Tunnel Vision

There's a cliche quote that gets thrown around constantly

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

It's often followed by a pithy and sarcastic comment meant to demean whoever happens to be in your pedantic cross hairs. More usefully it is used to cite transformative vision and paradigm shifts such as horse to car and dumbphone to smartphone. Sarcasm and genius-worship aside I'd like to think that the quote has spread as widely as it has due to the valuable advice trapped within.

Defined By Our Past

In many cases we tend to struggle with the tension between our past and what we will do in the future. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our past drives the future. Maybe it's a holdover from our prehistoric days when survival depended on our ability to avoid risk and heed the advice of our elders. Maybe it's easier for our brains to reason about things we have already experienced instead of imagining a completely new path. Whatever the reason the fact remains that there exist well-worn paths and people who continue to follow them. The problem arises when we believe this myth.

The past drives your future as much as your footprints make you walk.

Defining a Product

Part of the problem is that it can be difficult to realize that we are plodding down the same path. When you are defining a new product there is a brief period of time where you can achieve escape velocity and break the mental tethers chaining you to the existing solution. Let's take a look at a few common areas where it makes sense to blaze a new path.

This experience on a different form factor

Technology and people continue to change. What worked for 100 years could change tomorrow. Newspapers and their digital transformation are one of the most recent and prolific examples but the same pattern happens every day at much smaller scale. Maybe you offer an online experience today. Then someone told you that mobile was the way to go so now you need that experience to be usable from a mobile device. Tomorrow it could be a virtual headset or hologram.

The easy path to go down is to stick to what you know. You carry the same experience into the new form factor. If you are in a rush and the market won't wait then it can be a good move but it's important to take a look at missed opportunities of doing so. Each form factor brings new opportunities and new concerns. How well you deal with them can often determine your success in the long term.

When moving to a new form factor step back and take a breath. Your ability to capitalize on a new opportunity in the form factor could be the difference between you as a market leader or you as a me-too. It can also help to ask yourself why you are is such a rush. If you have been avoiding the market change hoping it will go away then that will be reflected in your strategy.

Now with 33% more flavor

How many times have you come across the fantastic badge on some food: "Now with 33% more flavor!" Maybe it was cheese or fish paste instead of flavor. Either way it was a bold declaration that this version was better than the other version. If the previous version was cardboard then this version is flavored cardboard.

The incremental improvement here is most likely lost on the customer. If Facebook put a new release out and said "Now with 28% less privacy concerns" would that entice you? ^[1]

Odds are your customers aren't enticed either by your claims. Your new product went live with a few tweaks but if it still missed the point or alienates them then odds are any curiosity will wane soon after launch. If you don't realize that you are falling into this habit you repeat the process until you eventually claim "150% more of that thing you want".

At which point both you and your customers will have promptly forgotten what it is exactly you make. Incremental improvement can be great but it has diminishing returns. Maybe it's time to take a chance and diversify. You might just delight a whole new set of customers who will never show up for 12% more of the wrong thing.

We value our key stakeholders

Even taking into account the rapid pace of change in the tech industry or perhaps because of it customers want to believe in your product. They are constantly mistreated, confused, and frustrated by lack of respect. When your new product comes out and it is a thinly veiled attempt to please your ad agencies, investors, or accountants don't be surprised when your customers notice.

It's understandable that any product worth anything has several key stakeholders. It's also perfectly understandable to make trade offs and compromises for these stakeholders. However problems arise when your product or service takes advantage of your customers. It's a slippery slope which can turn your business from a viable market into a third-party data reseller.

Nobody likes to feel manipulated so treat your customers with respect. Odds are when the market changes they will remember how they will treated and find some other company's product. The best products excite or delight customers checking off as many corporate line items as feasible.

Wisdom and Practice

Obviously it takes time to learn how to define and build a product that takes the above into account. The nice thing is that you probably already have an incredibly fruitful test-bed where you can experiment with minimum risk: your employees. Odds are you are already developing software for internal-only use.

Take a minute to think about what is staring you in the face:

• intimate knowledge of the domain
• captive audience and market
• generally easy and high level of feedback

You already have many of the things you need to build a successful product. By using internal applications as real-world practice you get a chance to grow your product management skills faster than the one a year or two cycle you have with public products. Not to mention your employees will thank you for making systems that don't make them want to throw their monitors at you.

Practice, iterate, and improve and the results will show in your products. Your customers will see the results and so will your bottom line.

Footnotes

[0]: I will continue to assume Henry Ford said it and let other's argue over it https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

[1]: I'm not picking on Facebook here. Feel free to replace it with Microsoft, Google, Apple, or whoever broke your trust today.

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