Reasons Your Product May Fail: No Definition Of Failure

Just as becoming over-reliant on customer feedback is a shortcut to failure, extricating customers from the process of product development entirely often produces equally grim results.

Your customers can provide you with relevant nuggets of insight that propel your product forward.

1. Patience – where possible, practice patience to give yourself enough time to know whether your strategic bets have paid off.
2. Interpret signals – you often won’t know whether you’ve achieved product/market fit. Instead, practice your ability to interp...

Try asking yourself some out-of-the-box questions that may increase the reach of your product/service:

1. Which kind of customers are not using your product and why?
2. What customers are not even interested in your industry or have rejected it?
3. What cus...

Failure can also feel good. 

Once you’ve achieved failure, it becomes a certainty. 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. Livin...

Feedback is great, but too much of it can have unintended consequences. you shouldn’t expect your customers to do the hard work for you. Aim to balance customer feedback with your vision, goals, strategy and – crucially – the advice of your advisors.

Our notion on exactly who our customers...

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. Fail fast. Move fast and break things. These are the mantras of modern product teams.

The benefits o...

Reversible failures are short term blips in the road. There’s time to ideate solutions towards success. There’s money in the bank to hire new specialists with domain expertise. You know the root of the problem and you have time to solve it.

Irreversible failures

The degree to which you listen to customer feedback is dependent upon the type of value your product is creating. Products tend to fall into distinct categories of value:

• Painkillers
• Vitamins
• Candy.

Painkillers won...

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.

If you have the resources, ...

Product Is Great:

1. Unexpected and positive physical action by users.
2. People are paying for it in the initial run.
3. Initial audience growth.

Product Isn’t Great:

1. No one is interested.
2. No monetization.

Building things that people want to use, in margin-enhancing, original ways is difficult.

You may have an abundance of domain knowledge, plenty of life experience, a fantastic team, heaps of funding, a big market and still fail miserably. People simply might not like or want what you have t...