create a new one within a decade inherently involves some arrogance.

Arrogance is one of the most insidious startup anti-patterns because, at first, it can feel like an asset. But as history has shown, even the best founders fail when they stop listening, learning, and evolving.

The best startups are customer-obsessed, data-driven, and humble enough to adjust their course when needed. If you find yourself dismissing criticism or resisting change, take a step back and ask:

“Am I being a visionary, or am I just being arrogant?”

The right answer can mean the difference between a billion-dollar company and a cautionary tale.

As part of the continued series on startup anti-patterns, we look at the battle between conviction and validation.

First, a story. In 2000, Intech technology, a fledgling startup out of Israel, was building a new type of billing software for property managers. Intech had one potential customer- the Israeli government – that shared the founders’ vision of software which could split bills across multiple tenants in a customizable fashion. For example, using this “killer” feature, the property manager could decide that one tenant pays 70% of the gardening bill while another pays the rest.

The excitement at Intech technologies was at its peak. The founders automatically assumed that if they had the vision and one customer wanted it, many others would. Eighteen months and several layoffs later, the truth was unveiled: end-users didn’t really care about the “killer” feature. Other prospective customers showed no interest in the product’s advanced bill-splitting capabilities. They opted for simpler and cheaper systems that generated invoices and connected to building meters.

After building a product that ended up being an overkill, the company shut down. The founders (Itamar was one of them) learned a hard lesson.

What it is

“If you build it, they will come” is the anti-pattern where startups make decisions based on their vision of how a solution should look, ignoring or underemphasizing customer needs and neglecting to collect sufficient product validation from prospective customers.

The origin of this anti-pattern is the allure of “a great idea”. Entrepreneurs, driven by their passion and conviction, tend to assume that their product’s brilliance alone will captivate customers and guarantee success.

Unfortunately, the mere existence of a product doesn’t automatically translate into customers flocking to buy it. The “if you build it, they will come” mentality often leads to a lack of product-market fit, a leading cause of early stage startup failure.

When combined with confirmation bias, another anti-pattern, this problem becomes even more acute. As with ignorance, it’s usually deadly when combined with a big dose of arrogance.

Why it matters

“If you build it, they will come” mentality can kill your company. It results in redundant product development and misalignment, a significant waste of resources, increased technical debt, and challenges in go-to-market. Hoping that a product will resonate with customers is often a recipe for disaster.

Building a product based on conviction as opposed to market validation can harm your startup in multiple ways:

• Increased adoption friction. Instead of iterating and improving the product based on customer feedback, startups who fall into this anti-pattern often lack the features customers want. They find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of slow growth, small capital raises, financial strain and, ultimately, the demise of the startup.
• Slower product development. Development teams should aim to build what’s most valuable for the business as quickly as possible. Building on conviction without validation is risky because unnecessary features slow down development without creating sufficient business value. Solution complexity and the likelihood of incurring more technical debt, slowing down future development, and shortening a startup’s runway.
• Low morale. Discovering post-launch that a product isn’t well-received can demoralize a team that worked hard on its development. Before then, team members who know that development is happening with insufficient validation may be demoralized by the company’s approach.

Building “in a vacuum” increases the risk of achieving product-market fit. This misalignment can manifest in various ways. The product might solve a problem that customers don’t care enough about or may fail to meet customers’ expectations or needs. Without product-market fit, it’s harder for a startup to build the right brand, launch effective marketing campaigns, and build the right sales playbook.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis requires honest self-reflection. Look at how the company makes product decisions that commit it to significant expenditures of time and money:

• Are you aware of all important decision points? Lack of awareness leads to implicit decision making. System 1 thinking, skewed by cognitive biases, dominates implicit decisions. Make decisions that commit the company to significant resource use explicitly.
• When making important decisions, how much weight do you give to conviction (vision, gut feeling) vs. anecdotal evidence (hearsay, one or few data points collected by an ad hoc process) vs. sufficient evidence collected by a thoughtfully designed validation process? Making big decisions without a responsible amount of evidence is risky.
• Does the evidence supporting decisions come from a sufficiently diverse range of stakeholders, both internal and external ones? Making decisions based on limited/skewed information is risky, especially when decision-makers aren’t aware of the bias and/or variability of the data.

When attempting to diagnose this anti-pattern, make an honest assessment of the extent to which conviction stems from fear. Sim knew a brilliant technical founder who’d rather spend 100 hours writing code than have a validation conversation with a stranger. He thought his product was going to be awesome. It was the only rational way to avoid talking to people who may give him negative feedback.

Fear often deters teams from engaging in validation processes due to a variety of psychological, organizational, and market factors:

• Fear of being wrong. People often intertwine their ideas with their personal identity. They may perceive being wrong as a personal failure. Cognitive dissonance pushes individuals to avoid situations that might challenge their pre-existing beliefs. Confirmation bias pushes them to unconsciously ignore unfavorable feedback.
• Fear of the unknown. If validation feedback suggests that significant changes are necessary, this can lead to an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty. The path forward might not be clear, which can be daunting. Even founders, who typically are comfortable with massive amounts of uncertainty, can fall prey to this.
• Fear of authority. In some hierarchical organizations, when a person of authority has conviction, people lower down in the organization may avoid validation. They fear repercussions if it contradicts the authority figure’s conviction.
• Fear of disclosure. Some entrepreneurs feel their intellectual property (IP) is so valuable that they fear validation processes might leak some of that IP. In his VC days, Sim met with several founders unwilling to talk about the details of their technology before a term sheet. You can imagine how these pitches went.
• Fear of being late. Some teams may skip validation to hasten delivery. They may fear that competitors may beat them to market or feel pressure from stakeholders to deliver by a specific deadline. Discussing time pressure trade-offs honestly and explicitly is good. Replacing validation with conviction implicitly, for fear of being late, is a problem.
• Fear of wasting an investment. Once a team has invested time and money in a particular direction, they might feel that continuing forward is the only option. This is known as the sunk cost fallacy. For fear of creating waste, they will ignore negative evidence. Humans often exhibit loss aversion, where the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.

