This is not a prediction. It is already true. The time, cost and specialist effort required to turn an idea into a working product have dropped, and they are still dropping. Work that used to take a quarter to prove feasible now gets answered in a week.
That is genuinely great. It is not the start of a problem. But it is exposing a problem that is about to get unaffordable.
The cost is not wasted engineering
Historically, the obvious risk was wasted engineering effort. But today, that is the least of it, because engineering effort is exactly what just got cheaper.
When building gets cheaper, the instinct is to build more. More ideas clear the bar, because the bar was largely a cost bar – engineering was the bottleneck. But today, more experiments get resourced. More things reach a state where somebody can look at them. Is the go-to-market (GTM) team ready for the wave of new features and products? Are the inefficiencies of the process between product and GTM no longer sustainable?
The real cost lands somewhere else. Noise.
Every additional idea competes for the same scarce things: product attention, executive review time, GTM bandwidth and the one that does lasting damage: access to customers and to the sales team.
There is a finite number of times you can go to a customer and ask what they think of something. There is a finite amount of credibility Sales will extend before they stop forwarding your requests. Spend that on twenty half-formed ideas instead of four serious ones and you have not merely wasted the asks. You have degraded the channel you depend on to validate anything at all.
So scrutiny has to go up, not down
This runs against instinct. Cheaper building feels like permission to filter less: just build it and see.
The opposite is required. The cheaper it becomes to produce an idea, the more disciplined you have to be about which ones enter the system, because the binding constraint has moved. It is no longer engineering capacity. It is organizational attention, and that has not got cheaper at all.
Which means the screening question moves earlier and gets harder.
Start with why you are building it
Every product and every feature gets built for a reason. The reason is rarely named, and the common ones are not interchangeable:
- Retain a customer because something is broken. You are repairing a defect in the relationship.
- Retain a customer because a competitor has something you do not. You are closing a gap that is being used against you.
- Grow inside a customer with something that was not there before. You are expanding a relationship you already have.
- Win a new customer because you are building something industry-leading. You are trying to expand who buys from you.
Four different bets. Four different definitions of success, four different commercial motions, and four different reasons to stop.
Each reason also sets its own test. Closing a competitive gap has worked when the gap stops costing you deals. Nobody needs to be excited about it. Building something industry-leading has failed if nobody talks about it or worse, they talk about it but don’t know how it solves an important problem. Decide which one you are doing at the start, or you will not be able to judge it at the end.
When the reason is not explicit in the business case, the team defaults to one generic launch at the end. Nobody can say whether it worked, because nobody agreed what working would mean.
Even in engineering-constrained environments, I’ve seen GTM be a ‘check-the-box’ exercise, with not enough critical thinking about how to make sure the investment is commercially successful. The last thing an organization needs is more of this behavior. And when the person checking the boxes isn’t the one who owns the resources needed to execute GTM, major conflicts occur.
Which misses what the moment actually is. GTM is Product’s opportunity to deliver on the promise they made when they convinced the company to build a product or add a feature.
Couple the business case to the commercial plan
These are usually two documents, possibly produced by two groups, at two different times. The business case justifies the investment at the front. The commercial plan decides whether it succeeded, and it gets written near the end, once there is something to sell.
That gap is where the value leaks out. The business case makes assumptions about who will buy and why. The commercial plan discovers, months later, that nobody tested them. By then the money is spent and the only remaining question is how to launch it. The question should be whether to launch it at all.
This is a boundary problem before it is a process problem. The business case usually lives with Product or Finance. The commercial plan lives with Sales and Marketing. Each gets written competently, by capable people, inside its own function. The gap between them belongs to nobody, and that is exactly where the outcome fails.
That is what an organizational seam looks like. Not a bad decision inside a department, but a good decision in each department that nobody connected. The work crossed a boundary. The accountability did not.
GTM is Product’s opportunity to deliver on the promise they made when they convinced the company to build a product or add a feature.
It is also why this gets worse as volume rises. One initiative crossing that seam is a conversation somebody can hold in their head. Twenty of them is a structural problem, and structural problems do not get solved by people trying harder inside their own function.
They should be one thing, written at the same time, by people who have to agree with each other because resources from multiple departments need to be involved in defining and ensuring success. The case for building it and the plan for making it pay are the same argument.
Kill more, and kill earlier
The consequence of better scrutiny is that more ideas die. That is not the process failing. That is the process.
What matters is when.
An idea killed before it enters the GTM pipeline costs a conversation. An idea killed after general availability costs the build, the launch, the sales enablement, every customer ask you spent getting there, and some measure of credibility with the team you asked to go sell it.
Most organizations are not built to be comfortable with this. Killing something reads as admitting a mistake, so ideas with no traction get carried forward on momentum until it’s too late. When building was expensive, that instinct was costly but survivable. There were only so many ideas in flight. Now that far more of them will enter the system, it is not.
Not everything that ships deserves a launch
When building was expensive, few things reached go-to-market, and the commercial teams pushed hard on all of them. That carried a hidden cost. When something did not land, nobody could say whether the product was wrong or the go-to-market was. Either way the cycle was spent.
With far more things shipping, that approach breaks. Go-to-market has to get selective, deciding what earns real attention, and combining related items into a campaign rather than announcing each one on its own.
It also has to separate two different jobs. Some things are worth telling the world about, because they change what the market understands you to be. Others should never get a megaphone. They should surface in a discovery conversation, when a salesperson asks the right question and the answer happens to be yes.
Treating everything as an announcement is how you train customers to stop listening.
The ability to build was never sufficient justification for building. What has changed is the cost of pretending otherwise.