Impact Pricing Blog

Your deals are stalling. Your roadmap keeps growing, but your differentiation keeps shrinking. Your marketing reaches the right people but not enough converts to pipeline. Your pricing fails to capture your fair share of the value you deliver. These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of one disease. 

In 1960, Theodore Levitt published one of the most important articles in the history of business. “Marketing Myopia” argued that the railroads didn’t decline because demand for transportation shrank. Demand grew. They declined because they defined themselves as railroad companies instead of transportation companies. They were so focused on what they built that they went blind to what they were actually selling.

Levitt saw this at the scale of an industry. The same blind spot runs smaller and faster today. It doesn’t wait for an industry to collapse over a generation. It shows up inside a single company, inside a single deal, inside a meeting last Tuesday. It cost you deals last quarter. This version is called Product Myopia.

What It Is

Product Myopia is the belief that value lives in the product.

It is the conviction, rarely stated and almost never examined, that what your company sells is the thing you built. The software. The machine. The platform. The feature set. Companies with Product Myopia define themselves by what they make, describe themselves in terms of what it does, and measure success by how much of it they ship.

This feels completely natural, because it is. You built the product. You funded it, staffed it, named it, and put it at the center of your company. Of course it feels like the center. It is the only thing in the building you can actually touch.

But it is not where the value is. 

Value is the result of solving problems. Not the product. Not the feature. Not the capability. The result that shows up in the buyer’s world after the problem is gone. The deals that stop slipping. The line that runs without the Friday breakdown. The team that finally ships on time. The product is the mechanism that delivers the result. The result is the thing the buyer is actually paying for.

Which means the value lives ahead of the product, in a future that has not yet arrived. And a company focused on the product it built is turned away from the only place the value actually lives.

Why Almost Everyone Has It

You have never once bought a product for its own sake. You bought the expected outcome on the other side of it. You bought the warm house, not the furnace. You bought arriving without the sweat, not the e-bike. You bought the photograph on the wall, not the camera. The product was the vehicle. The future it created was the destination. And the destination is the only part anyone was ever actually buying.

But because the product is what you can see, the entire organization gets structured around the wrong center before anyone notices.

Product Myopia is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is a failure of orientation, built into the structure of almost every company, owned by no one because no one ever chose it. It was simply where everyone started, back at the whiteboard, with the first question anyone asked.

What should we build?

Not: what future are our buyers trying to create? Not: what problem are we solving? The mind went straight to the thing. And the company that formed around that question has been answering it ever since.

The Diagnostic

This is not someone else’s problem.

For the next week, pay attention to the language in every meeting. Count how many times people talk about features, products, capabilities, and roadmaps. Then count how many times they talk about customer problems, buyer fears, desired futures, and willingness to pay.

You do not diagnose Product Myopia by looking at your product. You diagnose it by listening to your language.

If the first list dominates, you have your answer. 

This is the first in a series of posts on Product Myopia. Next week we’ll look at where it hides inside your company, in every function, in ways you will immediately recognize.

My new book, Buyer Disconnect, goes deep on exactly that work. Sign up here to be notified the moment it launches.

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Now, go make an impact!