Many of the times we find ourselves in a meeting room with a team discussing about the product plans. People discuss about existing features, new features, ways to pull more traffic to the site, upcoming SEO processes etc. Everything to make a product more successful and valuable.
How do you measure success or value? Everyone uses different perspectives and merits for measuring these. Marketing team would think of it in terms of total traffic home page is generating, number of likes on social media. Management would think of it in terms of number of registrations, downloads. Anything and everything that gets more traffic and attracts new users. A Team goes on adding “new and exciting” features to make the product stand out. Often adding new features seems like an obvious thing to do, but at what cost?
The team neglects the huge factor about the current users who are using the product, those loyal users who supported the ongoing development of the product. Existing Users who are more than happy about the product and what it offers. Suddenly prospective users become more important than the existing users. Those who were considered ‘masters’ before, become ‘slaves’ the moment they click on the ‘Sign me up’ button.
We need to understand that our role does not end after a user ‘Signs Up’ for a product, it doubles. Users puts faith on our system to do the right thing for them, we as product creators need to respect that. It may sound foolish to think emotionally about the product business, but it is what has been proved correct for long time. End to end experience is more important than the product itself. User base is a great power and it should be handled with greater responsibility.
Expanding the business can be very tricky. It can mean adding new features for existing users or adding new features to target new user base. We can also think of it in terms of redesigning the service to adapt requirements of existing users more closely. Here we have two distinct parameters i.e. feature set and user base, that we need to consider to expand our business. It can be improving existing feature set or adding new feature set, It can be satisfying existing users or specially targeting new users. More often the safest business plans include improving on existing feature set and satisfying our existing user base.
Tim Brown in his book “Change by Design”, talks about the “Ways to Grow” Matrix, developed by Diego Rodriguez & Ryan Jacoby, IDEO.
Here, the idea is not to just focus on single type of business expansion plan but to invest efforts in all possible areas of improvement. This tool was developed to guide businesses manage their portfolios using design based innovation. This tool helps evaluate the innovation efforts within an organisation.
First of all, businesses should invest majority of their efforts into improving existing offerings for existing customers, because this is by far the safest way to expand the business. This means sending out an incremental updates or a next iteration of an existing product. It is very important for a business to invest in existing products and users, as this investment helps create a brand out of a product.
Investment into existing products and users creates a strong foundation for a business. It is important to explore new areas expansions once a strong foundation is in place. It can be achieved either by extending existing offerings to solve the unmet needs of current customers or adapting them to meet the needs of new customers.
Toyota Prius is an example of evolutionary innovation along the product offering axis. Through clever engineering, Toyota offered a new breed of energy efficient transportation, Prius offered significantly lower fuel consumption with fuel increasing fuel prices.
On the similar lines Tata Nano is an example of innovation along the user axis. It involves adapting an existing product so that it can be manufactured at a lower cost and thus exploring a user base of indian families who could not afford a safer family transportation.
The most challenging type of innovation, and riskiest, is that in which both the product and the users are new. Very few companies achieve this great feat successfully. It means creating a whole new market with a ground breaking innovation. Apple did it with iPod & iTunes, in the process helped music industry move with the flow of new technology.
Company’s best defence is to focus on investing their efforts in creating a versatile portfolio and remain competitive in a constantly changing world.
