With insights from the builders of
and many others
Find the pain.
Build the smallest thing that matters.
Learn faster than everyone else.
Fast Fail is the hands-on guide to building world-class products. It takes you from a raw idea to a durable company: finding commercially useful pain, scoping a version one that can fail cheaply, pricing against the customers's problem, building a growth engine, and organizing the team and the delivery process that makes speed repeatable.
The Fast Fail Phase Model
Focus on the right priorities at each stage
1 - Building
The Discipline within the Craft
B2B product building comes down to three motions: find urgent pain, build the smallest better solution, and iterate with customers in tight loops. Borrowing engineering’s “fail fast” principle, Matthias Hilpert maps four startup phases: Explore, Learn, Standardize, Optimize. With AI product judgement matters more, not less.
2 - Pain
The Only Starting Point
Customer discovery for B2B startups: how to turn founder intuition into a testable hypothesis about pain, person and company. Learn to run 50+ discovery interviews, separate urgency from interest, map user, champion and decision maker, define your ideal customer profile, and convert three to five companies into paying co-development partners.
3 - Scoping
Less is More
How to scope a minimum viable product (MVP) that proves value fast. Scope sets the price of being wrong, so version one needs one user, one workflow, one outcome. With insights from Celonis, Signavio and CoachHub, the chapter covers story mapping, AI-assisted prototyping, manually operated MVPs and rapid discover-deliver-measure cycles.
4 - Proposition
Features Are Not Everything
A working product is not yet a proposition. This chapter shows B2B founders how to communicate value clearly in the customer’s own language, write four levels of product description, separate table stakes from differentiators, make customer success part of the offer, and stop underpricing through value-based pricing and three-tier packaging.
5 - Roadmapping
Prioritization Is Tough
Product roadmapping and prioritization after the first MVP. Measure real impact rather than activity, separate pre- and post-product-market-fit bets, and break initiatives into boulders, rocks and pebbles so something reaches customers every two weeks. Prioritize value over effort, and use roadmaps as thinking tools: specific now, directional next, thematic later.
6 - Time to Value
The Hidden Lever
Time to Value, the gap between signing a B2B contract and receiving value, drives retention, expansion and growth, yet customers rarely request it. Learn to remove its three barriers: registration and setup, data integration, and complex workflows. Covers frictionless onboarding, demos with prospect data, self-service tools and declining one-off requests.
7 - Growth Engine
The Flywheel In Your Product
In B2B, the product itself is the growth engine. Identify your unit of value, distinguish buyer from user, and choose product-led growth (PLG) or sales-led distribution based on product reality. With examples from DeepL, Miro and Celonis, it builds a flywheel from customer experience to data moats and pricing power.
8 - Organization
Small is Beautiful
How to build a product organization from founding team to scale-up. Balance commercial, technical and design skills, stay small longer with help from AI coding agents, scale engineering first, then move to autonomous cross-functional squads split by customer problem. Learn when platform teams, forward-deployed engineers and operators help or hurt.
9 - Performance
Measuring What Matters
Measuring product and engineering performance is hard because feedback arrives late and outcomes are collective. This chapter explains how to separate goal-setting from evaluation, adapt KPIs to each company phase, use qualitative individual and quantitative team metrics, reward decommissioning, align product, design and engineering leadership, and hire against performance criteria.
10 - Process
From Idea to Deployed Code
Beyond roughly €1 million in revenue, startups need a product development process that makes speed repeatable. Fast Fail presents a five-stage funnel: Discovery, Design, Development, In-life Management, Decommission. Squad benchmarks, engineering capacity allocation, cycle-time targets and disciplined feature decommissioning complete the picture.
10 - Continuous Everything
Wold-Class Engineering
Continuous delivery turns product strategy into customer learning. Small, frequent releases are important, measured by the four DORA performance metrics. Trunk-based development, automated testing and rollback make daily or weekly deployment safe. Tooling should stay boring. AI coding tools help, but need to be focussed on your real bottleneck first.
12 Horizon
Playing the Long Game
From €10 million to €100 million in revenue, B2B companies must make long-lead strategic bets early. This chapter covers revisiting product vision twice yearly, running a Customer Board of senior executives, managing platform migrations without customer standstill, starting partnerships commercially, build-versus-partner decisions, and treating internationalization as a return to discovery.
