While reading this article, I learned about the “9x effect,” a framework that explains why innovative products often fail despite offering real improvements. The idea is rooted in how people perceive value: consumers tend to overvalue what they already own by roughly three times (a cognitive bias known as the endowment effect), while product developers overvalue what they’ve created by a similar factor. Multiply these biases together, and there’s a nine-to-one gap between what innovators think people want and what consumers actually see as valuable.
TiVo is a striking example. In almost every objective way, it was better than a VCR — it let you pause live television, record automatically, and even guess what you’d like to watch. But using TiVo required giving up the simplicity of a VCR and learning a new system. Even if the benefits were real, the perceived loss of familiarity felt larger. TiVo ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars, not because it was a bad product, but because it asked too much behavior change too soon.
The article makes an important point: it’s not enough to build something better. You also need to minimize the behavioral shift required for people to adopt it.
It helps to categorize innovations based on how much they change the product and how much they change user behavior. The most successful ones — what the article calls “smash hits” — are those that dramatically improve the product while preserving familiar user habits. Google is one of the cleanest examples: it improved the underlying algorithm, but the user interface remained a simple search box. No new behavior required, just better results.
But most innovations aren’t that seamless. So what should product developers do?
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Be patient: If the product requires significant behavior change, expect slower adoption. TiVo might have survived had it approached the market more gradually.
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Design around existing behavior: The Toyota Prius works because it feels like a regular car to drive. You get higher fuel efficiency without changing how you operate the vehicle.
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Target people with less to “lose”: Burton Snowboards didn’t try to convert lifelong skiers. They focused on young people who weren’t attached to traditional skiing, which helped snowboarding become a mainstream sport.
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Start where your value is clearer: Iceland has made progress on hydrogen fuel cells because the constraints of island life make the trade-offs acceptable. In that context, the gains outweigh the losses.
The broader lesson is that developers tend to suffer from what’s known as the “curse of knowledge” — once we understand how great our product is, it becomes difficult to imagine how opaque or inconvenient it still feels to others. Closing that gap requires empathy, not just build quality.
This doesn’t just apply to product management. It’s a reminder that people resist change unless the benefits are overwhelmingly clear, and it’s on us — whether we’re building products or proposing new ideas — to bridge that psychological distance thoughtfully.
