Distinctions

Is

  • An approach where a team starts with its own capabilities, technology, or internal vision, then builds the product around those strengths rather than beginning with customer needs.

Is Not

Examples

Your team prevents outages. Leadership sees no outages. Leadership concludes that the system is stable. Budget cuts begin.

Boundary

Systems

Relationships

  • Can be misdiagnosed as a distribution, adoption, or execution problem when the deeper issue is weak understanding of the customer problem.

Perspectives

  • From the team’s perspective, failure may look like “customers did not adopt what we built.”
  • From the customer’s perspective, the product may not have addressed a problem acute enough to motivate change.

Works Consulted

  1. Stop Solving the Wrong Problem