The digital product world is moving too fast for its own good. What once made sense for early-stage startups, building quickly, shipping scrappily, and learning fast, has crept into the practices of large, established companies. Instead of creating better products, it has led to a flood of half-finished features, bloated platforms, and eroded user trust. In the race to be everywhere and offer everything, companies are losing the clarity, craft, and discipline that once made them strong.
If we want to build products that last, we need to rethink the pace, the priorities, and the purpose behind what we create.
Good Enough
In the right place at the right time, good enough has a valid role in digital product development.
When you’re building an early-stage startup with limited resources, time is your enemy. Good design is a luxury you can’t afford on a friends and family funded budget. In that environment, the goal isn’t to craft a polished product, it’s to get a working version into the market, test assumptions, learn from users, and secure more funding before the money or momentum runs out.
Minimal research, fast front-end builds, and rough guesses all made sense when the aim was validation, not victory. Good enough wasn’t about lowering standards. It was about strategic survival, a stepping stone, a temporary compromise on the way to something better.
The real problem today isn’t that MVPs exist. It’s that good enough thinking has become permanent. Products once meant to be iterated on are left untouched. Core experiences are rarely improved. Features are launched quickly but rarely optimised through real user testing, behavioural data, or craft.
Instead of learning from the MVP and refining it into something great, many companies simply move on, chasing the next feature, the next expansion, the next growth story. Built products are treated as if they’re finished when they’re not.
A product that was once good enough to launch becomes good enough to live with.
Over time, that good enough experience starts to show in clumsy interfaces, confusing flows, broken promises, and frustrated users who wonder why nothing ever really gets better.
Shipping fast is fine. But treating a shipped MVP as a finished product is where the damage begins.
Real product maturity comes from iteration. It comes from investing time in polishing what matters, making core journeys faster, clearer, more helpful, and more delightful. It comes from looking at data, listening to users, refining decisions, improving performance, and deepening loyalty.
Companies should be making their best features even better, not piling on new ones nobody asked for. They should be focused on strengthening what makes them valuable, not distracting themselves with constant expansions into categories they barely understand.
Good enough is fine for a launch.
Good enough is fatal as a long-term strategy.
Bad
In the race to grow, companies have abandoned focus.
Across the tech industry, mature organisations with established brands and significant resources are shipping new features and launching entire platforms at an unsustainable pace. Every business wants to expand into adjacent categories, driven more by fear of being left behind than by any clear user need. Fintechs are selling movie tickets, insurance, and SIM cards. Delivery apps are offering home security systems. Mobile networks are pushing travel deals inside dashboards built for managing your phone plan.
Executives, inspired by theories about ecosystems and platforms, are launching new B2B ecommerce ventures and loyalty programs without clear strategic grounding. The platforms being built often bear no relationship to the parent brand, nor any real connection to what customers expect or want.
Critical questions are being skipped.
→ Is this something our users need?
→ Is this something our brand should offer?
→ Can we actually run this at the level of quality that maintains trust?
→ Are we still staying in our lane?
Instead of focus, companies create noise. Instead of strength, they dilute themselves.
It is like building a marathon training platform to sell sneakers, but leaving the coaching, community, and content to people who have never run a mile. Without operational expertise behind new ventures, and without service layers properly planned and resourced, these additions quickly become burdens, not assets. They scatter energy and damage brand integrity.
The damage does not stay contained. It spreads. Core products weaken as attention, budget, and leadership focus are pulled into too many directions at once. Customers notice. And once trust is broken, it is hard to win back.
Ugly
The situation has worsened even further with the rise of mass-market AI.
Instead of using AI carefully to enhance product quality or service, many companies are treating it as a shortcut to cut costs. Entire design teams, research departments, and service teams are being downsized or eliminated, based on the belief that AI tools can replace human expertise. The craft, experience, and user understanding that took years to build are being discarded in months. Quality is sacrificed in the name of efficiency, but what is really lost is the connection to users, the ability to design with empathy, and the capacity to evolve products through real learning.
At the same time, AI is being rushed into products, not because it solves user problems, but because it looks impressive in marketing. Companies are bolting AI onto every feature they can, desperate to add “powered by AI” to their product descriptions, landing pages, and investor reports. The decision to integrate AI is rarely about improving the user experience. It is about optics. It is about appearing modern, relevant, and competitive, even if the underlying product becomes more confusing, more brittle, and less human.
The result is predictable. Products become heavier, journeys become harder, and users are left to navigate a maze of half-finished features designed to impress everyone except the people who actually have to use them.
What is being lost is not just quality. It is trust. It is the patient, deliberate building of products that people want to use and keep using.
If we are not careful, we will not move forward with AI, but faster toward more fragile, disconnected, and short-lived experiences, losing not just craft, but users themselves.
Good
A better way forward begins with restoring discipline in how we build products.
Good practice starts with reconnecting to users. It means investing properly in research, not running a handful of usability tests just to tick a box. It means creating roadmaps based on user needs and business strengths, not just copying competitors or chasing trends.
Good teams ship carefully. They improve existing journeys first before adding complexity. They understand that retention and user satisfaction are not side effects, they are outcomes of deliberate design decisions.
Good leaders protect quality. They resist the temptation to expand endlessly and instead double down on what made their products valuable to users in the first place.
When we aim for good, we slow down enough to ask the right questions.
When we aim for good, we remember that craft and care are not optional extras, they are competitive advantages.
Better
Better practice goes deeper than fixing features or running tests. It recognises that building a product is also building an ecosystem.
Better companies know that every new feature or platform needs more than code. It needs service. It needs operations. It needs people and processes ready to support it long after launch.
Better organisations invest in teams that can grow products, not just ship them. They treat launch as the beginning of the work, not the end. They create service design maps, operational models, and feedback loops before they go live, knowing that a product without ongoing support will not survive for long.
Better leaders understand the connection between product, brand, and service. They know that each experience a customer has is a thread in the larger relationship with the company. If you add noise, you weaken the thread. If you strengthen the essentials, you weave trust.
Better does not mean doing more.
It means thinking longer term, and making sure what you build can actually be run well and loved for years to come.
Best
The best companies take it even further.
They do not measure success by how fast they ship or how many features they release. They measure success by how much they sharpen the value they offer, how clearly they deliver it, and how deeply they earn loyalty over time.
The best teams design with patience. They think beyond interfaces and flows to the systems that support them. They design the product, the service, and the brand as one connected experience, not separate projects running in parallel.
They understand that real innovation is not about adding more.
It is about taking away what does not matter.
It is about stripping complexity, noise, and distractions until the product feels inevitable, because it fits so naturally into people’s lives.
The best companies know that every interaction is a promise.
The way a product works, the way a service responds, the way a brand makes you feel, all of it adds up to the real experience customers remember.
They understand that every decision compounds. Every shortcut taken today becomes technical debt, brand debt, and trust debt tomorrow.
The best companies treat design not as a project phase, but as a permanent commitment.
They do not rush to market to be first.
They build to endure.
We were supposed to be building better products. Instead, we have normalised unfinished work. We launch before we learn. We expand before we refine. We confuse activity for progress and clutter for innovation.
When delivery becomes the goal, quality disappears.
What should have been sharpened through research, iteration, and craft is left rough and rushed, forgotten under the next wave of “big ideas” that nobody asked for.
This is not progress. It is regression.
We are heading back to a time when software technically worked but was difficult to use and frustrating to navigate.
Design was never brought into technology to decorate. It was brought in to humanise, to translate complexity into something people could actually use and trust.
If we want to move forward, we do not need more features, faster releases, or another wave of the latest trends.
We need to design.