3 common mistakes to avoid when building products

In the late 1950s, Ford launched a new product in the market — “Edsel”.

It failed. Spectacularly!

So huge were the losses, around $350 mn, that it is still studied by scholars and business leaders alike. Bill Gates cited the case study on Edsel, presented in John Brook’s excellent “Business Adventures”, as one of his favorite case studies ever.

Here was a car with an investment of $400 mn, designed and built by some of the best minds in the industry, supported by a massive marketing engine, huge sales force, and an enormous distribution network.

And it failed.

We all have used or come across products that did not “make it”. Not all of them would be on the same scale as Edsel, but there are common lessons to be learned. A product’s success is dependent on many factors, some of them not controllable, but we can reduce the risks by avoiding some of the mistakes listed here.

1. Not listening to your customer’s problems

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing” ~ John Russell

Know your customers and always have your ear to the ground. It is not just sufficient to have a customer success team in place. Obsessive, manic devotion to listening and understanding your customer’s problems is the key to building a successful product. And this will only happen if there is a clear channel between the customer success, product, and engineering teams. You don’t want to build a product or add a new feature that no one wants to use, do you?

Because Ford did not really listen to their customers who wanted smaller, more economic vehicles, they ended up with Edsel.

An important point to consider though is to figure out the solution to your customer’s problems yourself, and not by simply following the solution a customer suggests. This can seem counter-intuitive, but always remember this — you are the expert at solving the problem. The customer has a clear idea of what the problem is, but while it may seem like they want every solution to be customized exactly how they want, multiple studies have shown that fewer, well-designed choices that solve their problem create better satisfaction. This paradox is known as “Choice Paralysis”.

In Deskera, one of the problems that our customers highlighted was adding reporting tags and fields to transaction forms according to the specific needs of their business. Some customers suggested that we hard-code the fields for each one of them. But this would have been a temporary solution, as business needs evolve over time, and these hardcoded fields would become redundant. The problem was solved by adding a separate module that allowed the users to create their own fields in any form of their choosing, with complete control over visibility and reporting options. Our customers loved it.

There are many great tools available to make sure you capture customer feedback and listen to their problems. Look for a CRM solution with a robust help desk and community function. Invest time in building a community of your customers/potential customers. Listen to their problems, understand and solve them using data and your expert insights, and see your products succeed.

2. Confirmation bias

“What we see depends on what we are looking for” ~ John Lubbock

Human beings favor ideas and solutions that confirm their existing thoughts and opinions. If you don’t believe this, just take a look at your Facebook feed!

Confirmation bias in our decision making leads us to replace the customer with ourselves. Immediately we start solving the problem for ourselves, instead of the customer. Remember Google Wave? An excellent technical product with many features that are staple in today’s products. But it failed because the product was solving problems for those who made it, not the customers.

Most badly designed interfaces and user experiences can be attributed to confirmation bias. Think of any badly designed interface or poor user experience you’ve had — a drop-down menu that doesn’t offer search as you type, or a report engine that needs you to learn a new query language. While powerful features in their own right, they are not solving the customer’s problem — namely not scrolling through 300 items to choose the right option or seeing a report immediately when needed. Because it works for me does not mean it works for our customers.

A marketing manager for Ford said this when asked about the failure of Edsel

” People weren’t in the mood for the Edsel. Which is a mystery to me. What they’d been buying for several years encouraged the industry to build exactly this kind of car. We gave it to them, and they wouldn’t take it…. And now the public wants these little beetles. I don’t get it!”

Confirmation bias is a dangerous trap to fall into and can destroy your product. To avoid this trap, it is important to encourage constructive disagreements in your team. Challenge your and your team-member’s biases transparently and embrace viewpoints openly.

3. Not saying “NO”

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” ~ Henry Ford

Many associate this quote negatively with Henry Ford. It is argued that he did not care for what the customer wanted, or had a love of black so deep that he refused to consider any other option (confirmation bias).

What many people may not know is that Henry Ford used this line since he wanted to move production up from thousands per year to millions per year, and this would not have been possible without, in modern terms, building and leveraging a platform and avoiding feature creep.

In his book My Life and Work — Henry Ford wrote:

“The salesmen were insistent on increasing the line. They listened to the 5 percent, the special customers who could say what they wanted, and forgot all about the 95 percent, who just bought without making any fuss ….any defect in service then that must be instantly and rigorously investigated, but when the suggestion is only as to style, one has to make sure whether it is not merely a personal whim”

By saying NO to producing multiple models and colors, the production of Ford T rose from tens of thousands per year to over 2 million over the next few years.

Avoid feature creep at any cost. Adding too many features will

a) Confuse your customers,

b) Make maintenance and customer support difficult,

c) Cause bugs, failures and production delays

d) Impact your Go To Market speed negatively

Identify your MVP, and then add features that solve your customer’s problems (refer point 1) instead of adding everything that everyone asks for, and you will be able to keep your customers happy and your product a success. Learn to say NO to unnecessary features.