How to Innovate While Keeping Customers Happy
One way to approach innovation with buyer resistance is by keeping in mind the idea of the “9x effect”. The 9x effect is the difference “between what innovators think consumers desire and what consumers really want”. Anytime a PM is working on introducing a new feature or replacing an existing feature, they should think about the psychology of loss aversion and steer away from removing elements that users center their workflows around. Rather than pitching the idea to users as a “new feature”, they should frame it as an alteration to an existing offering which makes the change easier to adapt to. It is also important for PMs to recognize their own biases. Just like customers see the feature they currently work with as the status quo, designers and developers “adopt the innovation-as-status-quo perspective” which is hard to encourage onto others.
Loss Aversion in Practice
In Kahneman and Tversky’s research, they found that “the gains from the wager must outweigh the losses by a factor of between two and three before most people find such a bet attractive”. This perfectly describes how PMs should see their product and feature changes as well because before it has actually been tested or tried, it is simply just a “bet”. This is also why initial testing and control groups and “dogfooding” to internal employees is important. I saw this resistance in practice during my internship at Slack. Rather than launching features to the general public or even certain users, we would first just roll out features to Slack employees to get feedback. Also because Salesforce acquired Slack, there has been a lot of push to get Salesforce clients to leave Salesforce and do everything from Slack which has been met with resistance. Even though Salesforce has a very not-modern vibe, people are so used to using it that they don’t want to switch their workflows to Slack.
