It’s one of the most painful questions a product manager or entrepreneur can ask themselves, isn’t it? After all you’ve invested: the careful planning, the development resources, all your perfectly crafted marketing, then the time you spent eagerly anticipating the release of your new product…. aannnd, nothing. People aren’t buying, converting, or really reacting to what you were so sure was going to be a hit. What happened?
While the less-than-desirable numbers will tell you in absolute terms that something is wrong, they won’t tell you why. Even if you dig deep into your conversion funnels, the information you are likely to uncover will at best help you find which stages to eliminate. But what if it’s just poorly performing overall? Qualitative research is a superpower in cases like these, opening the doors to radical new opportunities that can help you understand what happened, and turn that failure around.
Generally speaking, there are 5 different factors that lead people to avoid (or adopt) new technology:
Cultural factors
This one’s a biggie. Interpersonal or ingrained habits and cultural mores or societal taboos are liable to directly affect receptivity to new ideas and technology. This is as true today for newfangled items such as Google Glass, as it was for low-tech innovations in the past, such as basic hygiene, or even the humble fork. You read that right: it took Western society hundreds of years to adopt the fork. Although this sounds a little dramatic, don’t forget that we are prone to glossing over what we mistakenly assume to be minor cultural issues: the attitudes people have toward protecting their privacy, for example, or the complex etiquette that defines how people behave on first dates. Perhaps the most famous example: the first few years of Airbnb’s efforts were squarely focused on removing cultural barriers that prevented strangers from trusting each other enough to sleep in each other’s homes.
Technological factors
The technological factor is usually the one that product managers and developers will find easiest to wrap their heads around. Admittedly, it is pretty straightforward: Are there certain technological limitations that deplete the ideal experience you want to provide? Were there things you had to compromise on in development that you thought the market was likely to tolerate, but maybe they simply didn’t? This is a great question to ask yourself when trying to evaluate the failure of an MVP (minimum viable product) that you’ve released to a new audience: this is an instance where it is quite likely that drastic technological compromises had to be made.
Business factors
Often, we are overly optimistic about our own product’s chances of “beating the incumbent,” as it were. Is there a teeny tiny chance that you overestimated what you thought to be a solid competitive advantage against a direct competitor? Or a hidden alternative? If you moved into a new market, did you properly investigate if there were multiple direct or indirect competitors who do a better job solving the same problem? In most cases, of course, we have done enough legwork to say “yes, I have researched the competition - and mine is better!” As famously explored by Daniel Kahneman, we now know that the optimistic nature of entrepreneurs makes them especially vulnerable to this kind of thinking. It takes humility to go back after a failure and question the gap between your perception of your own product and the market’s verdict. However, cases like these don’t necessarily mean that all is lost - just that you have to recalibrate to what people’s perception of the competition actually is. Crafting the right questions to ask your use group can help uncover how they perceive you vis a vis the competition.
Quality issues
I use the word “quality” quite broadly here. Quality issues can be design related, performance related, technology related, even service and logistics related. In all cases, something may have happened where your value proposition really resonated with people…. Up until they tried out the product and experienced it for themselves, whereupon disappointment set in. You were doing so well! But customer abandonment because you failed to deliver on a promise may not signal failure after all: instead many entrepreneurs view this as solid proof of the market’s appetite.
Brand issues
As any branding expert will tell you: there are infinite ways to get your branding very, very wrong. Often product managers will run lots of tests on what they believe to be the most important parts of the product, but none on the branding or messaging that surrounds it. Fortunately, it’s becoming more common to test these things with target audiences before (or after) a release. When you do this, you will learn the answers to questions like: Is the messaging or copywriting turning people off? Is the visual or audial identity annoying, unappealing, or perhaps even offensive in some way? The last thing you want to do is spend your entire marketing budget on branding that’s completely tone deaf to something your audience cares deeply about. (Some entertaining examples here.)
Did any of these 5 factors ring a bell? After a failure, your job will be to find out which one is the culprit. Out in the wild, people have all sorts of reactions to your product that never make it into the qualitative data directly, and with a properly set up research session, you’ll be casting your nets to catch these morsels of information, and make more informed decisions about your future efforts.