Parnia Sebti

Most product roadmaps don’t fail because the template was wrong. They fail because the people in the room never actually agreed on the plan, and the document made it easy to hide that disagreement. A roadmap with a polished timeline gets signed off. But engineering quietly disagrees with parts of it, and sales pictures a […]

Most digital products die long before any code goes live. They usually die in the first two weeks, when a founder with real domain knowledge tries to turn that knowledge into a build plan and instead gets talked into producing a feature list rather than making a decision. The list keeps growing, deadlines slip, and […]

The excitement after a product launch is usually gone within three weeks. By then, there is some calm in Slack and activity on the product development roadmap you created prior to launch. So, you know what you need to do to ship the next product feature. But you are less certain if it is the […]

Voice keeps arriving in product roadmaps for the wrong reason. A customer asked for hands-free access. A competitor shipped a voice skill. A weekend demo of an LLM turned two hours of speech into what looked like a working assistant. Someone on the team says, “We can add that.” The harder question is always whether […]

You have the contract in ink as of Tuesday. Yet come Friday, the W-9 is languishing in a Slack DM, an ID upload has been in the spam folder since last night and someone from your side has to put the client on the spot for brand assets that were already turned over. It is […]

Most product decisions get made on evidence nobody would defend in a meeting. A pricing page changes because someone on Slack “felt” it was too cluttered. A feature ships because three loud customers asked for it. A signup flow gets rebuilt on the strength of one investor comment. None of that is research. And none […]

Code is rarely the culprit when a product goes under. The failure usually sets in months before that, at the point where an opinion is mistaken for fact. A look at CB Insights’ post-mortems will tell you 35 to 42 percent of startups have fallen because there was simply no market need. The features were […]

You won’t find most website redesigns have failed on account of an unattractive new look. No, they fail because the team made the mistake of treating a business issue as one of style. They put a designer to work before they knew what the site was supposed to do, gave their blessing to a homepage […]

You will not find many UX audits that have failed on account of the reviewer’s oversight. More often they fail because the report is delivered as a PDF, receives some accolades in a meeting and then does absolutely nothing to alter course. The team goes on with shipping and the friction remains. Put it off […]