Balancing Innovation and Familiarity
This is a question everyone struggles with. PMs are also humans at the end of the day, so one might have trouble understanding why people aren’t equally excited about a new product that is so much better but requires getting used to. The primary strategy is to minimize behavior changes by incorporating these innovations into familiar form factors, thereby increasing ease of use for current users. Another technique is to target new users with no “endowment,” making them more likely to buy the product. This helps bridge the x9 gap between customers and businesses. If behavior change is necessary, one should aim for a 10x improvement to help bridge that gap in expectations. Having said that, this is difficult to quantify in my opinion.
Loss Aversion and Buyer Resistance
This is the idea that people dislike losing features more than they enjoy new ones. So, if a product is missing a feature it previously had, people are less likely to upgrade. PMs can take advantage of this by ensuring they understand that a loss must be compensated with double the features. They should prioritize keeping features people know and love, while encouraging the adoption of new features that offer similar functionality over time, and then phase out the original feature.
Feature Creep
Feature creep is when a product keeps receiving new features that are only loosely related to the original and slowly make the product move away from its initial intention. PMs can avoid this by testing and validating new features, making sure users actually want the new feature, and that it is not getting added “just because.” Companies should understand “what kind of change they are demanding of consumers,” and this is exactly the PM’s job.
