The Biggest Waste in Business is Building Stuff Nobody Needs

The biggest waste in business today is solving the wrong problems.

I’ve personally owned the 0-to-1 Product Lifecycle of a flagship product, scaling it to over $25M ARR. Working with tech teams for over a decade has taught me one clear lesson: Building stuff is the easy part.

I’ve watched brilliant developers create amazing things in days that would have taken months just a few years ago. But here’s the strange part: Many of these impressive builds end up unused or forgotten.

Why?

Because they solved problems nobody really had.

I call this the “solutions in search of problems“ trap. It’s like buying a fancy drill when all you actually need is a picture hanging on the wall. (I’m totally guilty of this, too!)

The smartest teams I’ve worked with spend 80% of their time understanding the problem, and only 20% building the solution .

Before they write a line of code, they ask:

In today’s AI-powered world, we can build almost anything we imagine. The hard part is NOT creating. It’s choosing what TO create.

The real magic happens when you find a genuine problem that keeps people up at night, and then build the simplest possible solution.

How do you make sure you’re solving problems worth solving?

What’s the one takeaway from this that resonated with you most? Drop a comment below!

Richard Ewing is a Product Executive and the creator of The Product Economist framework. He serves as a Strategic Advisor to B2B SaaS organizations, helping leaders audit their roadmaps for capital efficiency and prevent “model collapse” in their business models.

Stop guessing. Start auditing.

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