Building a product plan that assumed the market would stay the way it was. I failed to anticipate what, in hindsight, were likely changes in the marketplace and likely reactions from our competitors. The only constant in life is constant change, and by forgetting that I doomed our product.

In my first PM job (at a big tech company), I was the lead PM of a team that designed and built a software product that was designed to replace networking hardware that our competitors sold for $5,000 per server connected to it.

Our business plan was simple: offer similar functionality in software, simplify the IT environment as a result (one less piece of hardware to manage!), and sell it for $500 per server. Easier, cheaper— what could go wrong? ;-)

Had we launched the product on my first day at work, I believe it would have been very successful. But the product, like most hard things, took a while to build— almost 2 years to get from initial design to MVP to beta to production.

In the meantime, the market had changed. Thanks to Moore’s Law and competition, what used to cost $5,000 per connected server now cost 10x less— exactly the price point we wanted to hit. And the competition now had more features and was easier to manage.

Our price advantage had evaporated in the time it took to bring the product to market. Our ease-of-use advantage was reduced. And now we were battling entrenched competitors in a more mature space. Predictably, our product failed to gain enough market share and was eventually cancelled.

What I learned was pretty simple: when building a new business, don’t build the product that the market needs now. Instead, build the product that the market is likely to need several years in the future. Don’t assume that the market and your competitors will stand still waiting for you!

Even if the product is quick to build, it often takes several years to build a brand, to scale up sales and distribution, to get to competitive feature parity, etc. So before launching a new business, take a hard-headed look at market trends and think about what the market will look like in a few years when your product is at full strength. And be really, really honest with yourself and your team about what it will take to succeed in *that* market, not just the market that exists today.