Product managers can balance the desire to innovate and ship new features with buyer resistance within themselves by trying to figure out who exactly their audience is and what they want. I feel as though product managers are always looking toward the next flashy thing (things that get them promoted) and not looking at current problems people are struggling with, which could retain more existing customers.
Having lots of data on previous customer data would be helpful to understand how users psychologically are buying your product (do they believe yours is the best? Are they attached to your brand?). Say, if your audience is an older demographic, you may need to be careful about drastically changing your product through innovation when many individuals of that demographic are distrustful of technology. Company stage can also drastically change how risk-averse you are as a PM. Better understanding your user audience can help with figuring out your priorities.
Loss aversion is that losses have a greater psychological impact on people than gains, and thus gains from a deal must fully outweigh the losses by at least a factor of 2 or 3. This leads to buyer resistance because loss aversion leads people to value existing products that they already know and love more than those they don’t own, also known as the endowment effect. The magnitude of this bias also increases over time so that once people have owned something for longer periods, people tend to stick to what they have even if there are better alternatives, also known as the status quo effect. I suspect this is because the decision to even think about switching to another product and weighing alternatives is a burden on the brain, so people are willing to stay where they are.
Feature creep is the excessive need to add more and more features as time goes on. This can lead to decreased usability and value of the product for many reasons since increased features with no clean UI or organization make for a messy user experience. There are many reasons why I can see PMs edging into feature creep, such as trying to appeal to more market segments and trying to make all stakeholders happy (support, engineers, executives). However, if you as the PM are being pulled in many different directions, you’re also putting your team at risk for burnout by adding more features than they can handle to your roadmap. At some point, you need to reach a decision that prioritizes certain features, so if you and your team can decide on an MVP (most viable product) of what is essential and doable in shipping your product, this can help you prioritize where outside influences fall in your roadmap.
Woohoo,
Annabelle
