Product Purgatory
Kill it or scale? Which new features should we add? Which market should we expand to?
These are tough questions that come up numerous times in a product’s lifecycle. The wrong decision can often lead you astray from building the winning product you desire. Wrong decisions are certainly one peril; however, the bigger risk is no decision.
Why is no decision worse?
Pretend that you are driving through a dessert on a giant road trip. You’ve told friends that you are going, loaded up the car and you’re off. Things go well for the first few days. Eventually, you realize that you’re lost. You’re not sure where to go. Your phone has no service. In this situation, do you keep driving in one direction or do you get decision paralysis and stop? You keep driving. Stopping will not rescue you — your friends may look for you, but the odds that they can find and help you are slim.
This is applicable to digital products, especially in large organizations. By stopping the work (note: the work does not have to be development, product strategy / thinking what you are going to do is ok!) on a digital product, you are ceding defeat. The product will eventually wither away and die.
Ok, this seems a bit dramatic. Does this happen often?
Yes, it happens a lot! Often, it’s because we don’t realize that we’re in a no decision environment. No decision can masquerade as waiting for a new hire, thinking you need a stakeholder’s buy in, saying that we need more research or any other number of permutations. The key characteristic is the mindset shifts from adding to the product to maintaining it. This state of not moving forward is what I call product purgatory.
Product purgatory is a horrible fate and one of the worst things you can do for a product. With an active product in the market, you’re achieving numerous different items:
- Keeping customers excited
2. Learning what works and does not work to stay ahead of the competition
3. Maintaining organizational inertia
The act of not doing something carries a serious penalty. Because now you are:
1. Not exciting customers
2. Not learning and decaying the value of what you have learned because customer preferences evolve over time
3. Providing competitors the opportunity to create the next feature customers crave
4. Signaling that you lost have confidence in your product
5. Losing time that could be spent building a new winning product
The natural question: how do you avoid product purgatory?
My core thought is that you should always have a developed hypothesis and you should be testing that hypothesis constantly! I’ve seen the importance of this in my personal life. While picking what to watch on Netflix it’s a slow process when I ask my partner what she wants to watch. The process is much faster when I recommend something. The very act of saying I want to watch Die Hard (aside: I am in the Die Hard is a Christmas movie camp) and being told yes or no gives me data that I can then use to make a more informed suggestion next time. This gets us much closer to the goal which is to put something on, especially because we’re going to be asleep in 15 minutes anyways!
Another way to consider this is that you should always have something that you can provide somebody so they can react. The common adage I heard early in my career is to “come with solutions, not problems”. Yet I notice that many times people do not have a hypothesis (a perspective on the solution) or, more likely, choose not to share it. This is extremely counterproductive!
The importance of this concept is extremely applicable to building products. When trying to figure out what to do next, I’ve seen blank stares from people coupled with “I’m not sure” or “We need more data”. We’re never completely sure. We could always use more data. The job of being a product manager is often making decisions when you’re not completely sure with incomplete data sets.
I think a large contributor to the lack of decision making is because of our inherent desire to be correct. This is understandable because it’s human nature. We want to propose something, be right about it and get sign off. This is a linear process, and great products are not built by being linear — great products require us to be non-linear thinkers and builders. This also means that we need to be comfortable taking risk and, sometimes, failing. If we do not fail, it means we did not push enough.
How do we balance this risk taking?
The way that I think about this is motivated by the book Thinking In Bets. A key point of the book is that you should take a series of small bets, but never take one so big that it knocks you of the game. We can apply this same concept to building products. Never take a shot so big that it can completely kill your product. Said another way, don’t put all your eggs in one basket (e.g., feature, idea, etc.)
As we consider product purgatory, we should always have series of small bets (or hypotheses) that we are testing at any point in time. We think about these bets as a portfolio. This means we have small, incremental enhancements we feel confident about and balance that with larger, innovative additions that have more value. What we do is constantly test these bets and get proof points and use that to keep moving our product forward. This means that when we discover that our innovative bet is not a good one (e.g., through a lo-fi wireframe) we are still making progress on our other enhancements to satiate customers and stakeholders and not get stuck in product purgatory.
