Why 80% of Features Go Unused: Gary Cohen on Building the Right Thing

Why 80% of Features Go Unused: Gary Cohen on Building the Right Thing

The Meridian Point with Kumar Dattatreyan

Episode overview

Gary Cohen spent twenty years building a delivery machine that shipped software on schedule almost every time. Customers liked the features. They showed up to every sprint review. Then a private equity board member asked one question that reframed his career: what additional revenue do we expect from all these features? The honest answer exposed a hard truth. The team had optimized for delivery instead of impact.

In this episode Gary and Kumar get into why building the right thing is harder than building the thing right. They cover embracing uncertainty as a strategy, continuous discovery, why red, yellow, green status meetings turn into theater, and where product management goes once AI makes the build cheap.

About Gary Cohen

Gary Cohen is Principal Consultant at Practical Agility. He is an engineering and product leader who ran product and engineering groups in software product companies for two decades. He led an agile transformation for one of Google's customer support groups. Today he helps teams shift from optimizing delivery to practicing real product discovery, drawing on continuous discovery work and a hard-won view of how organizational change actually sticks.

What you'll learn

• Why great delivery can still hide a bigger problem, and the board question that surfaced it
• Why teams get too incremental, and how the innovator's dilemma quietly caps ambition
• What embracing uncertainty means, and why uncertainty is where differentiation lives
• The poker trap of going all in on one solution at the moment you know the least
• How to hold multiple solutions open and test the critical assumptions behind each
• Why red, yellow, green status meetings become theater, and the watermelon project problem
• The generative questions that turn a status interrogation into real discovery
• How one question, "how can I help," changes the tone of the room
• Where product discovery goes when AI makes shipping code cheap, and the two levers that still create differentiation

Key takeaways

Delivery is not the same as impact. You can ship efficiently and still fail to move revenue or usage. Language matters. Until someone asks about business outcomes, teams optimize for the schedule they are measured against. Uncertainty is an advantage. When everyone can execute, execution becomes a commodity. The edge goes to whoever reduces uncertainty fastest. Kill solutions early. The faster you invalidate a weak idea, the sooner you reach the one worth building. Status meetings can be redesigned. Swap "why are we not green" for "are we still convinced this is the right opportunity." Cheaper building raises the stakes on discovery, not lowers them. More competition means finding the valuable thing matters more than ever.

Memorable quotes

"We can ship stuff people don't want a lot faster." — Gary Cohen

"This is the beginning, when you just start working in an area, and it is when you know the least about it. So you are making a decision way too early." — Gary Cohen

"You get these watermelon projects, which are green on the outside but really red inside. It is essentially theater." — Gary Cohen

"It is that presence of uncertainty that creates the opportunity for differentiation in the marketplace." — Gary Cohen

"When something gets cheaper, people do more of it. So product discovery becomes more important, not less." — Gary Cohen

Resources and books mentioned

• Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
• Opportunity Solution Trees, a framework from Teresa Torres
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Jardena London's leadership circle, and her work on polarities and organizational change
• The "how can I help" reframing, inspired by Max Goodwin on the NBC show New Amsterdam

Connect with Gary Cohen

• LinkedIn
• Practical Agility
• Gary would love to hear from listeners. Reach out on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on product discovery and leadership.

Connect with the show

• Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachkdat
• Agile Meridian: https://www.agilemeridian.com
• The Meridian Point airs live every two weeks on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, then posts to Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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