Delayed Feedback Kills Product Innovation

Last month, I watched a talented product team ship a feature that would have been perfect, if it had launched three months earlier. Six developers spent twelve weeks crafting a collaborative workflow tool that users had begged for in January. Every line of code matched the specs perfectly. The UI was spotless. Every test passed with flying colors.

The team had done everything right. Morning standups buzzed with progress updates. Design reviews yielded pixel perfect mockups. Code reviews caught every edge case. The product manager kept stakeholders aligned and excited. Even the launch plan looked beautiful, a masterclass in engineering execution.

Then they sat down with users. One by one, they showed how they'd patched together their own fix using Slack and some quick automation. Those urgent needs from January? Already solved. That burning problem that drove all those feature requests? Gone.

"Oh yeah, that was a huge pain point back then," one user said, sharing his screen. "But we figured out this workaround with Zapier and some Slack channels. It's pretty rough around the edges, but honestly? It works fine now."

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