Product executive Marcello Genovese has watched countless digital products fail for the same preventable reason. Teams build elaborate features, chase vanity metrics, and polish interfaces while skipping the one step that matters most: actually testing with users.
“Whenever they didn’t test it out with the user,” Genovese says when asked about the earliest warning signs that a product team is building the wrong thing. His answer is immediate, unequivocal. Even when metrics look healthy, he argues, teams can be months into development before discovering their core assumptions were wrong.
Genovese brings an unconventional perspective to product strategy. Before entering the technology industry, he built his career in entertainment, performing as a wedding singer and DJ across Germany and Switzerland while still in his teens. That background taught him something most product leaders miss: understanding what an audience actually wants requires direct engagement, not guesswork from a distance.
“People misunderstand that nothing is as easy as it looks,” Genovese explains. “You still need to think through your product, and a good product strategy is always about the end user and how they’re going to use it.”
Genovese’s approach diverges sharply from teams that spend months refining concepts before user contact. He advocates for rapid, stripped-down prototypes that prioritize function over form.
“I test products with simple prototypes that may look ugly, but they have the functionality, and that helps,” he says. These rough versions serve a specific purpose: validating whether users actually want what the team thinks they want, before resources get committed.
The method reflects hard-won lessons. Genovese started his first web hosting company before age 16, becoming one of Germany’s youngest entrepreneurs. Over the following years, he and business partner Stefan Graf launched multiple ventures, learning through trial and error which approaches actually worked.
When pressed on when product intuition stops being enough and process needs to take over, Genovese’s answer centers on validation: “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. You can start building without one, but then you risk building something the user won’t like.”
Even experienced teams can be misled by seemingly positive signals. Genovese points to a common scenario: engagement numbers tick upward, retention looks stable, but something feels off. Teams often miss what’s happening beneath the surface.
The problem compounds when internal stakeholders mistake polish for product-market fit, or when investor pressure pushes teams toward features that serve pitch decks better than end users.
His diagnosis of what separates successful platforms from those that burn out after early traction returns to the same principle: “If you build a product that solves a real problem for the user, then you’re solving something important. Build for the user, not for the technology or fancy interactions or excessive functions. That makes the difference.”
Genovese reserves particular criticism for how product teams lose focus as they scale. The pattern is familiar: a product gains momentum with a clear value proposition, then gradually morphs into something bloated and confused as different stakeholders impose their preferences.
“Teams should keep their vision,” Genovese argues. “Don’t just build for investors or others in the company. Keep the vision and the idea for solving the problem for the user. Always focus on the first idea you had.”
This vision drift often stems from well-intentioned attempts to satisfy multiple constituencies. Investors want features that signal growth. Executives want capabilities that match competitor offerings. Engineering teams want to implement interesting technical solutions. Meanwhile, actual users get deprioritized.
“You see products that start strong and get traction, then they try to fulfill investor needs or the CEO’s wishes. You should keep your vision and what you stand for, not build a product that does everything.”
When product leadership goes wrong, Genovese offers advice that many teams resist: sometimes the best path forward is starting over completely.
“Be bold enough to throw away what you’ve done and start from scratch,” he says. His reasoning is pragmatic rather than dramatic. When a product accumulates layers of features built on faulty assumptions, incremental fixes often prove more expensive than a clean rebuild informed by actual user research.
“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 product became much better.”
This willingness to discard sunk costs distinguishes effective product leaders from those who optimize their way into irrelevance. Genovese frames it as the fundamental question teams should ask themselves: “What was my initial vision for this product? What was my idea? Are we focusing on solving a problem for the consumer, or just fulfilling wishes from people who don’t actually use the product?”
Genovese’s advice for product leaders navigating uncertainty rather than momentum is direct: “Talk to your users, do reviews, run user testing. There are plenty of testing platforms out there.”
He even advocates for deliberately seeking out users who don’t fit the target demographic. “Even if you can’t find the right user for your product to test it, sometimes the least likely person helps make your product stronger and gives you a different viewpoint.”
The broader principle extends beyond individual features to organizational culture. Genovese identifies the user as his north star. “The person using the product is what matters most. You should keep the company mission and build a product that solves a problem, but I would never change a product just because an investor wants something. If it’s stupid, I don’t care who’s making money.”
On questions about AI integration and emerging technology, Genovese maintains his user-first framework. He sees AI as neither overused nor underutilized, but frequently misapplied.
“AI isn’t over-applied right now in products. It’s more about doing it the right way. If AI doesn’t solve a problem or help the user, and it’s just a button that says ‘do this with AI,’ it doesn’t make sense. But if it solves a problem and gives additional help, then it’s useful.”
This extends to his broader philosophy on technology selection: “Technology should support the product. Everything is possible. We have enough computing power and everything needed to make a great product. For me, it’s always about the user interface. It’s about speed. It has to react immediately, not have long load times just because of the technology.”
Genovese’s entertainment background resurfaces in how he frames product philosophy. Just as performers must read their audience in real time, product teams must remain attuned to how users actually experience their work. “User experience is key in a product. If the user experience is good, then you can use any technology around it.”
Product teams rarely fail from a lack of technical capability or insufficient features. They fail, Genovese argues, because they never validated whether anyone wanted what they built. The solution isn’t complicated. It just requires doing the unglamorous work of testing rough prototypes with real users before committing to months of development.
As Genovese puts it: “Talk with your user, talk with your customer. Find out what they need, what they want, what they don’t like.”