Over the last two weeks I introduced Product Myopia, the belief that value lives in the product rather than the future it creates, and showed you where it hides inside every function of your company. This week is about what it costs.
Every symptom below probably has its own initiative in your company. Its own budget. Its own task force or consultant or quarterly goal. Each one feels like a separate problem with a separate cause and a separate fix.
It isn’t. They are all the same disease.
Feature Wars
Your competitors ship a capability. You match it. You ship one. They match it. The cycle repeats, quarter after quarter, and neither of you pulls ahead. The product grows more complex, the release notes get longer, and the differentiation between you and your closest competitor somehow keeps shrinking.
This is what happens when two companies compete on the product instead of the future. Features are visible, comparable, and easy to copy. The buyer’s future is none of those things. A company that helps buyers see a future they could not see before is competing on ground nobody else has claimed. A company locked in a feature war has picked the most crowded battlefield available and is fighting for inches.
Discounting
The deal is close. The buyer has been engaged, the demos went well, and then they balk at the price. So you discount. The deal closes. Everyone moves on.
What actually happened is this: the buyer reached the end of the evaluation and could not see the value clearly enough to pay for it. The company, unable to make the value legible, lowered the price to meet the buyer’s confidence instead of raising the buyer’s confidence to meet the price. The discount closed the deal by quietly agreeing with the buyer’s doubt. And the buyer walked away having learned that your prices are negotiable, which is a lesson they will remember next renewal.
Discounting feels like closing. It is actually the tax you pay for Product Myopia.
Fear of Raising Prices
Leadership knows prices should be higher. The margins tell them. The competitive analysis tells them. Their gut tells them. And still nobody moves.
The reason is simple. Raising prices requires being able to defend the value, and the value was never made legible enough to defend. The company is held hostage by its own inability to articulate what it actually delivers. So prices stay where they are, the company leaves money on the table every quarter, and the conversation about raising prices happens again next year with the same outcome.
Commoditization
When every competitor describes their product in the same language, buyers cannot tell the offers apart. The product that should feel differentiated feels identical to three others on the shortlist.
This is not a branding problem. It is a Product Myopia problem. Everyone is looking at the same thing, the product, and describing it in the same terms, features and capabilities and integrations. The differentiation was always in the result the product creates, in the specific future it makes possible for a specific buyer with a specific problem. Nobody talked about that, so nobody stands out, and the buyer does the only thing left to do. They compare on price.
Long Sales Cycles
The champion is sold. The demo was strong. The evaluation went well. And then the deal enters a strange purgatory where meetings slide, replies slow, and nothing moves.
What is happening is that the champion has to carry the case internally, to a CFO who never saw the demo, to a committee that was never in the room, to colleagues who will remember if it goes wrong. And the case they were handed is a product story. Features, capabilities, a comparison chart. None of it answers the question the CFO is actually asking, which is whether solving this problem is worth the cost and disruption of change.
The champion cannot sell what they were never given. The business case has no foundation because the value was never built on problems and results. So the deal sits. Sales calls it a long cycle, and the real cause goes unexamined.
Small Pipeline
Most companies believe their pipeline problem is a sales problem. The team is not prospecting hard enough. The outreach volume is too low. The conversion rate needs work.
But look at who is in the pipeline. It is almost entirely buyers who already recognized their problem, already decided it was worth solving, and already went looking for a solution. That is the smallest set of buyers available. The vast majority of your potential market has the problem but has not yet prioritized it, or has the problem and cannot yet see it at all. Those buyers are invisible to a company that speaks only in product and solution language, because they are not yet shopping for a solution. They are living a problem that has not yet been named.
A company with Product Myopia can only see the buyers already looking for what it sells. Everyone else, often the largest and most valuable opportunity in the market, never enters the conversation at all. The pipeline stays small because the company is only visible to the fraction of the market already ready to buy.
The Pattern
These six are ones every company recognizes. They are not the whole list. Product Myopia touches almost every decision a company makes, from which customers to pursue to how to onboard the ones you win. These six are painful enough to have a name.
Each symptom attracts its own solution and its own budget. None of them treat the disease. They manage the symptoms while the cause runs untouched underneath, producing the same problems next quarter with new names on the initiative.
Next week I’ll talk about what changes when a company finally turns to face the future its buyers are trying to create.
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!
Tags: buyer, buyer outcomes, buyer value, product differentation, Product Myopia, product strategy, sales, value, Value Creation
