How to Reduce Product Debt by Solving The ‘Fail-Fast Problem’

Too much pressure on delivery to ‘fail fast’ with unvalidated ideas will inevitably create a huge amount of product debt.

Successful product managers ensure that their products are full to the brim with valuable functionality and features. Anything else built is wastage, or ‘product debt’. The more product debt you have, the lower your return on investment will be.

There are two very common and frequently discussed causes of product debt:

1. Lack of a product strategy
2. Lack of structured discovery

However there’s a third, which is rarely spoken about but which can have the biggest impact. It’s the ‘fail-fast problem’.

Before we get into that, let’s recap on the first two.

Cause 1: Lack of a Product Strategy

First, without a clear product strategy, you will have no objective means of making decisions, therefore feedback on the product will be unfiltered and other factors will lead the decision making.

For example, the seniority of the person who suggested it, or the frequency of which the feedback was raised. It’s not that these sources are always wrong — it’s that they’re not necessarily always right. The easiest and…