Prashant Mahajan is an experienced product manager turned entrepreneur and founder and CEO of the company Zeda.io. Prashant has worked with hundreds of product leaders and created some of the most successful, revenue-generating products available in the market today.
Anyone crazy enough to launch a recent product already knows the statistics about product failure. According to Professor Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, over 30,000 recent products are introduced every year, and 95% of them fail.
However, even this 5% doesn’t always achieve its goal because many of them don’t do exactly what customers need and others don’t hit their target KPIs. We call this the product death cycle. It’s a repeating cycle that occurs when, despite listening carefully to customers and carefully crafting the features they ask for, products struggle to gain traction.
This is an all-too-familiar scenario many product experts are familiar with, and the irony is that most product experts do exactly what they were taught: listen to their customers.
On the other hand, the vicious cycle of product death does not have to repeat itself. There are ways that companies can better understand their customers’ pain points and develop the right products to solve the right problems at the right time. It’s about understanding the basic fundamentals.
Make sure you solve the problem
When it comes to product design and development, solving the right problem may seem obvious. We’ve all heard about the solution to the problem – look at the Segway transportation device. However, the reality is that successful products and services succeed because they solve a specific problem that is well demonstrated. The challenge is to truly understand your customers’ pain points.
I discovered this at the beginning of my startup: we were engaged by a branch of a vast international company. As a juvenile, motivated start-up, this was a dream client and we immediately jumped in to create the perfect product for them. But when we came up with a solution, they wanted something different because they felt their priorities had changed.
I think this is something that a lot of startups can empathize with – you get a contact at a great company and they tell you about their problems. You build a product or solution to solve this problem, but it doesn’t work as planned.
It often happens that a company realizes too behind schedule that its product must solve a problem or that it doesn’t quite hit the mark. For example, it may have an adoption rate of 20% when the company was targeting 80%. Or the company may misunderstand where it is going wrong internally.
Understand the variables involved in doing everything well
Getting everything right is about more than just the product and the overall experience. Execution is not one gigantic thing, but many petite things that come together. The current economy, people, market and industry are beyond your control. However, product development, marketing, sales and customer service are not. All elements must fit together and all are equally crucial.
Too often, when something goes wrong, you hear marketing blaming the product, or sales blaming the product, or someone will blame what’s going on in the world. But it’s never just one thing – everything works together to create a great overall experience.
Stay longer
This ties into the final, fundamental aspect necessary to avoid failure: perfect timing. This is the hardest thing to achieve. There have been so many products that solved the right problem and were made almost perfectly, but they lacked the right timing.
Google Glass is a perfect example of this, and I often wonder if currently successful companies like Uber and Airbnb would have achieved the same success if they had launched earlier. Then there’s Netflix, which lasted for years before becoming a household name, all thanks to the technological infrastructure necessary to provide high-quality streaming.
Stop guessing and exploit available artificial intelligence
The good news is that artificial intelligence and data-driven initiatives can lend a hand companies take the guesswork out of business and avoid product failures. While AI’s predictive capabilities can be helpful in the long run, the more tactical, practical and data-driven side of analytics will lend a hand in the initial phase of the transition.
AI features like sentiment analysis can lend a hand companies better understand what their customers’ real needs are. Natural language processing is also available to lend a hand product managers understand customer feelings. Machine learning can lend a hand process market trends and customer needs.
AI will also lend a hand product teams better measure success. At best, they can improve a successful product. In the worst-case scenario, this means they locate micro-failures faster and take action more efficiently before too much time and resources are wasted. Either way, AI can lend a hand you make more informed product decisions. The tools are available for businesses to learn to exploit and apply them in meaningful ways to understand what their customers want and need.