Lesson #1: Great Products Expand Markets Taylor Swift moved to Nashville at 13 and went door-to-door to record labels. They all turned her down. Labels saw country music on the decline with young listeners, and didn't see a market for a teen country artist.
I look at product as an act of, how does this get communicated through the distribution channel we need to use. Said another way: if this product doesn't make a pretty compelling social ad -> we ain't doing it.
Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then conducting a post-mortem, conduct a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong then using the power of hindsight to deduce the likeliest reason it went wrong.