Building products that actually create value

Only a small fraction of startups survive long term, and the biggest cause isn’t funding—it’s building something the market doesn’t truly need. When there’s no real demand, funding issues are a symptom, not the disease. At a recent lunch & learn, NextCorps EIR Zoe Koulouris shared how early-stage teams can avoid that trap by treating product as a cross-functional, learning-driven effort, not just a feature factory.

Drawing on 15 years of experience as a founder, software agency owner, and product leader, Koulouris unpacked the product lifecycle, the role of product management, and how discovery, delivery, and team structure all come together to reduce risk and increase the odds of real traction.

What is a product, really?

Koulouris framed a product as an equation where you are solving for value. To “balance” it, teams have to simultaneously serve the customer, the business, and the technology. Ignore any one of those three, and the result is failure.

• Customer = usability risk: Can people figure out how to use it?
• Technology = feasibility risk: Can you actually build and maintain it?
• Business = viability risk: Does it make sense for your business and goals?

The combination of all three is what generates value—measured not just in features shipped, but in adoption, retention, revenue, and satisfaction.

Matching tactics to product lifecycle stage

The product lifecycle describes the journey of a single product from idea to end-of-life. Koulouris emphasized that your current stage should drive your priorities and investments. Mislabeling your stage—and applying the wrong tactics—can get expensive fast.

R&D / Incubation: The riskiest phase. You’re investing in building an MVP—a minimal but complete version that you can actually sell. The focus is on early adopters, prototyping, grants, pre-seed funding, and friends-and-family support.

Introduction: You have a production-ready MVP and you launch to a targeted, forgiving market that tolerates bugs and limited features. The challenge is eventually translating an early adopter product into something the broader market expects.

Growth: You’re gaining product-market fit and traction. Priorities shift to scaling, expanding the team and operations, and raising capital (Series A/B/C, later-stage VC, or PE) to meet demand.

Maturity and Decline: You’ve reached peak market share and face growing competition. Now the work is about defending your position, innovating, potentially transforming the product, or deciding when to reintroduce, pivot, or wind it down.

Throughout the talk, Koulouris used a fictional case study: a company with multiple products at different lifecycle stages and ten conflicting business goals, creating internal misalignment. By mapping products onto a lifecycle graph, leaders could see which offerings were mature but at risk, which were failing and should be shelved, and which new products needed investment—making prioritization more concrete.

Where product management comes in

When there are many products, goals, and constraints, the complexity quickly outgrows ad hoc decision-making. That’s where product management provides structure, owning the “big picture” of:

• What you’re trying to accomplish with each product
• How the product vision and strategy translate into a roadmap
• How to communicate that roadmap so builders empathize with both customer needs and business outcomes

In early-stage companies, the CEO typically acts as product leader because they own the vision and understand the business tradeoffs. As companies grow and add products, CEOs often hand this responsibility to a Chief Product Officer, VP of Product, or product managers who partner closely with engineering.

Koulouris framed strategy as “specific choices:” one to three problems you’ll focus on for a clearly defined target market, along with explicit decisions about what you will not work on right now. Good strategy is about focus as much as it is about ambition.

From vision to roadmap: Choosing outcomes, not features

A strong product vision may span three to five years for software (and often longer for hardware), but it remains high-level and inspirational. Product strategy bridges that vision to the present by defining a specific target market, a clear value proposition, a small set of prioritized problems to solve, and the business results that will signal success. The roadmap then turns that strategy into tactics.

Instead of a long, feature-driven wish list, Koulouris advocated for outcome-oriented roadmaps that tie initiatives to concrete results and metrics, clarify what “success” looks like before work starts, and give teams a rational basis for prioritizing the backlog.

She highlighted four product metrics that connect roadmap decisions to real performance: adoption, retention, revenue, and satisfaction. When leaders pick a focus area—like retaining customers on a mature but threatened product—they can align metrics such as churn and upsell revenue to specific objectives and initiatives.

Discovery: Validating before you build

In many organizations, ideas come from everywhere—customers, sales, executives, the product team—and end up in a giant list that the team is expected to estimate and deliver. This linear, “throw it over the wall” flow (business case → requirements → design → engineering) creates lag and often leads to building the wrong things.

Koulouris recommended shifting to a more parallel and iterative discovery process. Instead of pushing requirements down the chain, cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering) collaborate early to generate ideas tied to clear objectives, prototype and experiment quickly, and collect evidence about usability, feasibility, and viability before making large commitments.

Top product teams run many small experiments a week—not big, polished tests, but focused probes around specific risks and hypotheses. The goal is to validate or invalidate ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible, so the backlog is continuously pruned and focused on what’s most likely to work.

Delivery: Getting to production fast and safely

Discovery is about learning. Delivery is about reliably getting working software into users’ hands. Koulouris pointed to several delivery metrics that can help teams self-assess:

• Deployment frequency: How often do you release to production?
• Lead time for changes: How long from starting work on a change to having it live?
• Time to restore service: How quickly can you recover from a production failure?
• Change failure rate: What percentage of deployments cause issues?

In early-stage companies, these responsibilities often fall to a technical founder or a single technical lead. As organizations grow, engineering managers and more formal DevOps practices help build the infrastructure and culture needed for continuous delivery.

Build vs. buy: Investing in the right capabilities

Another recurring question for startups is whether to build software in-house, contract it out, or buy an existing product. Koulouris has been on both sides: running an agency that built products for clients, and working inside companies that combined internal development with external partners.

She encouraged founders to consider whether software is a long-term capability they want to invest in, how much internal expertise they have to manage vendors or offshore teams, and the cultural and ownership implications of relying on external partners.

Regardless of the path, the same core questions apply: Are we building the right thing? Do we have the right team? How long will it take? How much will it cost? Clear product management and discovery practices make those conversations more grounded.

Balancing investments across the portfolio

Returning to the case study, Koulouris shared a way to think about resourcing across multiple products by defining “investment levels” based on lifecycle stage and strategic role. A new MVP might be staffed with a lean designer-developer pair, while a mature “run the business” product or a transformational initiative might warrant a larger, cross-functional team.

This framing helps leadership see where dollars and headcount are going to run, grow, and transform the business. By making these allocations explicit, teams can align financial planning with product strategy instead of letting history or internal politics drive investment decisions.

The human side: Conflict, alignment, and culture

The Q&A surfaced a theme many attendees recognized: tension between stakeholders who want to ship faster, and technical teams who don’t feel ready. Koulouris acknowledged that product work is messy, and decisions are often made with incomplete information. You sometimes do have to ship before everything feels perfect—but you also need structures that make those decisions thoughtful, not random.

One pattern she has seen work is cross-functional leadership pairs—a product manager and engineering manager who partner closely, jointly own tradeoffs, and advocate both for business outcomes and technical quality. When those relationships are strong and rooted in empathy, it becomes much easier to negotiate scope, timing, and risk in a way that preserves trust.

Bringing it all together

Koulouris’ core message for founders is simple but demanding: treat product as a disciplined, cross‑functional practice grounded in real customer value, not just a list of features. When you’re clear on your stage, your strategy, and how you’ll learn quickly, you dramatically improve your odds of building products that actually matter.

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