The loudest voice in the room just cost your company six months in opportunity cost.
Kritarth Saurabh knows this pattern intimately. As VP of Product at Neat, he recently walked me through a decision that looks rational on every slide deck but represents the single most expensive mistake product teams make.
A sales leader walks in with data—Mural sits in the top three whiteboarding apps by usage, and multiple six-figure deals hang on this single integration. The executive nods. Product scrambles. Engineers build. Everyone celebrates the launch.
Three weeks later, the next request arrives. Then another. Then twelve more.
This is not about Mural. This has never been about Mural. The customer who asked for Mural integration wanted Figma, Trello, and Jira integrations too—they just started with the app they used yesterday. When Kritarth’s team paused to run a single quarter of validation instead of immediately building, they discovered the actual problem hiding behind the feature request: enterprises need workflow integration across their entire app ecosystem, not a point solution for one tool.
That insight led Neat to build an App Hub marketplace instead of a dedicated integration.
The difference? One approach creates an integration team that exists solely to service requests. The other creates a platform where apps onboard themselves.
One scales linearly. The other scales exponentially. One requires a permanent headcount. The other requires infrastructure.
Data justifies most decisions. Sales urgency validates them. Quarterly pressure accelerates them. But moving fast only matters when you scale the right thing.
Kritarth articulates the shift required: “You gotta have the conviction to take a step back and say, look, what is the real outcome that I’m trying to drive here?”
The trap isn’t the build—it’s building before understanding. Output-driven roadmaps deliver features. Outcome-driven roadmaps deliver capability.
Features create work. Capability creates leverage. The Mural integration would have shipped in eight weeks. The marketplace took a quarter. But the integration would have spawned a team dedicated to servicing an infinite request queue, while the marketplace eliminated the queue entirely.
Product management exists in the tension between speed and direction. Companies hire PMs to ship faster, then measure them on velocity. But velocity without vector is just motion. The hardest word in product isn’t “no”—it’s “wait.” Wait while we validate. Wait while we experiment. Wait while we understand whether we’re solving a symptom or addressing the disease.
Kritarth’s framework comes from Escaping the Build Trap: define current state, articulate desired outcome, build hypothesis, run experiment, collect data, validate learning, then scale. Not ship and iterate. Validate then scale. The sequence matters because the cost of getting it wrong compounds. Every feature built on flawed assumptions becomes technical debt. Every integration built without architectural thinking becomes a maintenance burden. Every quarter spent on the wrong problem is a quarter competitors spend on the right one.
The irony cuts deep—the organizations that pride themselves on being data-driven often ignore the most important data point. Not market size or user metrics or sales pipeline, but this: what problem are customers actually trying to solve? Not what feature did they request, but what outcome do they need?
Five product teams can build the Mural integration. One product team can ask why the request exists in the first place. The difference between those approaches is the difference between output and outcome, between features and capability, between building a roadmap and validating one.
Listen to The Way of Product: Apple Podcasts or Spotify
Episode Summary:
What happens when your biggest customer asks for a feature that seems perfectly rational—backed by data, supported by sales, and tied to six-figure deals? Kritarth Saurabh shares how Neat avoided the build trap by pausing to validate what customers actually needed versus what they requested. This conversation explores the difference between output-driven and outcome-driven roadmaps, and why the hardest word in product management isn’t “no”—it’s “wait.”
Key Topics Discussed:
The Mural integration trap: How responding to customer feature requests can lead to becoming an integration factory
Output vs. outcome-driven roadmaps: Why shipping features fast matters less than scaling the right thing
The validation framework: Moving from idea to experiment to validated roadmap before building
Qualitative vs. quantitative data: When to trust customer anecdotes over usage metrics
Zero-to-one product development: Building without data in early-stage companies
Meeting equity and hybrid work: How Neat approaches designing for distributed teams
Simplicity in hardware: The phone camera principle and why accessibility beats perfection
Key Quotes:
“You gotta have the conviction to take a step back and say, look, what is the real outcome that I’m trying to drive here?”
“If I had just spent maybe the next quarter validating this as an experiment...what they would’ve told me is they want App X, they want Figma, they want Y...This is not about just making the dollar signs with the mural. This is about the wider customer problem.”
“The hardest word in product isn’t ‘no’—it’s ‘wait.’”
“Often moving slow is a problem...but I think a bigger problem is not scaling the right thing.”
Featured Story:
The Mural Integration Decision: Kritarth details how a seemingly rational request for a Mural integration—backed by top-three usage data and tied to major deals—would have led Neat down the path of building an integration team that services infinite requests. By spending a quarter validating the underlying customer need, they discovered enterprises wanted workflow integration across their entire app ecosystem. This insight led to building an App Hub marketplace instead, creating a platform that scales exponentially rather than linearly.
Resources Mentioned:
Book: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Neat’s App Hub marketplace
Product Kata framework
About the Guest:
Kritarth Saurabh is VP of Product Management at Neat, a video conferencing hardware company focused on simplicity and meeting equity. Before Neat, he spent years in consulting at Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, and Deloitte, working with Fortune 500 companies and startups on product development. He started his career as a software engineer and has experienced the full product lifecycle from ideation to sunsetting.
Connect with Kritarth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kritarthsaurabh/
About Neat
Neat manufactures video conferencing devices designed to keep meetings simple and equitable, whether participants are in-office, remote, or hybrid. Their products include the Neat Board Pro, an all-in-one 65-inch integrated screen with camera and speaker capabilities.
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