Destined to Fail: B2B PM Story

This case study illustrates a common B2B product failure pattern where teams build solutions for problems that aren't actually high-priority for customers. Shreyas Doshi describes the typical cycle: PMs conduct customer interviews, receive positive validation for their product idea, build and launch the product, but then experience poor adoption despite having "solved the problem" customers said they wanted addressed.

The root issue is the "focusing illusion" - when discussing a specific problem with customers, they naturally focus on that problem in isolation, making it seem more important than it actually is relative to their other business priorities. This leads to false validation for products that solve real but low-priority problems.

Doshi introduces the "Customer Problems Stack Rank" (CPSR) approach as a solution. Instead of discussing problems in isolation, PMs should ask customers to rank the target problem against all other problems they're currently facing across their business and organization. This provides crucial context about relative importance and urgency. The approach should be applied across different personas (VP Support, Marketing, Sales, etc.) to get a complete picture.

The key takeaway for product managers is that solving a real problem isn't enough - you must solve a problem that ranks highly among your customer's current priorities. Using stack ranking methodology during customer discovery helps avoid the focusing illusion and provides more accurate validation of whether a problem is worth solving with a new product.