Nathan Latka

They're not going to buy it.

Nine times out of ten, they're going to come in, and they're going to say, oh, yeah, we'll totally buy if you build this one thing.

You build this thing, they don't buy.

And new features are great for keeping everybody on the executive team happy, keeping your investors happy, because it feels like you're growing.

You're not growing in the way that are meaningful, right?

Because it doesn't get you new customers most of the time, and it doesn't stop your current customers from churning, because people are already using your product.

They just want that to work better nine times out of ten.

The other problem with your roadmap is hippos.

And if you haven't heard of hippos, it's the highest paid person's opinion in your organization.

How many times have you come up and your CEO says, oh, I have this great idea.

What I'm referencing over here with this my billion dollar mistake is an article written by Hinton Shaw.

He was the founder of Kitsmetrics.

He says in the article, we were three years ahead of our competition.

We were scrappy, we were lean, we were iterating on things that they had let stagnate.

And then he says, I F'd it all up.

And the reason why is because he had all these ideas.

And every time he had an idea, he went to his product team and he said, hey, product team, build this.

His ideas were not better than lots of the ideas that they were already working on.

But because he was the highest paid person in the organization, people built what he said.

It actually got to the point he talks about in his article.