[jakequade]

> Failure to validate a product before building it? Premature optimization.

I largely agree with your comment, minus this. Unless everything after the initial idea for a product is an "optimisation" - which is quite a claim - building something shouldn't be lumped together with optimising it.

My point is that it seems like you're attributing more to this idea than is fair.

[Nevermark]

Its a stretch of the original meaning, but a good one I think.

Building a product before a good indication it is the right thing to build is prematurely optimizing a business.

At any level of a project, it is important to do things in the right order, to avoid wasting unrecoverable time and effort on work that never needed to be done.