What does it cost to build your Product?
A deep dive into understanding the real cost of building a digital Product
1In the last article, I shared insight on the hidden costs for end users when engaging with digital products—monetary, time, cognitive, emotional, and even opportunity costs. These costs, though borne by users, are directly tied to the decisions made during product development. The reality is that these decisions also carry a price for product teams and organizations. Understanding the cost of building a product is essential for leaders who must plan and direct these complexities to deliver products that balance user value and business goals.
Welcome to Episode 17 of Product with JnrJose
Let’s take a deep dive into the less obvious, but deeply impactful, costs of product development. The goal is to connect the challenges of building a product with the experience of using it.
Cost or Trade-ofs: Picking the Right Problems
Every feature added, every initiative prioritized, comes at the expense of something else. As leaders, the challenge is in ensuring these trade-offs maximize user value while advancing business goals. Misplaced priorities, like developing flashy features instead of solving core pain points, often result in wasted resources and frustrated users.
For example, a ride-hailing app could focus on building gamified driver ratings while ignoring user complaints about unreliable pickups. Instead, leaders must connect business goals to user needs, ensuring decisions align with long-term strategy. Regularly reassessing priorities and asking, “Is this solving our customer’s biggest problem?” can help avoid costly detours.
The Cost of Process Over-Engineering
We’ve all seen the effects of bloated internal processes—approvals stretching weeks, multiple layers of decision-making, and unnecessary role redundancies. These inefficiencies not only slow product delivery but also frustrate teams, leading to delayed features that users need today, not months down the line. Internally, over-engineered processes translate to missed opportunities; externally, they manifest as user frustration.
Rather than layering more process, leaders should streamline collaboration between product managers, engineers, and designers. When you empower teams to make decisions and focus on outcomes, you cut unnecessary delays. A lightweight, goal-driven process ensures timely delivery without sacrificing quality.
Misalignment: The Silent Cost
One of the greatest inefficiencies in product development is misalignment—when teams work toward conflicting goals. Imagine a fintech app marketed as intuitive but developed without onboarding tools. Users lose trust, churn increases, and the product underdelivers.
To prevent this, align all teams around a unified vision. As a leader, it’s your role to facilitate conversations that connect marketing promises to engineering deliverables and user outcomes. Regular cross-functional check-ins ensure every team understands not just what they’re building, but why it matters to the user.
The Cost of Skipping Discovery (most expensive)
Skipping the discovery phase is one of the costliest mistakes in product development. Without understanding root causes, teams often build features that miss the mark. For example, a payment app might add a budgeting feature when users are more concerned about transaction speed. By investing time in thorough discovery—customer interviews, data analysis, and prototyping—leaders can ensure their teams build what users truly need.
Discovery isn’t a one-off task; it’s a continuous process. Build-in mechanisms to revisit assumptions and validate solutions with real users at every stage. When leaders champion discovery, teams avoid the sunk costs of building the wrong things.
Engineering Debt: The Cost of Shortcuts
When deadlines loom, it’s tempting to cut corners in development, leading to engineering debt—those "fix it later" decisions that eventually cripple scalability and performance. This debt doesn’t just slow teams; it trickles down to users as buggy, unreliable experiences.
The solution isn’t to avoid debt entirely but to manage it smartly. Make intentional trade-offs, ensuring teams revisit and address debt before it grows unmanageable. Dedicated sprints for maintenance and scalability improvements can prevent the compounding costs of technical shortcuts.
The Hidden Emotional and Cultural Costs
Building a product isn’t just about the technology; it’s about the people. A toxic or high-pressure environment can lead to burnout, poor morale, and disengaged teams. This, in turn, reflects in the quality of the product. Users notice when a product feels inconsistent or unreliable—it’s often a symptom of internal struggles.
Fostering a psychologically safe workplace where teams can experiment, fail, and learn without fear is essential. Recognize and celebrate small wins to boost morale. Leaders who actively listen and address team concerns create environments where great products can thrive.
Balancing Value and Risk
Ultimately, the cost of building a product must balance with the value it delivers to users. This is where value risk—the risk of building something users don’t need—becomes critical. Adding features no one uses or failing to address the core problem results in wasted resources and user dissatisfaction.
To mitigate value risk, shift focus from outputs (features shipped) to outcomes (problems solved). Tools like A/B testing and analytics can validate whether a feature resonates with users. As leaders, your ability to champion outcome-driven metrics over vanity metrics ensures resources are spent where they matter most.
The Interplay of Costs and User Experience
The true cost of building a product doesn’t stop at your team—it ripples outward to your users. Every misstep in prioritization, misalignment in vision, or process inefficiency translates to higher cognitive, emotional, and opportunity costs for them. When users face these hidden costs, they often abandon your product.
When process is streamlined, teams is aligned, and discovery is championed, leaders can not only reduce the internal cost of building products but also lower the external cost for users. The result? Products that are faster to market, more relevant, and ultimately more valued by the people they serve.
Build Simply, Deliver Impactfully
Just as users weigh the costs of using a product against its value, product leaders must do the same during development. Every feature, process, and decision carries a cost—and these costs determine whether a product succeeds or fails in delivering user value.
For top stakeholders, the challenge is clear: foster collaboration, champion user-centered discovery, and streamline execution. When you align the cost of building a product with the value it delivers, you not only create a product that users love—you create a sustainable foundation for long-term success.
What’s Next?
In the next episode—the final one for 2024—we’ll dive into the cost of middlemen in product discovery and delivery. You’ll learn why introducing layers—irrespective of what fanciful names we call them—often causes more harm than good, and how empowering direct engagement between teams and customers leads to better products.
Also, mark your calendars! On December 20th at 6:00 PM WAT, I’ll be joining my friend
for a practical session on goal-setting and creating a vision board for 2025. Don’t miss it—it’s going to be a game-changer for how you plan your next product milestones. Click here to register for freeLet’s keep building, learning, and delivering value together.
the voiceover is generated using NotebookLM