Why Do Good Products Fail?

InnovationWhy Do Good Products Fail?ByRajiv Gupta,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 08, 2026, 07:15am EDTRajiv Gupta is a Principal Product Leader at AWS driving cross-functional business strategy for cloud infrastructure and AI storage. getty​When was the last time you looked at a product launch and asked yourself what that company was thinking or who in the world would buy that? I go through this at least once a week, if not more. This is in addition to the products that barely register, even after someone gives you a demo.Many such products either die or, even worse, hang around for years without meaningful adoption. Product teams keep working on the next feature that their market research says is critical to unlocking the hockey-stick growth curve. It often doesn't deliver the intended outcomes.A while back, I started looking for a simple set of questions that a product manager can ask when shaping a product or evaluating a direction. I reviewed both successful and unsuccessful launches across AI tools, enterprise software and consumer products. In my experience, three questions consistently revealed whether a product was set up to succeed or headed for one of the failure modes I described above. Others may have frameworks that work equally well, but these are the ones that resonate with me.1. Can most individuals in your target segment understand the product, even if they're not the ones buying or using it?The benchmark here isn't whether your buyer understands the product; it's whether the broader segment does. Only aerospace engineers need to understand a component built for space shuttles, not the general public. Within that segment, however, engineers should easily understand the value of the component over alternatives. Similarly, a networking engineer should immediately un...