Why your product is burning cash, not creating value

There’s a name for products that look good on paper but don’t deliver returns: expensive 💸.

We build businesses on fragile foundations (velocity, headcount, good stories) until one day, the cracks appear:

• ❌ We're not sure we're building the right things anymore
• ❌ We're not delivering fast enough to make it to the next round
• ❌ And it's not helping the business KPIs (EV, EBITDA, growth)

Too often, our energy goes into crafting a story investors want to hear, instead of building products that actually move the business. Today’s product methods like agile, product discovery, Cagan’s empowered teams, or even Ries' lean startup, have brought us a long way. We’ve learned to move fast, iterate, listen to users, chase outcomes, and so on.

So… what’s missing?

💔 The love of the product.

Sounds cheesy? Think of an artisan. They don’t just deliver things. They craft them, with care, intent, and mastery. That’s what I mean by the love of the product.

Now think of how we talk about “product” today. We think UX. product management. growth. Maybe marketing. But we rarely think engineering, craft, and creativity. We’ve split “product” from the actual product. We’ve turned a deeply inventive act into a transactional process. Product teams gather insights, map them to use cases, convert those into features, and translate those into tickets, then throw them over the wall to engineering. It’s neat. It’s organized but it kills the soul of the product. We stack features on top of features, teams on top of teams, until the whole thing feels like a house of cards.

And then the moment comes when we need to prove our product and our business are worth investing in, and that’s when the truth hits us:

• We have a solid roadmap, but we’re no longer sure it’s the right one
• Delivery slows, momentum fades, and progress feels fragile
• We keep adding features but the core experience weakens, and clients stay indifferent
• We scale headcount, but not profitability.
• We work harder than ever, but feel increasingly disconnected from purpose.

It’s time to rediscover the artisan spirit of our forefathers and learn to adapt this mindset to our modern companies and challenges of today.

The key to building products that truly deliver?

• Stop seeing the product as a collection of features mapped to use cases.
• Start seeing it as a system of human trade-offs your customers refuse to make.

That’s where real value is created: not in features, but in the friction they remove. That shift changes everything. When we build from real, emotional trade-offs, we focus our energy on what matters most to seduce clients:

• 🩵 We build with care.
• 🔗 We build with coherence.
• 🪴 We build things that are easier to evolve because they were meant to last.

That’s what Lean Product Engineering is about: It’s artisanship at scale. Here’s what is different:

• Emotion-Centric Design : don’t just “understand the user”, feel what they feel. Design with empathy, precision, and intent.
• The Chief Product Engineer: not a backlog manager but a system thinker. Someone who aligns strategy, design, tech, and cost like a modern master builder.
• Performance-Based Products: craft what matters most to clients. Not more features, but sharper performance where the customer refuses to compromise.
• Design to Cost: profitability by design. Teams that learn to hit cost targets without killing value create growth that can actually scale.

If that’s the edge you’ve been missing, it’s time to bring artisanship back at scale in your company.

This article was initially published by Sandrine on LinkedIn.