Discussion of the Week: Who Is Actually Responsible When Nobody Uses the Product?

A feature factory is a team that measures success by how much it ships rather than by the value it creates. Features are delivered. Budgets are spent. Roadmaps are completed. Yet users remain indifferent.

Everyone agrees it is a problem. Nobody agrees on who should be responsible.

Experienced product teams understand that requirements are assumptions until validated by users. Agencies that position themselves as strategic partners should be willing to challenge weak assumptions, unclear goals, and unrealistic expectations.

Building the wrong thing perfectly is still building the wrong thing.

Digital products exist in environments filled with uncertainty. User behavior, market demand, competition, and adoption cannot be fully predicted in advance. A feature list is not a product strategy.

Clients who focus exclusively on delivery dates, budgets, and feature counts often create the conditions for feature factories to thrive.

One of the most interesting aspects of feature factories is that they rarely involve bad intentions.

• Engineers are often proud of what they build.
• Clients sincerely believe they are solving real problems.
• Projects fail because success was defined incorrectly from the beginning.
• The organization measured activity instead of impact.
• The team optimized for delivery instead of outcomes.
• Nobody deliberately created a feature factory.
• Yet everyone helped sustain it.

Have you ever worked on a product that shipped successfully but failed to create meaningful adoption or business results?

Where do you think responsibility should sit when a digital product is built and nobody uses it?

• Is it the agency, for taking the money without pushing back on a brief that was never going to produce a usable product?
• Is it the client, for treating a complex product problem like a construction contract and assuming delivery equals done?
• Is it the industry, for normalizing a model where agencies are rewarded for shipping volume rather than for user outcomes?

What do you think? Have you been on either side of this? And what would actually fix it?

Drop your take in the comments.

Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use.