Breaking the Black Box: How Community-Driven Product Development Prevents Product Flops
Jake McKee | February 18, 2025
Read time: 5 minutes
"It would be devastating to design a product and then discover later that customers hate using it."
These words, spoken by a Senior Product Designer at Whirlpool, echo a fear I’ve heard countless times in my 20+ years of community engagement work. Product designers, developers, managers, and owners alike all share the same worry: What if we build something with the best intentions, only to find out after launch that customers don’t actually love it?
As a longtime Community Guy, I find it puzzling that so many product teams struggle to anticipate customer dissatisfaction. Community engagement isn't just about running online forums or organizing meetups—it’s about bridging the gap between customers and internal teams, ensuring that what gets built aligns with what people actually need.
Yet time and time again, I see teams working in isolation, building what they think customers want, only to be met with frustration when reality doesn’t match expectations. This disconnect doesn’t come from a lack of effort or talent. It happens because traditional product development follows a flawed process—one that keeps customers at arm’s length during the most critical stages.
It’s hard to make products customers love. It’s even harder when you don’t know what customers will actually love.
So how do you fix that? By changing the way you engage and understand customers while you develop, not just before or after.
The Three-Stage trap of traditional product development
For decades, product teams have been trained to follow a rigid, three-stage model:
- Collection
This is where teams gather data, research, customer insights, and internal requirements. The goal? To make sure they’re solving the right problem and defining the right scope.
- Black Box Product Development
This is where everything goes dark. The product team retreats into a closed system, working in isolation—protected from distractions, customer noise, and outside opinions.
- Verification
Just before launch, the team finally emerges to check: "Is what we built good?" This often comes in the form of usability testing, beta testing, or focus groups.
At first glance, this process seems logical. But it has serious flaws.
It assumes that customer needs remain static. In reality, markets shift, customer behaviors evolve, and new competitors emerge.
It treats customers as checkpoints, not collaborators. Customers are asked for input at the start and evaluated at the end, but they’re absent during the critical middle, development stage.
It leads to late-stage surprises. Teams often discover usability issues, missing features, or major disconnects when it’s too late (or too expensive) to fix them.
It erodes customer trust. If customers don’t feel involved, they won’t feel invested. A product launch should feel like an exciting moment of shared success—not a shocking reveal.
The good news? There’s a better way.
Community-Driven Product Development: A Smarter Alternative
CDPD isn’t about handing product decisions over to customers. It’s about designing with them, not just for them—integrating engaged users throughout the process, rather than just at the beginning and the end.
Instead of treating customers like distant observers, CDPD turns them into trusted collaborators. It bridges the gap between Collection and Verification by bringing real-world customer perspectives directly into the Black Box stage, ensuring that what gets built isn’t just "good"—it's loved.
Why CDPD Works
It eliminates blind spots
Most product failures happen because teams don’t know what they don’t know. By involving representative customers throughout development, CDPD prevents teams from making wrong assumptions about what users need, how they’ll use the product, and what truly matters. Instead of guessing, teams gain real-world feedback at the moments when it’s most actionable.
It builds advocacy before launch
When customers feel heard and valued, they don’t just buy a product—they champion it. CDPD turns engaged users into word-of-mouth marketers before the product even hits the shelves. Instead of launching to an indifferent audience, teams launch to an excited, invested community that’s already spreading the word.
It reduces wasted resources
Building the wrong features—or getting them wrong—wastes time, money, and momentum. CDPD prevents unnecessary pivots and costly post-launch fixes by ensuring that what gets built actually aligns with real customer needs. Instead of spending months refining something that ultimately doesn’t matter, teams focus their energy on what delivers the greatest value.
It keeps teams connected to real-world use cases
Developers, designers, and product managers often work in a bubble, making decisions based on what they believe is best. CDPD brings in a direct line to passionate users, ensuring their work remains grounded in reality—not just internal assumptions.
CDPD in Action
When LEGO faced the challenge of redesigning its Mindstorms robotics kit, they realized that their most engaged customers could either become their biggest critics—or their strongest allies.
Rather than risk alienating their core audience, LEGO handpicked four community leaders to work directly with their product team for eight months before launch. These users provided real-time insights, helped refine key features, and—most importantly—became advocates when the product finally hit the market.
The result? Instead of facing backlash, LEGO’s most passionate customers championed the new Mindstorms—turning potential resistance into excitement. The product’s launch was so successful that it landed on the cover of Wired Magazine, highlighting it as a model for customer collaboration.
The Future of product development is collaborative
Companies already know that the old way isn’t working. They’ve tried surveys, usability testing, beta programs, and post-launch feedback loops—yet they’re still running into many of the same problems.
What’s missing is real engagement from representative community voices throughout the development process—not just at the start and the end.
By embracing Community-Driven Product Development, teams can:
Reduce costly last-minute changes – By engaging real customers during development, teams identify and fix potential issues early, avoiding expensive pivots and rushed post-launch fixes.
Launch with built-in advocacy – When customers are involved in shaping a product, they become its biggest advocates. Instead of struggling for attention at launch, companies gain a community that’s already invested in the product’s success.
Ensure products align with real user needs – No more guessing. No more assuming. CDPD ensures that what gets built is what customers actually want—not just what the team thinks they want.
The best companies don’t just build for customers—they build with them.
In our next article, we’ll explore how to implement CDPD in your own organization—step by step.
For more information on Community Driven Product Development (CDPD) visit https://jakemckee.com/cdpd
About the Author
Jake McKee, Community Driven Product Development and Consultant
Jake McKee is one of the founders of the modern customer community movement. He led Apple’s famed Global Support Communities and pioneered efforts at LEGO to engage its adult users in a community, which spawned breakthrough innovations such as the Mindstorms Community Driven Product Development (featured on the cover of Wired Magazine). For more than 10 years, Jake has been a leading industry community consultant working with clients like Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Calix, Southwest Airlines, and Outdoorsy. His consulting practice, Jake McKee Consulting, focuses on helping organizations of all sizes design, execute, and grow Community Driven Product Development programs that bring the Community Voice into the product development lifecycle. Jake also manages the CX 5essions project, an invitation-only monthly dinner series that brings senior online community, CX, and product management leaders together for conversation, connection, and camaraderie. And just for fun, he created a web comic for community managers called Confessions of a Community Manager.