Q: 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?
A:
The Problem
The big issue with finding a balance here is that innovation is often incremental and, over time, becomes more significant as innovations pile on. However, buyers want to have The Thing(TM) that has all of the incremental changes at once, not many slightly better versions over time.
This can be seen with how iPhone purchasing tends to go – someone buys an iPhone, holds on to it and refuses to replace it as several new models roll out over a number of years, eventually the phone breaks or becomes so out-of-date it becomes a no-brainer to replace, and then the iPhone is replaced.
As I see it
What seems to be a classic product manager strategy for finding the balance, and is supported by the be patient substrategy described in the article, is: continue making incremental improvements and simply minimize resistance as you go. If innovation is incremental, keep making the incremental changes while releasing new products and, at the same time: seek out customers who don’t have an incumbent product, make new versions of products interactively-similar to prior versions to prevent adoption hinderances, eliminate incumbent competing products (stop offering them), and find people for whom the newest innovations really matter. Even if sales are slow at first, the revenue generated can have a long tail that can be used to enable newer innovations that support future explosive revenue.
Another Perspective
A strategy not really touched on in the article, that feels particularly relevant in the software industry that has pioneered it, can be finding the balance through a subscription model. In my experience with platforms like say, for instance, Spotify, is that, by paying a monthly cost instead of buying the music out-right, my costs roughly balance out overtime as a consumer who would otherwise buy music but, in the mean-time, the product can be changed and innovated on. Why “eliminate the old” as the article put it when you can continually replace a product on the customers behalf, keeping behaviors roughly similar to prevent churn, and pile innovations on that are subsidized by an active subscription to keep your product ahead of competitors. This keeps innovations coming without customers having to consciously replace a product on their own (which, in this instance, might look like buying a license to a software and having to replace that software by buying a new license to a new version later, which, as a model, runs into almost all the same problems as other products do with regards to buyer resistance) without nearly the same level of buyer resistance.
