This is the fourth and final post in a series on Product Myopia. If you missed the first three, I introduced the disease, showed you where it hides in every function of your company, and named the symptoms you have been treating as separate problems. Start there if you haven’t.
This post is about what changes when a company finally starts focusing on the future the buyer is trying to create.
The antidote to Product Myopia is not a single initiative or a new process. It is a shift in what each function focuses on. Stop organizing around the product. Start organizing around the future your buyers are trying to create. Here is what that looks like function by function.
Product
A product team facing the buyer’s future asks a different question before anything gets built. Which problem is worth solving, and for whom?
That question changes two decisions. The first is which features make the roadmap. A feature connected to a specific problem in a specific segment earns its place. A feature added because a competitor shipped it, or because someone internally thought it seemed important, gets a much harder look. The second is how the product gets packaged. Packaging built around the scope of a problem helps buyers recognize their own situation in the offer. A buyer with a specific problem sees a package designed around that problem and thinks: this is for me. A buyer looking at a long feature list thinks: I wonder if any of this applies to me. Those are different buying experiences, and only one of them closes the gap.
Marketing
Marketing has two decisions that change when the focus shifts to the buyer’s future: segmentation and messaging.
Segmentation by who buyers are, industry, size, role, gets you to the right people. Segmentation by what problem buyers have gets you to the right conversation. The buyer who recognizes themselves in a problem statement is a different buyer than the one who recognizes themselves in a demographic. One is ready to engage. The other is still deciding whether the message is for them.
Messaging changes just as dramatically. Product-forward messaging speaks fluently to the small slice of buyers who already understand your category well enough to translate a feature into a result. Problem-forward messaging speaks to everyone living the problem, including the buyers who never knew they were in your market. Lead with the problem, follow with the result, and let the product show up as the proof you can deliver the future. That is the order that resonates with the largest available audience.
Pricing
Pricing has one decision that matters more than any other: what does the pricing model signal about where the value lives?
A pricing model tied to the product, per seat, per license, per unit, tells the buyer they are paying for the thing. A pricing model tied to the result, per outcome, per transaction, per unit of value delivered, tells the buyer they are paying for the future. When the metric aligns with the value the buyer receives, every unit of usage feels like a return rather than a cost. The price feels smaller relative to the outcome because the outcome is what the model is measuring.
Beyond the model, pricing also has to set the number. And a number set beside a value nobody made legible will always feel too high. The work of making value legible, naming the problems, connecting them to results, putting a number on what changes in the buyer’s world, is what gives pricing the foundation to hold its ground. Without that foundation, the discount is inevitable.
Sales
Sales does not set strategy the way the other functions do, but salespeople make a decision in every conversation about where to focus their energy.
Most sales conversations run on relative value. Which option is better, which features compare favorably, why you are the right choice over the alternative. That is an important conversation, and winning it gets you to Decide. It does not get you to Commit.
Commit requires inherent value, the buyer’s sense that solving this problem is worth the cost and disruption of change. The salesperson who helps a buyer understand their own problem more clearly than they did before the conversation, who names the KPIs that are suffering, who helps the buyer picture what changes when the problem is gone, is building the foundation for commitment. That is a different conversation than the one most salespeople are trained to have. It is also the one that closes the gap between a buyer who prefers you and a buyer who signs.
Leadership
Leadership’s lever is what gets measured.
Right now the roadmap measures what gets built. The bookings report measures what gets sold. The dashboard measures product performance. Every instrument on the wall is organized around the product, which means every conversation in the building is pulled back toward the product, even when someone is trying to face a different direction.
When leadership starts asking what changed in the buyer’s world, the whole company reorients. Which problems did we help buyers solve this quarter? Which segments responded to problem-forward messaging? Where did buyers commit and where did they stall, and what was the difference? Those questions do not have answers yet in most companies, because nobody built the instrument to measure them. Building those instruments is leadership’s job, and it is the one lever that moves every function at once.
The Question That Changes Everything
Every function has a version of the same shift available to it: Stop asking how to make the product look better. Start asking how to help buyers see the future the product already makes possible.
That question does not require a new product. It does not require a rebrand or a restructure or a new sales methodology. It requires turning to face the place the value actually lives, out ahead of the product, in the future the buyer is trying to create.
The language diagnostic from post 1 is still the fastest way to know where you stand. Count the product words in your next meeting. Count the buyer future words. The ratio tells you which direction your company is facing.
My new book, Buyer Disconnect, is about exactly this. Not a prescription for fixing every function, but a clear-eyed look at why smart companies lose winnable deals and why the value they create stays hidden. If you have been reading this series and recognizing your own company in it, the book goes deeper.
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Tags: buyer, Buyer Disconnect, buyer future, buyer outcomes, customer value, marketing, pricing, Product Myopia, product strategy, value-based pricing
