Breaking the Cycle: Why Product Teams Must Start with Customer Desirability

Written By Ryan Foreman

How do we break to cycle of features that continue to disappoint customers and fail to deliver results?

Some of the biggest successes I’ve seen and had is when customer first principles are acted on, but why are so many ideas still based only on maximising revenue or delivering what is feasible with the current technology?

The Feature Trap

I’ve seen product teams continually being pushed to build experiences that customers haven’t asked for, all because a commercial models show a great return on investment. But too often, those features flop. Customers don’t use them. Business results aren’t realised.

When the teams deliver the feature but the commercial results are not realised, it creates a cyclical culture where commercial results are chased through more and more deliverables and forcing features faster. Discovery gets deprioritised. Teams feel stuck and pressure mounts to deliver the next feature even faster.

Product teams have the tools, skills and knowledge to validate desirability of customers but not the capacity.

Products have to be commercially viable, but if they don’t appeal to customers, they will never be successful

How can product teams break this cycle put the customer at the forefront of decision making?

The Mindset Shift: Start with Desirability

One of the most powerful transformations I’ve led with product teams starts with a mindset shift.

👉 You can influence Viability and Feasibility. You can’t control Desirability. Start here.

Desirability Viability Feasibility framework

I’ve used the Desirability Viability Feasibility framework over and over to shift this mindset and change culture in organisations that fell into this trap, it’s biggest impact has been to:

  • Start conversations focused on the customer, solving their problems and meeting their needs.

  • Demanding validation by customer discovery, testing, and iterative learning become mandatory, not optional

  • Prompting stakeholders to assess their own ideas, limiting the investment made and identifying risk earlier

  • You build better alignment, with a shared framework, product, engineering, and commercial teams assess ideas together.

Control the controllables, discover the rest

Viability and Feasibility are levers that organisations have the most control over:

  • Feasibility - Technical scope, team capacity, tools.

  • Viability - Commercial models, pricing, growth levers.

What you don’t control is the customer:

  • Desirability - Customer problems, needs, and motivations

This isn’t about saying no to the business. It’s about finding better ways to say yes to the customer.

Final thought

By starting with desirability and leveraging the framework to balance the rest, I’ve helped turn delivery focused teams into discovery led machines that are more confident in whats on their roadmap, more empathetic to their customers, and delivered more results for the business.

It’s not a silver bullet. But it creates the conditions for better conversations, better products, and better outcomes.

Ryan Foreman