I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what separates market-dominating products from those that merely survive — or worse, fail outright.

In Chapter 15 of I Need That, I outline the four crucial success factors all winning products share: Outcomes, Advantages, Ease, and Economics. Over the next four emails, I’ll explore each of these in depth.

Let’s start with the foundation: Outcomes.

This might seem obvious, but it distresses me how many product makers compromise here: To succeed at scale, your product must work flawlessly every time, for a long time.

Not most of the time. Not eventually, after cursing and troubleshooting.

Every. Single. Time.

It is simply not acceptable to have missing parts, “moderate” failure rates, or occasional quality issues. These aren’t minor inconveniences — they’re existential threats to your product’s future.

Here’s why: In our hyperconnected marketplace, product failures never just disappoint one customer.

They become amplified through reviews, social media, and word-of-mouth. And the math works against you — if 50% of your customers are satisfied, the disappointed buyers are two to three times more likely to write reviews than the happy ones.

Those negative reviews don’t just hurt sales today. They fundamentally undermine trust in your brand for YEARS to come.

More importantly, inconsistent outcomes prevent your customers from achieving their Coveted Condition — that future state they fantasized about when they decided to buy.

When that happens, you’ve broken the most fundamental promise of your product.

Product Payoff: Dyson built a multi-billion dollar empire on the radical premise that vacuum cleaners should actually work consistently. While competitors accepted how vacuums lose suction over time as an inevitable compromise, James Dyson made “No Loss of Suction” his foundational promise. This obsession with consistent outcomes allowed Dyson to charge more than competitors while building fanatical customer loyalty.

Action for today: Conduct a brutally honest assessment of your product’s consistency. What percentage of customers achieve PERFECT outcomes with your product on their very first attempt? If it’s not above 95%, identify the failure points and make fixing them your absolute priority — even if it means delaying new features or expansion plans.

Over the next three emails, we’ll explore the remaining success factors: Advantages, Ease, and Economics. But I’m starting with Outcomes because without this foundation, the others become irrelevant. A product that doesn’t consistently deliver is not a product worth scaling.

Want to discuss strategies for perfecting your product’s outcomes? Tap that funky little reply arrow and let’s talk about building reliability into every aspect of your offering. Or reach out to my team of product marketing specialists at Graphos Product.