Why Products Fail: 6 Typical Reasons
There is no insurance against failure. You may have an excellent high-productive team, a promising product, enough resources and time and smartest tools. However, it will not deprive you of the probability of failing at any stage in the life cycle of the product.
What are the reasons your product may fail? Is it possible to embrace and avoid failure timely when building products?
In April, Department of Product offered its own assessment and identified 6 key reasons why products may fail.
- Nobody wants what you’ve built
- You’re addicted to customer feedback
- You ignore customer feedback
- You lack patience
- You fail to define failure
- You want to fail
How to embrace failure without failing?
- Practice patience to give yourself enough time to know whether your strategic bets have paid off.
- Practice your ability to interpret signals.
- Understand the type of value your product creates and weigh customer feedback accordingly.
- Recognize the limitations of feedback. Customers cannot tell you what to build. It’s up to you and your team.
All product managers want to build successful products. However, avoiding failure entirely is impossible.
Surprisingly, one of the key factors in determining the product success may be how effective you are in managing failures.