Sarah Burkhart is a former Fortune 50 tech executive, now the Founder and General Manager at Stardust Home Services.  As a founder, wife, mom of three boys, and homeowner, she is painfully familiar with the challenges of doing it all. She's building Stardust as a way to take a meaningful burden off busy executives' plates.

The Fastest Way to Build the Wrong Thing

Years ago, ideas weren't the bottleneck.  Our engineering teams were not sitting idle.  We had a backlog of ideas and went through backlog grooming sessions to apply an ROI framework to determine what moved to the top of the backlog.  You needed developers, budget, months of runway. That friction was frustrating, but it was also a forcing function.  That ROI framework made the product teams slow down and ask whether the idea was worth building before you spent the resources to find out.

That friction is disappearing. AI tools now write a significant share of production code, and developers report completing certain tasks dramatically faster than they could unassisted. What used to take a team of engineers weeks can now take one person a weekend. The distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a working product" has compressed by an order of magnitude, and it's still compressing.

In a lot of ways, that is great news.  It has democratized the idea to product pipeline.

Speed doesn't fix the oldest failure mode in the book

I spent years running a P&L inside a Fortune 50 tech company. The projects that failed almost never failed because we couldn't build the thing. They failed because they didn't address the customer needs meaningfully enough to change their behavior, or their budget, for it.

That's not a new problem. CB Insights has tracked startup post-mortems for years, and "no market need" consistently shows up as the single biggest reason companies fail.  It is cited more often than running out of money or having the wrong team. Long before AI made execution cheap, founders were already building things nobody asked for. The only difference now is how fast and how convincingly you can do it.

When building something takes six months, the slowness itself creates space to invite customers, users, and stakeholders in to second-guess your assumptions. When building something takes six hours, that space disappears. You can go from idea to polished demo before you've talked to a single person who might buy it. The output looks legitimate. It feels validated, because it exists. But existing and being wanted are two completely different things, and a fast, well-built product built on a wrong assumption is still wrong, just wrong faster, and with more conviction behind it.

Customer conversations don't slow you down. They tell you which direction to run in.

This isn't an argument against building fast. It's an argument for putting more emphasis on the non-negotiable step.

Talk to the people who'd actually use this. Not your team. Not people who'll be polite. The actual humans with the actual problem. Ask what they're doing today to solve it, what they've already tried, what they'd have to believe to switch. Their answers will tell you more in an afternoon than a month of building in isolation ever will.

Knowing how to talk to customers in a way that avoids confirmation bias is an art in and of itself.  You have to work hard not to lead the audience to the answer you want to hear.  You have to ask open-ended questions.  And, you have to get comfortable with hearing answers that you don't like and sitting with them.  Maybe asking why, and being curious rather than defensive about your assumptions.

The uncomfortable truth is that this step doesn't get easier just because everything else did. If anything, it matters more now, because the cost of skipping it (building the wrong thing) has gotten cheaper to do and easier to hide behind a polished result. A bad idea executed brilliantly is still a bad idea with better production values.

The advantage goes to whoever still does the important work

Here's the opportunity in this, especially for founders and builders in a community like ours: if execution is no longer the differentiator, then knowing what to execute becomes the entire game. The people who win in this environment won't be the ones who can build fastest. Nearly everyone can now build fast. They'll be the ones who are most rigorous about talking to real customers before they start and most willing to be told their idea is wrong.

In a recent Texas Women's University accelerator, I got the chance to hear Neha Sampat talk about starting Contentstack.  She took us through many aspects of her founder's framework, but the part that stuck out to me was to fall in love with the problem.  Get to know the problem intimately, through your customer's eyes.  Recognize that your customer may not be the user, it may be the purchaser, or the decision maker, or all three.  Get input from all of them.  Keep asking why (nicely).

Customer input is a discipline. And it's one that gets easier to skip precisely when it matters most to keep.

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Outside of work, Sarah enjoys spending time with her family (three boys, husband Ryan, and dog Daisy).  They are soccer and climbing fans (Austin FC and Crux Climbing ftw!).  Sarah is also an avid equestrian, pursuing hunter/jumper training at Lone Star Stables.

Sarah is active in several community organizations, including Texas Women in Business, National Association of Women Business Owners, and more

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