A Must Learn Concept for Product Managers: Diffusion of Innovation
If you are a product manager who is building a new product, then one of your biggest goals must be to achieve product-market fit.
Product-market fit describes the stage of a product that has successfully identified a target user group and is serving them with a product that meets their needs well.
Once you achieve PMF, then you shift your aim to grow your user base and eventually to have a large scale adoption.
Let’s think about a software product that is widely adopted today: Google Maps.
It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle, and air, or public transportation.
Although the product offers all these features, not all features target the same user group, right? If you are a person who travels with public transportation then the map automatically shows you how to reach from point A to B with public transportation and the departure times because you need to know that to make sure you catch it on time. On the other hand, if you are a person who generally walks everywhere then it shows you a Live View of the street because you need more accurate information about the streets and intersections.
As you can see, the needs and the goals of each of these user groups are very different than each other.
But why is this important? Why is it important to build it for the right audience?
It can be explained with the law of diffusion of innovation, a theory that is first developed by Everett Rogers in 1962.
Law of Diffusion of Innovation
Everett Rogers found out that individuals in any society fall into one of the five technology adopter consumer groups: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.
You can see by the above curve that the Innovators is a small but important group. They are always the first ones to try a new product because they are risk-taking and like being on the cutting edge. They are willing to overlook problems with new products and technologies to be on the cutting edge. They are also the ones who introduce a new product to the larger population by sharing their experiences with their communities.
The Early Adopters are also forward-thinking, unlike Innovators they do not buy a product for the sake of it though. They rely on their intuition to make buying decisions. They have the highest degree of opinion leadership among others.
The Early Majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. They will carefully observe the experiences of others with the new products and take their time before buying or using a product. So they will need to be convinced that the product is highly beneficial and it is the new status quo.
The Late Majority has a high degree of skepticism and they are more resistant to change. They don’t like or care about disruptive innovation much. If their existing product and technology work for them they don’t see any reason to change it. However, they are generally responsive to peer pressure.
The last category is the laggards. They are highly resistant to change. They wait until a new technology or a product is completely mainstream to even consider adopting it, and in some cases they never adopt.
Let’s assume that you are working on a new product idea. Do you think targeting all five groups at once would make sense? No, not really, right? It is like packing a suitcase without having a destination. Whose needs and goals you will aim to satisfy with your product?
The Chasm and How to Cross It
Okay… so, let’s say you launched your new product, and Innovators and Early Adopters are already using your product. Now you want to scale it to a larger group of people. The next group for you to target is the Early Majority group. Uh- oh.. as you can see there are gaps in the model. The biggest gap is the one between Early Adopters and Early Majority. This gap is so big that it is a chasm. Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm focuses on this gap and how to cross it.
Because the characteristics of these two groups are very different, the Early Adopters generally do not serve as role models for the Early Majority. The Early Majority needs a reference. How will you overcome the vast chasm between the two groups then? According to Moore, you cross the chasm by starting small. By picking a very targeted and specific niche of customers inside the Early Majority to focus on.
When you target your product only to single young professionals aged 25–35 in San Francisco who make 80–120K a year you can know exactly whose problems to solve and work your way towards them.
As product managers, you need to make sure to listen and understand the issues and frustrations of the niche customer segment that you chose. Then win the Early Majority over by providing them everything they need to achieve their goals.
Since each group’s emotions, motivations, and drivers are different (just like the Google Maps example), as a product manager, if you aim to have widespread adoption of a new product, you need to tailor the experiences, communication channels and messages to each of the adopter group mentioned above.
People are driven by their needs and their desires. They do not just use/buy a product because they are nice to have (except the Innovators probably!). They are focused on filling the gaps in their lives. Picking a niche target and creating a persona based on that will help you to understand the people — the WHO. Whose problem are we solving? Whose pain points we are trying to identify? Once you fully understand that, you can design a great product for them. Then continue to do the same for your next user target. Divide and Conquer!
