Your product is good. That's the problem.
Nobody gets fired for launching a good product. It hits the specs. It passes QA. It looks decent in the catalog. The sales team can work with it.
But nobody remembers it either.
Good is the most dangerous place a product can be. It's comfortable enough to defend and invisible enough to ignore. It sits on a shelf next to twenty other good products and nobody can tell the difference.
Great products are different. Not because they have more features, better materials, or a larger marketing budget. They're different because someone, somewhere in the process, refused to settle.
Good products answer the brief. Great products question it.
The brief says "redesign the handle." The good response is a better handle. The strong response at all. Maybe the entire interaction model is wrong. Maybe the problem isn't the grip. Maybe the problem is that the user shouldn't be gripping anything in the first place.
That's not a design skill. That's a design decision. And most teams are structured to avoid decisions like that. They're structured to optimize, to iterate, to make things slightly better each cycle. Which produces good products. Every time.
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Process keeps things safe. Judgment makes things sharp. The difference between a product that sells and a product that leads a category is usually one moment where someone said: "This isn't enough. We can do better. And here's what we need to sacrifice to get there."
That sacrifice is the part nobody talks about. Great products always lose something. A feature. A target audience. A deadline. A comfortable assumption. The willingness to subtract is what separates great from good.
We see this constantly. A company approaches us with a product that's performing well. Revenue is stable. Customer complaints are low. Everything is "good." And yet, something feels stale. The competition is closing in. The brand is losing its edge. The product has become forgettable.
The answer is never adding more. The answer is: what would this product look like if we designed it from scratch today, given everything we know now? That question terrifies people. It should. Because the answer usually means admitting that good was never the goal. It was just where the team stopped pushing.
If your product is good, congratulations. Now figure out what you're willing to give up to make it great.
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Ready to find out where good is holding your product back?
