Marcello Genovese on Why Growth Metrics Can Mask a Broken Product
Engagement numbers are climbing. Retention curves look stable. Every dashboard metric flashes green. And yet the product is fundamentally broken — a reality the team won’t confront until they’ve burned through months of runway building features nobody actually wanted. It’s a scenario that product executive Marcello Genovese has watched play out with unsettling regularity across growth-stage companies.
The problem, as Genovese diagnoses it, isn’t poor execution or a shortage of resources. It’s that teams learn to optimize for metrics that conceal product-market fit failures, confusing healthy-looking numbers with genuine user validation. “If you build a product that solves a real problem for the user, then you’re solving something important,” Genovese says. “Build for the user, not for the technology or fancy interactions or excessive functions. That makes the difference.”
The distinction between products that scale sustainably and those that collapse after early traction is whether the core value proposition actually resonates with the people using it. Viral loops, retention tactics, and growth hacks can temporarily conceal weak fundamentals. Eventually, the gap between what a product promises and what it delivers catches up — and the correction is expensive.
When Series A and B Funding Breaks Products
Genovese is particularly pointed about what happens to startups during institutional funding rounds. A company finds focused early traction, raises a Series A or B, and within six months the product has ballooned into something bloated and incoherent. The stakeholder base expands dramatically. New board members import opinions. Investors push for features that signal scalability. Executives hired from larger companies bring playbooks that worked in different contexts entirely.
“You see products that start strong and get traction, then they try to fulfill investor needs or CEO wishes,” Genovese observes. “You should keep your vision and what you stand for, not build a product that does everything.”
The founder’s original vision gets diluted in the pursuit of internal consensus. Teams that rely primarily on intuition are especially vulnerable to this drift. Without a systematic process for evaluating which ideas actually serve users, every suggestion from a credible stakeholder carries equal weight. The roadmap becomes a catalog of compromises rather than a coherent plan. In a detailed discussion published on Bitcoin Schweiz News, Marcello Genovese explains precisely when intuition fails and process must take over, walking through the specific failure patterns he’s observed at this stage of company growth.
Rough Prototypes Over Polished Assumptions
Process, in Genovese’s framework, has nothing to do with approval chains or documentation bureaucracy. It’s about systematic reality-checking that persists even as organizational complexity grows and shipping pressure intensifies. “If you think through a product and you have an idea about how the user wants to use it, you need a process before building,” he explains. “You can start building without one, but then you risk failure or building something the user won’t like.”
His preferred mechanism is rapid prototyping with minimal investment — stripped-down versions of a product exposed to real users before significant engineering resources are committed. “I test products with simple prototypes that may look ugly, but they have the functionality, and that helps,” he says. At the growth stage, when institutional investors are watching and brand standards feel non-negotiable, shipping ugly prototypes seems unprofessional. Genovese argues that instinct leads directly to expensive failures. If a rough prototype can’t demonstrate value, a polished version won’t either — the team will just have spent considerably more to reach the same conclusion.
The Case for Starting Over
Among Genovese’s more counterintuitive positions is his argument that the best path forward sometimes isn’t iteration — it’s a complete rebuild. The sunk cost fallacy grips growth-stage companies with particular force. When millions have been raised and months invested in features, the psychological resistance to discarding that work becomes enormous. “Be bold enough to throw away what you’ve done and start from scratch,” he says. “I’ve seen products improve their design and structure when they started from scratch and rethought from the beginning what problem they’re actually solving.”
The test he applies is straightforward: “What was my initial idea for this product? Are we still solving that problem, or have we drifted into something else?” Substantial drift — especially away from genuine user problems and toward satisfying internal stakeholders — makes rebuilding preferable to continued iteration on a misaligned foundation.
The North Star That Doesn’t Move
Genovese’s core principle, threaded through every aspect of his approach, is that the user is the only stakeholder whose needs should drive product decisions without qualification. “I would never change a product just because an investor wants something,” he says flatly. “If it’s stupid, I don’t care who’s making money.”
The teams that survive growth stages intact are the ones with enough clarity — and enough discipline — to keep asking whether every decision actually serves the person using the product. Not whether it looks good in a board deck, not whether it addresses a competitive threat, but whether it solves a real problem for a real user. That question, pressed consistently against every proposed feature and roadmap shift, is what separates products that endure from those that implode despite healthy-looking metrics.
Read the full discussion with Marcello Genovese on Bitcoin Schweiz News: https://bitcoinnews.ch/56571/product-executive-marcello-genovese-explains-when-intuition-fails-and-process-must-take-over/