Arrogance and confirmation bias are the most common anti-patterns that make the diagnosis of “if you build it, they will come” difficult.

Misdiagnosis

Misdiagnosis occurs when companies set an unreasonably high bar for the validation required to make product decisions. It may lead to analysis paralysis in organizations, another anti-pattern, reducing the company’s competitiveness in the market and its ability to launch new products in a timely manner.

What is a reasonable, let alone optimal, split between conviction and validation when making decisions? There is no right answer. Context matters. Marissa Mayer famously asked a team at Google to test 41 different shades of blue for the toolbar on Google pages. Was that too much? It’s hardly excessive when considering Google’s scale and Google’s resources. A 41-way test may not have been that much more difficult to execute than a 2-way test. However, the request to test 41 options applied to a product with limited usage would be ridiculous. It’d take too long for the test to produce a valid result.

Refactored solutions

Once diagnosed, the refactoring of this anti-pattern requires changing the organization’s mindset and approach to product development:

• Empower people to make data-driven decisions. Instrument products for data collection with good security and privacy controls. It should be easy to implement A/B and multivariate tests. Clean, machine-readable metadata should be available for data enhancement. Manage data consistently in a unified platform. Give key stakeholders self-service access to the analytics that matter. Operational dashboards that answer known questions aren’t enough: optimize for ad hoc analytics aimed at answering new questions quickly and precisely. Distribute organizational authority, responsibility, and accountability for making decisions based on data.
• Embrace market research and customer feedback. Starting at the top, foster a culture of listening to markets by implementing methodologies such as customer development. Engage with potential customers through surveys, interviews, or beta testing to gather valuable feedback that shapes the product roadmap and the entire company. Pay special attention to statistical validity.
• Share the voice of customers. Broadly distribute customer and market feedback within the organization. Spend time in all-hands and other company-wide communication channels to highlight customers. Empower your customer support/success team to work more closely with product teams and rotating engineers and product managers to support duty.

Your ability to make well-validated product decisions is like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Getting good at validation isn’t easy. It requires significant investments in culture, systems, and processes. It also requires overcoming fears.

To overcome fear and foster an environment that encourages validation, organizations and teams can foster a culture of learning and experimentation; encourage collaboration and open communication; and incorporate iterative processes with smart feedback cycles. By addressing fear, organizations can improve the likelihood of developing products that meet market and customer needs, ultimately enhancing their chances of success.

When it could help

This anti-pattern can help in two cases: when an excess of conviction can be useful and when the expected value of validation is low.

As with ignorance, an excess of conviction can be useful in very special circumstances:

• Entrepreneurs vary wildly in their ability to predict the future. On average, they’re very wrong, but there are outliers. If you have solid evidence, without ego-boosting revisionist history, that you are such an outlier, it may be smart to put relatively more weight on your convictions.
• If resources and timeframes are very tight, there truly may be no room for doubt or validation, and it may be worth taking on significant validation risk. It’s time for a Hail Mary pass. Startups often live or die by these decisions.
• There’s a saying in venture capital that a little bit of data is a dangerous thing. Sometimes the presence of data that isn’t great is worse than having no data at all. This is especially true in tough fundraising climates, when investors who are slowing down their investment pace are looking for even more reasons to reject deals. Since hiding bad data is unethical, entrepreneurs sometimes make the decision to avoid or reduce validation instead of risking having to disclose unfavorable data. However, the absence of validation data may lead to fundraising failure.

All these strategies follow the strategy paradox: while they can be extremely successful, they can also lead to extreme failure. Even Steve Jobs, the quintessential product visionary, came up with Macintosh Portable and the Newton.

There are some cases where market validation has lower expected value because it produces fuzzy and/or biased results:

• Highly disruptive products. One example is Uber/Lyft in the early days. When surveyed, early prospective customers were concerned about getting a ride with an unknown, unlicensed driver. However, after consumers got used to the convenience and cost efficiencies with ride-hailing, they became comfortable with it. Strong network effects compound this early on and it is difficult to imagine the value at scale.
• Groundbreaking technology. It’s sometimes hard to articulate technology that works like magic to customers. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, many didn’t understand why touch screens would matter so much. Previous smartphones had keyboards and regular touchscreens, and it wasn’t immediately apparent that capacitive touchscreens would change the world.
• Category creation. In blue ocean scenarios, there are no (or almost no) prospective customers to talk with. The market or category doesn’t exist yet and will only unfold in the (hopefully near-term) future. For example, when Life360 first launched, investors, advisors, and even parents consistently said they don’t believe kids will have smartphones. Smartphones back then were business tools, not replacements for cell phones, and the general audience didn’t think kids would need them. They were clearly wrong (easily said in hindsight).

Some ideas are much harder to validate than others. Smart startups focus a lot of effort on validation to reduce the risk of achieving product-market fit.

Co-authored with Simeon Simeonov. More startup anti-patterns here.