3 Product Development Stages Derribar Ventures Says Teams Rush Past Too Often

Derribar Ventures on the 3 product development stages teams skip under pressure — problem definition, prototyping, and scope — and what skipping costs.

LIMASSOL, LIMASSOL, CYPRUS, October 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Derribar Ventures Limited, a company working with brands and businesses on product creation and digital platform development, has shared an analysis of the development stages that consistently get compressed or skipped in the rush to ship.

Speed Is Not the Problem. Skipping Is.

The version of speed that tends to cause problems is the kind where stages get compressed, not because the team has gotten better at them, but because the pressure to reach the next milestone is stronger than the discipline to complete the current one properly.
Derribar Ventures’ analysis is not an argument for slowing down. It’s an argument for knowing which stages can absorb compression and which ones extract a cost later that tends to be considerably larger than the time saved upfront.

The Three Stages
- Problem definition

Most product teams think they have done this. Very few have done it as thoroughly as the work that comes later actually requires.
Derribar Ventures’ analysis found that products that ran into fundamental market fit problems after launch almost always had a problem definition phase that lasted a fraction of the time spent on the build. Teams had identified a pain point and moved to a solution without fully mapping the shape of the problem. By the time those gaps showed up, the product had already been built around the wrong assumptions.
The fix at that stage is rarely a feature. It’s usually a direction change, and direction changes after a build are expensive in ways that are both financial and motivational.

- Prototyping and early testing

This stage gets compressed most often when the idea feels solid, and the team is confident. It is also one of the more reliable predictors of a skipped testing phase, because a team that believes in its product can usually find a reason why early testing isn’t necessary yet.
Derribar Ventures’ analysis points to a consistent finding: the products that performed best in the market were almost always the ones that had been broken multiple times before launch. Broken early, in front of real users, and then rebuilt around what those users actually did rather than what the team assumed they would do. A launched product with the same problem costs significantly more to address, and carries the additional weight of user expectations that have already been set.

- Scope definition before build

The scope tends to expand. What is avoidable, or at least manageable, is going into a build without having done the work to understand where the edges of the product actually are.
Derribar Ventures’ analysis found that teams that invested meaningfully in scope definition before build consistently delivered closer to their original timelines and budgets than teams that treated scope as something to be figured out along the way.

Why These Stages Keep Getting Skipped

The pattern repeats because the pressures that cause it are real. Investors want to see the product. Internal stakeholders want progress. Competitors appear to be moving faster. In that environment, stages that don’t produce visible output get deprioritized in favor of stages that do.
Derribar Ventures shares this analysis for product and development teams that are currently in the planning phase of a build, and for businesses that have already shipped something and are trying to understand why it didn’t land the way the plan suggested it would. In most cases, the answer sits somewhere in one of these three stages, and the earlier that gets identified, the less it costs to address.

About Derribar Ventures Limited

Derribar Ventures Limited is a product development and digital marketing company based in Cyprus, working with brands and businesses on building and scaling digital products. The company’s approach combines market research, strategic planning, and execution across the full product development cycle, with a focus on building things that work in the market rather than just on paper.

Calandre Leroy
Derribar Ventures Limited
+1 404-795-4798
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