How can product managers effectively balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with the need to address buyer resistance? What strategies can they employ?
To effectively balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with the need to address buyer resistance, product managers need to consider all the different economic and behavioral forces at play. Firstly, as the article mentions, there are economic drivers. Innovation comes at a cost from the production side- R&D, marketing, market cannibalization, opportunity cost, etc… The key things to consider here are 1) why is the innovation necessary- is this product losing market share to competitors, is it obsolete within the market place, are there UX problems that need to be addressed, is a new market of users being targeted? What is the cost of a new product, and what is the potential size of its success. These questions will help to understand from the development side whether the innovation and new features are necessary and who they will target, as well as frame the scale of the cost that should be incurred for production. From the consumer side, as the article stresses, the cost analysis should be conducted on both the economic and behavioral. For economic, this entails estimating the transaction, learning, and obsolescence costs of the new product / feature. Crucially however, behavioral factors such as perceived gains and losses, the endowment effect, and status quo bias also need to be factored into the equation. For this I would opt to use the frameworks in the reading (the 9x effect, and capturing value from innovations). By using the 9x effect framework, the product manager will get a more realistic understanding of their potential new product’s need, viability, and adoption because it will relativize the experience from the user perspective. This will also help with sanity checking key company-side metrics, such as market sizing, growth estimates, and capital deployment. The capturing value from innovations framework is also a great tool for balancing buyer resistance with the need to innovate. Similar to the production side questions above, if a product manager can determine which category of the four (easy sell, smash hit, sure failures, long hauls) the product falls into this gives powerful insight into the next step forward. For instance if a product is a long haul versus an easy sell, the expected capital deployment should be lower or higher due to expected adoption rates. Similarly if the product falls under sure failures it gives a strong indication that the innovation is not necessary. It may seem simplistic but sometimes these analyses are overlooked or conducted far too late into a bad product’s development, by which time a PM may be too biased to properly understand the need and success rate for the product.
