What’s the word for something that did not end as expected, but wasn’t a failure? Is there a word for that? Sunsetted? Killed? I once kicked off a product that was exploring the consumer safety space. With this product we validated and invalidated a lot of hypotheses, gained a lot of learning in the space, even built some software — but we weren’t discovering anything we hadn’t seen elsewhere. It wasn’t a failure, persay, but it was leaving me feeling disappointed.
Setting expectations for the journey and outcomes
At FordLabs we create a proposal before a new product is started. Within that proposal document we outline the desired outcomes, assumptions, and known risks of the product. The value of this document is very important: we used those desired outcomes and assumptions to guide the work we were doing. Therefore, I needed to confirm the entire team was onboard with those outcomes, as well as the Discovery & Framing process FordLabs exercises.
As a part of that process, we conducted user interviews to build empathy for a customer’s problems and use that empathy to help develop solutions, but after a number of weeks of research, our team wasn’t finding pain points with those we were interviewing: parents, single parents, significant others, vehicle owners & lessees. It was making it difficult to create a solution!
It’s not a failure, but it feels like one
Christine Hassler, life coach and speaker, would call these feelings an “expectation hangover”. An expectation hangover, according to Hassler’s book, is the disappointment and other negative reactions that come from life not turning out the way we hoped, planned, or expected.
In this case, I found myself experiencing two different categories of expectation hangover. The first was the situational hangover; when “something doesn’t turn out the way we wanted it to; or we don’t get the satisfaction we thought we would from a particular result.” I went into the kickoff with the expectation that we were going to find people experiencing a problem that hasn’t been addressed (or at least could be improved), start building software to improve that experience for them, and build a user base. And I was finding this wasn’t true.
The second type was self-imposed expectation hangover; when “we don’t live up to the standards or expectations we’ve set for ourselves.” We created expectations for ourselves that we weren’t able to reach — regardless of whether those expectations should be what we were evaluating ourselves against once we had found that the initial problems we looked to find were not there.
After this experience, I want to make sure every person on the team is encouraged to share their expectations & assumptions for the product from the beginning. This will help the team ensure we manage expectations between each other, as well as better defining what success looks like at the start. By doing that, I hope to reduce any expectations hangovers in the future. 🍻
