Unravel the mystery behind product failures. Delve into the myriad reasons, from poor market research to ineffective marketing strategies, that can lead to a product's downfall. Understand how to avoid these pitfalls and ensure your product's success.
Why do products fail?
Lack of product / market fit
- In the startup context, it seems to be fairly straightforward: either nobody wanted the thing you built the way you built it or you failed to find enough people who did.
- With the growth of agile transformation and larger corporates adopting startup principles, the idea of failure itself is now one that is largely embraced as a means of testing ideas quickly
- Agile and the fail fast culture prioritizes failing to learn as quickly as possible and move onto the next experiment
- However, strategy involves the opposite of failing fast: patience, intuition and persistence
How to embrace failure without failing
Patience
- Practice patience to give yourself enough time to know whether your strategic bets have paid off
- Interpret signals
- Value
- Understand the type of value your product creates
- Recognize the limitations of feedback
- Customers can’t tell you what to build
Nobody wants what you’ve built
You need to rely on a bunch of intuitions, data, feedback and signals. Your interpretation of all of these factors is critical and can often contribute directly to the life or death of your product.
- Product market fit is not a final destination. It is a messy process of cultivating your ability to both interpret relevant signals and filter out the irrelevant noise.
You fail to define failure
Defining upfront what failure and success looks like will give you the clarity to conclude whether what you’ve achieved so far is success or failure.
- Degrees of failure: reversible vs. irreversible
- Irreversible failures are short term blips in the road
- Successful failures are time to ideate solutions towards success
- You know the root of the problem and you have time to solve it
You’re addicted to customer feedback
Listening to and acting upon customer feedback is an essential part of product development, but think twice before prioritizing customer feedback at the expense of other inputs.
- Balance customer feedback with your vision, goals, strategy and the advice of your advisors.
Why do you want to fail?
Failure feels better.
- Humans crave certainty. Failure feels much better than the never-ending, ambiguous slog of keeping products alive and continuously evolving without the certainty of knowing how it will all end
- If you find yourself in a position where you’re attracted to the lure of certainty, consider the underlying motives behind it.
Ignore Customer Feedback
Extricating customers from the process of product development often produces equally grim results.
- Products tend to fall into distinct categories of value: Painkillers, Vitamins, Candy
- Your customers are in no position to tell you what to build, but listening to them will unlock new ways of providing value.
You lack patience
A lack of patience means cutting experiments short before you learn anything, launching several products targeting different market segments at the same time with no clear goals, and chasing multiple metrics that contribute in no meaningful way to your objectives.
- Patience is easy when you have the resources to give yourself the time you need to test ideas fully by building products to trial with existing and new customers.
