Every week, someone on my product team comes to me excited about a new feature. They’ve seen what competitors are doing, talked to a customer who wants it, or found a cool technical solution that could differentiate us. My response is always the same question:
“Do you really think we’re still going to do this in five years?”
It’s amazing how quickly enthusiasm deflates when people actually think about this. That complex reporting dashboard they want to build? In five years, users will just ask an AI assistant for the data they need. That intricate contract workflow with 15 approval steps? Future systems will handle most of it automatically.
This question has saved Concord millions of dollars and thousands of development hours. But more importantly, it’s taught me one of the hardest lessons in product development: being right at the wrong time is still being wrong.
My $2 Million Google Docs Mistake
Back in 2014, when we started building Concord, I made what seemed like an obvious decision. Why were people still using Microsoft Word for contracts? It was an offline document format in an online world. We should let people edit contracts directly in our system, just like Google Docs.
We were right about the direction of the market. Today, nobody questions online collaborative editing. But in 2014, we were too early. Way too early.
Our customers weren’t ready. Legal teams were still attached to Word. IT departments hadn’t approved browser-based editing for sensitive documents. We spent two years and probably $2 million building and refining a feature that most of our customers actively avoided using.
The lesson? It doesn’t matter if you can see the future. What matters is whether your customers are ready to live in it.
The DVORAK Keyboard Problem
There’s a better keyboard layout than QWERTY. It’s called DVORAK, and it’s scientifically proven to be more efficient. I tried to learn it once. After two weeks of typing at the speed of a frustrated toddler, I gave up and went back to my inefficient QWERTY keyboard.
This is the reality of product innovation that nobody talks about. Sometimes the theoretically superior solution loses to the familiar one. Sometimes being “better” isn’t enough.
When my team shows me a new way to handle contract tracking that’s technically superior but requires users to completely change their mental model, I think about my DVORAK experiment. Will our users actually make this leap, or will they stick with their inefficient but familiar Excel spreadsheets?
Building Bridges to the Future
So how do you balance innovation with reality? How do you build for the future without alienating your present customers?
The answer is what I call “bridge features”—intermediate steps that move users toward your five-year vision without asking them to make a giant leap.
Take our AI features, for example. In five years, I believe contracts will be largely AI-negotiated. An AI will review terms, flag issues, and even suggest improvements based on your company’s playbook. But if we’d launched that as our only option, we’d have terrified our user base.
Instead, we built bridges:
- First, simple AI-powered contract review that flags obvious issues
- Then, suggested edits based on common patterns
- Next, learning from your accepted/rejected changes
- Eventually, AI negotiation assistance
Each step validates our five-year vision while giving customers time to adapt. We’re not dragging them into the future—we’re walking there together.
The Features We Killed (And Why We’re Proud of It)
Last year, we killed a feature that was 90% complete. It was a beautiful, complex reporting system that could slice and dice contract data in dozens of ways. Our engineers had spent months on it. Our designers had crafted an elegant interface.
But when I asked the five-year question, the answer was obvious: nobody would use traditional reporting dashboards in five years. They’d just ask their AI assistant, “Show me all contracts expiring next month with values over $50K.”
Killing that feature hurt. But keeping it would have hurt more. It would have added complexity to our product, confusion for our users, and technical debt for our future. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do as a product leader is to throw away good work because it’s pointed in the wrong direction.
The Questions That Matter
The five-year question is powerful, but it’s not the only filter. Here’s my complete framework for evaluating product ideas:
The Five-Year Question: Will we still do this in five years? If no, what’s the bridge to get from here to there?
The Grandmother Test: Could my grandmother understand and use this? If no, we’re probably overcomplicating it.
The Removal Test: What would happen if we removed this entirely? If nothing significant, it shouldn’t exist.
The Timing Test: Are our customers ready for this today? If no, what needs to happen first?
What This Means for Contract Management
The contract management industry is at an inflection point. AI is changing everything about how we’ll create, negotiate, and manage agreements. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon everything and chase the newest technology.
Here’s what I know will be true in five years:
- Contracts will be simpler and more standardized
- AI will handle routine negotiations
- Compliance will be largely automated
- Human lawyers will focus on strategy, not paperwork
But here’s what I also know: we can’t jump there overnight. We need to build bridges that help our 1,500+ customers move from where they are today to where they need to be tomorrow.
The Courage to Say No
The five-year question isn’t just about killing bad ideas—it’s about having the courage to say no to good ideas that are pointed in the wrong direction. It’s about accepting that timing matters as much as technology. It’s about understanding that your job as a product leader isn’t to build everything possible, but to build what will matter.
Every feature you don’t build is resources you can invest in the right direction. Every complexity you remove makes your product more accessible to the customers who need it most. Every time you resist the urge to be everything to everyone, you get closer to being invaluable to someone.
So the next time someone comes to you with a feature request, a competitive analysis, or a “revolutionary” idea, ask them the five-year question. You might be surprised how many bad ideas it kills—and how many good ones it reveals.
Because in the end, the best product decisions aren’t about what’s possible today. They’re about building bridges to what’s inevitable tomorrow.
Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.