Why Most Startups Build the Wrong Product and How to Get It Right | Ep 274 | DevReady Podcast

·34 min·2 clips

She says founders “fall madly in love with the solution” and then build before validating the problem.

1. DevReady Podcast episode 274 centers on why most startups build the wrong product and how Karina Carter says to avoid that mistake. 2. Karina Carter, a fractional CPO with 12 years in product, joins as the guest and explains why she is brought into companies that are not performing well. 3. The episode asks what a product team should do before building, and Karina’s answer is to understand the problem, not just the solution. 4. She describes her earlier work as a research analyst in UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, where she sat in a “windowless basement” doing regression analysis on countrywide data sets. 5. She contrasts that academic, slow environment with product work, where shipping quickly and speaking to customers matters more than sending analysis into “the black hole” of a department. 6. Karina says every company she has worked with sits on “a ton of data they haven’t actioned,” and she starts by asking for access to the data set. 7. She says the useful pattern is to identify outliers, interview the people behind them, and then discover new use cases that can become “30% of the revenue.” 8. She gives the Great Firewall as the China-specific problem space that shaped her venture studio work, because Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Shopify could not be used normally. 9. She says that in China they solved that problem quickly, and people were willing to wait six months for their solutions because the company addressed a specific pain. 10. Karina says the best teams are not necessarily the biggest teams, and she values “better people” with a growth mindset over headcount. 11. She names “radical responsibility” as another core trait, meaning “this is my problem to solve” rather than blaming the market or outside forces. 12. Karina explains that customer research must use the same questions for everyone, because changing the questions destroys the ability to find a theme. 13. She says the wrong research can still happen when teams ask leading questions like “Do you think this is great?” and then mistake polite answers for real validation. 14. One example she gives is 20 people in the UK buying pollution masks, which turned out to be tied to cancer treatment rather than pollution itself. 15. She says she interviews customers by asking what runs through their heads “right before you fell asleep,” because that surfaces real business worries like cashflow. 16. Karina says feedback from loud users can be misleading if they are not the ideal customer profile, and the real fix may be to stop those users from entering. 17. She says product teams should create a vision statement and strategy before setting OKRs, because “impact” has to mean something specific. 18. The episode is conversational and practical, with Karina giving direct examples, quick corrections, and strong opinions about research, data, and AI. 19. People building B2B products, startup founders, and product managers will get the most out of this episode. 20. Listeners looking for light entertainment or a beginner-only overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical warning against building around a solution before the problem is understood.

This episode makes a plain case against building around a solution before the problem is clear. Karina Carter brings a fractional CPO lens to it, laying out how she looks at underperforming companies, checks what is actually working, and uses interviews to surface overlooked…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you keep confusing customer quotes with customer truth.

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