Ok, so back to the hypothesis bit, how does having a hypothesis prevent product purgatory?
For a few reasons.
1) You drive to the right answer
The beautiful part about having this portfolio of bets that you’re constantly tinkering with means that you are always learning. Having your hypothesis and sharing it means that are actively making a step towards getting to the right answer. This is because you’re able to leverage the thinking of more people when you share your hypothesis, and in the cases where you’re objectively wrong, you find out quite quickly.
2) You provide yourself (and your product) an opportunity
The act of having hypotheses and showing them shows that you care about your product and that you believe in it. Again, your hypotheses are allowed to be wrong, especially when they are balanced with other hypotheses that are right. And, even in the case where you are wrong too many times, it means that you gave your product a fair shake. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Having a hypothesis and testing it puts you in the arena. Being in the arena extends the life of your product, giving you more opportunity to answer the key question that is causing trepidation in the organization. Not putting yourself in the arena and waiting for something to happen is the same as waiting in the dessert. If you do not do something, nobody else will.
3) You maintain inertia
Getting the funding and buy-in to build products is tough. In some large organizations, getting the greenlight to build the product can be harder than building the product itself! Losing this momentum that you have should be avoided at all costs, especially if the product is displaying positive signals.
Great. I’m already in product purgatory. What do I do?
I’ve been there. It’s not fun. The key component is understanding what allowed you to get so far and what caused you to stop.
What got you to where you are: We build products because there is either a business problem or customer problem (hopefully both) where we believe we can build a product that solves the problem(s). To get out of product purgatory, you must look at your data to determine whether you are doing this. If the data is clear that you are doing this, then move on to the next step.
If the data is not clear, come up with hypotheses for why this is. Not having data that shows the product’s value is a very good reason to not move forward. The lack of data is your data. If you cannot come up with valid reasons beyond the product is not a good one, move on from the product. If you cannot get buy in to test your hypotheses, move on from the product. Spending time on a product that does not have a good foundation (e.g., not built on a strong customer insight or not having strong executive support) will be something that you regret. Important questions to ask yourself: did we ever have product market fit? Was there really a market for this? Has the market shifted and we need to adapt?
What caused you to stop: If everything was going well with the product, odds are that you would not have stopped. Think about what caused this and then think about how you can move around it. Often it is because there is a key stakeholder that believes you cannot scale the product further or that the product is not doing a strong enough job solving your customer or business problem. Understand this concern deeply and scrutinize it. If you believe this thought is right and non-impactable, make your peace and move on.
However, if you believe they are wrong then make the case for the product. Lean into the product metrics that you have and create hypotheses that you can test on why their primary concern is incorrect. Get buy in to run low investment tests and use that to rebuild your momentum and get back to developing as quickly as possible. Again, if you cannot get buy in to run low investment tests, move on.
Admitting that your product does not have a recipe for success is courageous. Once you have done what you can, you are doing a disservice to your customers and your organization by not moving on to the next idea that can create positive impact.
We have a full roadmap and keep adding to our product, therefore we are not in product purgatory, right?
True! You’re not in product purgatory, but you may be in the Build Trap. You should not build for the sake of building, or because you are scared that as soon as you stop building you will be in purgatory. Rather, the key takeaway if you are in either scenario is that you need to intentionally think about mechanisms that allow you to test your hypotheses. This is critical for all of us to do for any product, when we find ourselves in either scenario, it highlights the point even more.
Wow! This was a lot of information.
Yes, I know. Here’s a summary:
TL;DR: Always keep moving — this means always be testing and, if your tests are positive, developing. If you stop, get moving ASAP or move on. Staying in no decision land will not take you, your customers, or your business anywhere.
Contributor: Kevin Savage
Acknowledgement: Mike Tsinkler, Tulio Soria
