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Designer’s Field Guide
The Five Product Strategy Fails
And what you can do about them
This I believe:
Successful products succeed uniquely but failed products all fail for the same reasons.
In this post I’ll describe the 5 most common product strategy fails I’ve encountered and what I’ve learned to do when I see them coming.
1. The Top Down Fail
When the Hollywood film is made about the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal my bet is the story it will tell is one where the senior executives of the company made promises to investors that engineering could not keep. This is a classic version of the top down fail.
This root of this failure mode is a good idea, actually, a great idea. In fact, you cannot have a top down failure without first having an idea that is so brilliant, so simple, and so obviously true that it can’t be wrong — except that it is!
In Volkswagen’s case the idea was Clean Diesel. Exciting financial projections for this aspirational brand were shared with investors and promises were made. Those financial projections became someone’s responsibility to make tangible, first, as a marketing campaign and second as a…
