HOW TO KILL A PRODUCT BEFORE CUSTOMERS DO

Every failed product gets the same eulogy. The market wasn't ready. Competitors moved faster. The customer never saw the value. The explanation always points somewhere outside the building, where no one has to answer for it. How to Kill a Product Before Customers Do argues the opposite. Most products are not rejected by customers at all. They are quietly finished off long before launch - in planning sessions, in polished decks, in dashboards that glow green while the revenue slips out the back. The people responsible are not incompetent or careless. They are diligent, senior, and almost always right about the small thing in front of them. That is exactly why no one sees it coming. Written as a field guide to polite, deniable sabotage, the book walks through ten everyday methods by which capable teams strangle their own products: the roadmap treated as a contract, the feature added to avoid a harder conversation, the meeting that decides nothing, the launch everyone stops watching, the reorganization that erases the only people who understood the thing. Each is illustrated with a composite case from real working life: a lending app, a hospital record system, a telecom billing engine no one was brave enough to switch off. It is dry, unsparing, and uncomfortably familiar. There are no villains in these pages. There is only a meeting the reader has already sat through, and a sentence they have heard said far too calmly. The killers don't wear masks. They wear lanyards.