Product managers can mitigate risk of failure through effective needfinding and prototyping. With the article’s stunning statistics of 70% to 90% failure rates for new products, lowering these rates by just 5-10% can result in enormous company-wide savings. Contending with “loss aversion” is incredibly hard to hypothesize or predict. Even after product managers have established a verified need, they must also establish confidence that people will follow through on their need-seeking given the opportunity. The example about the Dvorak versus QWERTY keyboard led me to reflect on Apple and their iOS updates. While it might be a stretch to call rearranging home pages, incorporating drag-down menus, introducing long-press functionality “long haul” features, it definitely helps adoption promotion when they bundle these features with “smash hits” like new text features and being able to emoji-react to messages. The practical experiments the article outlined (trading coffee mugs and chocolate bars) is a great example of getting real-world experience with customer behaviors. In CS147, I have had ideas I loved that didn’t end up having customer demand or excitement. I think an important quality of a product manager is being able to accept the experimental outcomes of the design process and help their team do the same. Efficient execution can often outshine an exciting idea, but as a product manager, I will strive towards exciting execution team-wide.
