Quick Wins and Slow Regrets

Have you ever considered that if you don’t implement a particular feature now, it could be twice as expensive to implement next year, or even three times as expensive in two years?

I first heard the metaphor “slow regrets” at the Product Management Festival in Zurich, where Rutger Coolen shared his story and the hard lesson he learned.

Collen defines “slow regrets” as features that become more expensive to build as your product grows. These are the opposite of “low-hanging fruit”, representing “quick wins” — doing less while gaining more value.

Now, let’s reflect on scenarios that may occur in your company, particularly in a corporate setting.

How many times have you heard “MVP” used as a magic word to push a feature into development, with the excuse that full development will happen later, but in reality, it gets postponed for years?

Have you noticed that this supposedly postponed feature is now considered by many developers as technical debt? Implementing it now affects numerous applications and teams in your organization, making it nearly impossible to implement.

You’ll start to slowly regret not implementing it a few years ago, as it now costs you several times more.

I prefer the metaphor “slow regrets” over the common term “cost of delay”, which tends to focus on lost revenue and missed opportunities while waiting to release a product or feature. “Slow regrets” more effectively highlight the “hidden reality” that features can become more expensive to implement as the system or business grows in complexity.

So, how can we avoid slow regrets? As Coolen mentioned, it depends on the context, but I see several key hints for both regular product managers and product leaders.

For product managers:

• Mindset: Start with a mindset focused on future costs and how they may impact the company’s product, potentially compromising its value down the line.
• Stay focused and ruthless. Stick to your product principles when asking key questions like “Who are my users? What do they want to achieve? What are their problems? How can we help them?” and ensure alignment with “performance attributes”, such as those in the Kano Model, which directly impact customer satisfaction. What key attributes of your product are worth investing time in now, as they represent long-term investments that will pay off in the near future?
• Cost Trade-offs: When considering the scope of your capability or initiative, compare the cost of development now versus in the future. Ask yourself: What are the pros and cons of developing the full scope now (even if feature utilization is low at the beginning but gradually increases) versus postponing development (potentially facing pressure from stakeholders and a more complex environment later)?

For product leaders:

• Mindset: In your product culture, stop automatically rewarding “quick wins” and assess whether these wins are actually creating future product debt. This is especially important in organizations where politics play a role, as “quick wins” often become a “trampoline” to skip levels on the corporate ladder.
• Balance short-term with long-term goals. For companies still waiting for a decisive breakthrough and fighting for their place on the map, it can be tempting to prioritize short-term goals over long-term ones. It’s the product leader’s responsibility to make tough decisions, factor in “future cost” during the decision-making process, and create a culture that leads by example, influencing the entire product organization.
• Don’t play games — your people are watching. Tech companies hire smart people, and when product leaders “sabotage” the company’s product by ignoring the key points mentioned, they might think corporate fluff will cover it up — but it won’t. Remember, you hired intelligent people. Even if they pretend not to notice, they actually see what’s happening but choose to stay polite.