Sunday Rewind: Easy ways to avoid the product graveyard

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a post from 2022 that looks at the questions you should ask to avoid product failure.

Are you acting on a hunch or the views of one influential customer or stakeholder, or have you done some research?  Do you understand customer needs and wants – and what they’re willing to pay for? Is your research as thorough and as unbiased as resources allow?

Your world-beating product will never see the light of day unless you can keep everyone who’s involved interested and engaged with its success. Think about quick wins for keeping them on-side.

Is there clarity and consensus about what your product should do? Is your product, as Marty Cagan teaches us, valuable, usable, feasible and viable? The importance of a clear product vision, one which is founded on value for customers, cannot be overstated.

Are you sure you’re solving a real problem for enough people to sustain a business? Or are you in reality just addressing a few edge cases? As David Pasztor, CEO of UX Studio says in this article on Medium, one of the chief reasons that products fail is because they are useless.

A quality product will build customer trust more quickly and will be the catalyst for recommendations and good reviews.

History is full of cases where great products, digital and physical, have failed to make an impact or lost out to inferior or less technologically sound competitors because they had inadequate or poorly conceived marketing and go-to-market strategies. Anyone still got a Microsoft Zune?

One man’s failure is another man’s success – a failure for Apple or Google can make for a very decent business somewhere else. 

Read the original post: Easy ways to avoid the product graveyard