The 'Perfect' Product That Killed the Company

It was 199X. I was working with a medical device company that held a dominant market share. They were the “safe choice” for hospitals, the gold standard.

Then leadership decided it was time to build the “Next Generation” platform.

The mandate was ambitious: This platform would replace three legacy product lines. It would be fully digital. It would integrate with everything. It would secure the company’s dominance for the next decade.

To ensure success, they did what every MBA textbook says to do: they gathered requirements from every stakeholder.

• Sales wanted a specific set of features to kill a low-end competitor.
• Marketing wanted a futuristic UI to wow investors at trade shows.
• Engineering wanted to refactor the entire codebase to eliminate technical debt.
• Regulatory wanted pre-emptive compliance with standards that hadn’t even been ratified yet.

The Requirements Document became a phone book. It was a masterpiece of comprehensive planning. Technically, it was impressive. Operationally, it was a suicide pact.

The Collapse

Three years later, the product still hadn’t shipped.

The schedule had slipped four times. The budget was blown. The engineers were exhausted, working 80-hour weeks to integrate features that had no business living in the same device.

While this company was trying to build the “Perfect System,” a scrappy competitor launched a product that was objectively worse. It had half the features. The UI was ugly. But it solved the one core clinical problem the market actually cared about, and it was available today.

The market didn’t wait for perfection. It moved. By the time the “Next Gen” platform finally limped out the door—buggy, overpriced, and complex—the war was already lost.

The Diagnosis: A Systems Failure

Post-mortems usually blame execution. “We didn’t have enough engineers.” “The project manager was weak.” “The scope crept.”

This is rarely true. In my experience, the engineers usually build exactly what they are asked to build. The failure isn’t in the hands; it’s in the head.

The failure was a refusal to acknowledge the Theory of Constraints.

In any complex system—whether it’s a circuit board, a software stack, or a hospital—there is always one constraint that limits the system’s performance relative to its goal. Just one.

For this company, the constraint was Time to Market. Every day they didn’t ship, they bled market share.

But they behaved as if the constraint was Feature Completeness. They optimized for a local metric (making every department happy) at the expense of the global metric (shipping a viable product).

When you try to optimize for everything, you optimize for nothing. The system freezes.

The Bridge to Healthcare

I share this story not to reminisce about tech, but because I see the exact same pattern in Hospital Strategic Planning today.

I see health systems launching “Digital Transformations” or “New Tower Projects” that look exactly like that doomed R&D project.

• The Nursing leadership wants specific ergonomic layouts.
• The IT department wants a full EHR refactor.
• Finance wants to maximize bed count for DRG reimbursement.
• The Board wants a shiny atrium for donors.

Everyone adds their “must-haves” to the pile. The project swells. The timeline extends to five years. The budget balloons.

Meanwhile, the Emergency Department is boarding 40 patients tonight. The nurses are burning out today.

The hospital is trying to build the “Perfect Tower” for 2030, while the operational reality of 2026 collapses under its own weight. They are solving for Feature Completeness when the constraint is Flow.

The Strategist’s View: The Minimum Viable System

This is where the “Outsider” perspective becomes critical. An insider knows all the reasons why those features are “needed.” An architect looks at the physics of the system and asks: “What is the one thing stopping flow right now?”

If the constraint is ED Boarding, then a new atrium doesn’t matter. A new EHR doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is getting patients out of inpatient beds faster.

Real strategy isn’t about what you do. It’s about what you have the courage not to do.

It requires looking at a “valid” requirement—something a VP feels strongly about—and saying: “That is a good idea. But it does not relax the primary constraint. Therefore, we are not doing it.”

The Universal Law

Whether you are building a defibrillator, designing a software platform, or running a Level 1 Trauma Center, the law remains the same:

Any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion.

• Making non-bottleneck engineers code faster just creates a pile of inventory (untested code).
• Making non-bottleneck surgeons operate faster just creates a pile of patients (waiting for beds).

You don’t need more resources. You don’t need a bigger budget. You need the strategic discipline to identify your constraint and subordinate everything else—including your ego and your “perfect” vision—to breaking it.